As a business, email as a form of communication is a powerful tool. It can help promote your business, nurture relationships with customers, and can help strike up conversations with new clients. Cold outreach campaigns are a way to introduce your business to your target audience. If done correctly, it could help secure new customers and drive revenue.
However, it’s not always done correctly. For some, the success of the email is dependent on a variety of factors. In this article, you’ll gain all there is to know when it comes to the best practices for your cold outreach campaign. With this guidance, you should have no problem convincing the email recipients that your business product or service is worth their time.
What are the benefits of cold outreach emails?
Why choose to invest in cold outreach emails? There are some benefits to using this method of outreach, especially when you’ve never used it before.
When it comes to the best practices for cold email, they result in higher open rates than average. For business emails, in particular, this sits around 14% to 23% depending on the industry you’re in. Here are just a few benefits of cold outreach emails.
They can help target users where they’re most active
Email is one of the most engaged platforms and you’ll likely find your target users to be most active via this channel.
By capturing your audience’s attention via the most active of platforms, you’re more likely to see conversions or at least an improved interest over what you have to offer.
Helps with lead generation
Lead generation can be useful as a stepping stone to converting leads into customers. When you’re conducting cold outreach, it can help spark some general interest that can at least provide you with the olive branch needed to start up a conversation.
Getting your foot in the door is useful when needing to pitch your services, so it’s worth doing.
Cold emails can be more personable
Whilst cold emails can seem quite invasive, they’re actually a lot more personable than you’d think. With cold emails, the user isn’t expecting anything so why not give them something to get excited about.
Typical marketing emails can be generic in their appearance but cold outreach campaigns can be personalized and tailored to the email you’re sending it to.
They can be highly informative
Cold outreach emails will often contain more information because you’re trying to create interest in your brand, product, or service.
With this type of email, you’re more likely to cram in more information than normal and this may be worthwhile to the email recipients.
6 best practices for your cold outreach campaign
The success of a cold outreach campaign is down to how you approach and deliver these campaigns. Some may be a success, whilst others may fall short of achieving any traction. It’s good to experiment with the practices below and any you may find useful in helping pique the interest of those you’re looking to email.
1. Send Automated Emails That Are Personalized.
Email automation is very handy when it comes to cold outreach campaigns. Whilst it might be good to send them out individually for smaller campaigns, you may have hundreds of emails that you want to incorporate into this one campaign.
Automating the process is going to be a lot easier and there’s still an opportunity for you to personalize the content even when using automation.
Look for sendinblue alternatives like Flodesk for example. Flodesk is a great tool for helping deliver professionally designed email templates and content that you can then automate to send to whoever you want.
Flodesk’s approach is designing emails that people love to open and that’s a need that your outreach campaign will certainly want to have.
2. Make sure your emails aren’t too sales-heavy.
When it comes to crafting the content of your emails, make sure that they’re not too sales-heavy. You can easily create something that’s too in your face when it comes to cold outreach, especially if every other line is trying to will the reader to buy something.
Instead, try to focus on making introductions to your business, perhaps adding a bit of storytelling in for good measure. Storytelling will make your consumers trust you more, especially as they’ve never interacted with you until this cold email.
With 81% of consumers saying they need to trust a brand before they buy from them, it’s imperative that you hook them in with trust and confidence in your business.
Try to read through your copy before you go sending it. You may find that it’s too sales-heavy or that it’s not got enough of a balance. Remember, this is an introduction to who you are as a business, the hard sales pitch can always come later on down the line.
3. Keep track of your responses and open rates.
Each campaign is going to perform differently from the next. You may have the same approach for everyone one and a lot of it can often come down to luck and influences that are out of your control.
For example, you may catch one client on a good mood day where they’re actually keen on using your services. Other days, you may not catch them in a good mood. You can’t control that!
Make sure that each campaign is monitored carefully. Take a look at all of your responses so far and monitor your open rates in particular. The lack of open rates could suggest that you’re not reaching the user at the right time or that they’ve not seen your email amongst the many hundreds that they get daily.
It could be that you’ve not got the right user and so it’s back to the drawing board for market research.
4. Follow up multiple times where necessary.
Many of us are forgetful when it comes to responding to emails or communications in general. Whether that’s a work colleague, friend, or your own parents, it’s normal to forget.
With that being said, it’s critical to follow up with those you’ve emailed, at least once if they’ve forgotten to respond to your initial outreach. For others who have responded, it can be easy for them to forget and so it’s your job to make sure you keep alive the conversations you’re having.
Outreach can be difficult because it can often take a lot of effort and persistence to get some leads over the line for conversion. However, it’s a worthwhile practice, especially if they all prove to be successful in aligning themselves with your business.
It’s worth keeping a record of those who you’ve emailed, who have responded, and how many times you’ve chased them. That way, you’re not one person in particular too often and missing out on ones that haven’t been followed up.
5. Re-send emails to unopened ones.
Any email user will likely receive plenty of emails throughout the day. With the average office worker receiving 120 emails per day, it’s easy for some emails to get lost.
If you’ve got email recipients who’ve not opened their emails, then chances are, they’re either ignoring it, they’ve deleted it or to your advantage, they’ve simply missed it.
Missing an email means you can take your chances again by re-sending the email you’ve already sent them. It’s good to be cautious on how many times you re-send them as this may only become annoying to those who’ve purposely ignored the email.
However, those who’ve missed your email the first time, might catch it this time around and could be a potential lead. It’s a worthwhile practice for your outreach strategy to incorporate.
6. Test your emails before you hit send.
Before you click send on your emails, it’s imperative that you test them out first. This type of testing can help spot any grammatical errors, any features within the email like a GIF or embedded video that doesn’t work, etc.
A cold outreach email needs to be perfect and it sets a first impression that could easily be ruined if there are problems with your email displaying properly.
You can easily test your emails before you send out your campaign and it’s worth making sure you do this each time you create one. Even if you end up using a similar layout or email template, there’s always something that can go wrong when it lands in the user’s inbox.
By testing your emails, it can help you appear more professional and put together when sending them to prospective leads.
Acknowledge the value of cold outreach email campaigns
Not all businesses appreciate or acknowledge the value that can come from cold outreach email campaigns. It’s worthwhile including this method of sales pitching to see how well your campaigns perform with some of the practices implemented.
