7 Cold Email Mistakes to Avoid

While it might seem simple enough, cold emailing is an important form of marketing that you can easily get wrong.

Poorly written emails leave a poor first impression and if you aren’t careful, your audience won’t even open your email to see what it’s about.

Cold email marketing can create 6-figure deals (and more) if you master its techniques. Start by learning what mistakes you should avoid when you reach out to potential clients. The tips outlined in this post will help you craft better cold emails and grow your business by finding customers.

7 Cold Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Cold emailing is an effective way to reach out to clients and build your business. You can easily connect with a potential client that has never heard of you before. It’s a type of push marketing that’s especially useful for the B2B sector.

However, you might be driving away clients and their revenue by making mistakes that you’re not aware of.

Long emails, poorly written subject lines, a lack of case studies, and social proof are some of the mistakes you might be making.

If you don’t want your emails to get deleted, make sure that you avoid the following cold email mistakes.

Writing a long email subject line

Many people believe that a long and descriptive subject line is going to get their email opened. That’s far from the case. When your email recipient has to read and process a long and overly-descriptive email, they’ll just ignore it or hit the trash button.

Avoid this by keeping your subject lines short and sweet. It also helps to include benefits in your subject line that will entice the reader. Just saying ‘I need your advice’ or ‘quick question’ will get your email opened and give you the chance to hook your reader into reading your mail.

Need more help? Try using an email subject line analyzer to see if your subject line is optimized.

Not including proof

When you’re writing to a decision-maker who has no idea who you are, you need to create a compelling reason for them to take your email seriously.

Make sure that you add some kind of evidence that you can create value for your email recipient. You can share the main details of a case study or the outcomes of a job you did in one or two lines.

This piques your leads interest and you’ll be more likely to get a reply fast.

Not knowing your customer

When you’re sending someone a cold email, it’s critical that you learn as much about the person and business you’re writing to.

Check out the recipient’s work on LinkedIn. Take a look at their posts, links, activities, and background. And try to understand just how your business can solve your client’s problems. When you learn more about your customer, you’ll be able to personalize your email message to suit them.

Sending your message out at the wrong time of day

You want to send an email to your potential customers when they’re active and ready to engage. Always look up the timezone that your customer is in and avoid sending your message too early in the morning or too late at night.

You’ll have to experiment to see what works best for you but typically, sending emails at 10:am does the best job.

Not personalizing your email

Many cold email marketing campaigns can fail because they lack personalization.

You’ll get far better results when people feel more connected to your message through personalization.

A personalized email uses the person’s name, adds context, features solutions that help the client in particular. In this way, you offer clear benefits that create a compelling reason for clients to learn more about you.

Not following up

One of the most common mistakes that people make when email marketing are not following up with their leads after sending an initial email.

Some email recipients forget about your content and intend to get in touch later. Others just need another push towards taking action.

Do a quick call and remind the business that you sent them an email. Or just send a follow-up email asking what’s going on. Follow-up emails act as a reminder and they create opportunities for you to share more information. So, make sure that you follow up after a day or two of sending a cold email.

Not adding a call to action

When you don’t add a call to action or some kind of step to take at the end of a cold email, you leave things ambiguous.

Instead, asking to set up a meeting in the near future and even sharing a time and date compels your lead to respond. They might agree to a meeting quickly or they’ll suggest another day and time.

In either case, you’re keeping the momentum going when you add some kind of call to action or step to do.

Conclusion

We’ve just covered the top mistakes you should avoid when cold emailing potential customers. Run through this post like a checklist the next time you send someone a cold email.

Remember to keep your email short and to the point. And always highlight the value you can create for your lead. You should see better responses right away.

Start improving your cold email marketing today and you’ll see rapid business growth.

  This article was written for Business 2 Community by Thomas Griffin.
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Author: Thomas Griffin

Follow @jthomasgriffin

Thomas is the president and co-founder of OptinMonster and TrustPulse, the leading conversion optimization sites.  … View full profile ›

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