This may come as a surprise, but cold emailing is one of the best ways that you can turn your donkey agency into a unicorn agency.

You just have to go about it properly.

Cold emailing isn’t about spamming your contact list with hundreds of emails a week.

This will decrease your engagement and conversions.

You won’t get many opens and you’ll likely lose tons of contacts to the unsubscribe button.

The key to cold emailing to get more opens and convert more contacts is to supplement traditional inbound marketing with outbound prospecting.

Marrying these two things means that, in addition to using content marketing to draw potential customers to your product through channels like blogs, webpages, and social media, you also reach out to your potential customers directly.

Keep reading to learn 5 useful tips on how to hone your cold emailing skills and get more opens!

1. Procure an already established email marketing list.

The first step to cold emailing is having a list of contacts to send your emails to.

There’s several ways to go about this.

You can perform a manual search for emails to add to your list.

Only do this if you know the name or company of the person you are trying to email. You can manually search for emails using tools like Hunter.

If you want a little more ease of access in your list building process, purchase a list using a service like ZoomInfo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This will save you the time of searching and provide you with a list of tons of leads.

You can also use a scraper tool, like the Phantom Buster Facebook Group Extractor, to help you build your cold email contact list.

Scraper tools crawl through Facebook pages and groups to collect information from users which you can then add to your contact list.

The most important part of list building, however, is to use an email list verifier service.

This will ensure you have minimal deliverability issues, making sure you get the most out of your contact list.

2. Warm up your email address.

Next, it’s important to warm up your email address (make sure that it’s from a different email domain than your agency’s address). This way, you know your emails work, that they look right, that they deliver properly, and that they get your point across.

It will also ensure you don’t send emails that bounce on dead emails. This helps your sender score.

What’s a sender score? Sender score is a metric that email providers use to rate how likely people are to want to receive your email content. Bounced emails are part of the equation along with spam reports.

Warm up your email address by sending emails to your friends, family, or coworkers. Tell them to make sure they engage with the emails so you know everything is running smoothly.

3. Go slowly and don’t spam.

Like I said, cold emailing is different than spamming. It’s important to be mindful of the distinction.

The less your contacts feel they are being spammed, the more likely they are to open your emails and click through them.

That’s why you should go slowly.

Don’t send hundreds of emails a week.

Start by sending a few a day.

You’ll see your engagement skyrocket.

There are services that you can use to schedule your cold emailing so it is automated.

4. Make your emails more engaging.

Boring emails don’t get engagement.

Low-intent emails receive about 3 to 5 times lower engagement rates.

Make your cold emails pop with eye-catching subject lines.

Make copy easy to read and easy to understand.

Use imagery.

Appeal to your audience.

5. Use intent signals.

Intent signals are a great way to spark engagement in your cold emailing.

Intent signals are anything that appeal to your audience’s personal lives.

For example, if you know that a company has had a change in management or has moved, consider including this in your cold emailing.

You’ll wind up sending fewer, but more targeted, cold emails that are more likely to be clicked on.

Cold Emailing Your Way to Unicorn Growth

Email marketing is an important aspect of promoting and growing your company, but it has to be done the right way.

This requires strategy.

While spamming your email list with emails every week is an ineffective method to reach and engage your contacts and potential customers, strategic cold emailing is proven to have higher engagement rates.

Higher engagement rates are a huge step to Unicorn Growth Land.

Using these 5 tips to improve your cold emailing processes will help you reach and engage more of your contacts.

You’ll see more email opens, more click-throughs, and, as a result, more conversions.

Try out these tips, see how they improve your email marketing, and watch your number of customers, revenue, and agency grow to new heights!

Originally Published on Inc.com