A Guide to Cold Email Marketing

A growth hacking technique to make yourself known, cold emailing (or cold mail in the language of Molière) is a method of prospecting by email. While in the 1980s the era of door-to-door mercenaries was at its peak, the advent of the Internet drastically changed the situation. Today, the goal is no longer to sell at all costs, but to offer the customer a personalized relationship where he feels recognized. Placing it at the heart of all attention has become essential to conquer it and retain it.

Also called “outreach emailing” or “drip emailing”, cold emailing is quite simply an automated prospecting email optimized to generate qualified leads quickly. The message is sent to a target prospect without the salesperson having been in contact with him beforehand, nor that he himself has requested an interaction with the company. The objective is precisely to trigger spontaneous contact with the prospect. Cold emailing must therefore be based on a clear message and a high added value proposition to attract its attention.

In a nutshell, cold emailing could be compared to version 2.0 of its ancestor, cold calling. The famous phoning of the 90s where salespeople were the kings of the pitch for relentless telephone canvassing with sometimes inconclusive results.

As a reminder, growth hacking is a state of mind, a real methodology, aimed at achieving rapid and significant growth through a set of digital marketing practices and techniques, and this at a lower cost. The objective is to promote a product or a service (via, for example, social networks) in order to measure the enthusiasm of Internet users.

Cold emailing: a prospecting power to generate results

Like any business in search of profitability, converting your visitors to prospects and then to customers is vital to growing your business. But to obtain convincing results, as with any commercial prospecting campaign, some good practices are essential.

Cold emailing is no exception. Cold prospecting requires meeting challenges to differentiate yourself from the competition whose emails are pouring into inboxes.

To run an efficient campaign, it is therefore essential to adopt a perfectly orchestrated cold emailing approach in order to obtain a good open rate. A real lever for conversion, email appeals to B2B decision-makers: 22% have already bought a product and / or service 2 to 3 times following its receipt.

How to prepare a successful cold emailing campaign

In order not to be assimilated as spam, and to optimize its open rate, cold email requires special attention in its creation and writing. It must be synthetic, short, and to the point to arouse envy.

Do not lose sight of the fact that its primary objective is not to sell, but to establish a first contact with its recipient. You must therefore talk about him, and not about you, about his desires, his expectations and needs. Hence the importance of knowing your target well in order to deliver a personalized and authentic message.

Before launching your cold emailing campaign, it is essential to:

• Define who are the prospects you want to reach. To achieve this, make a fictitious form of a typical prospect (buyer persona).
• Build a list of emails from your prospects. Select as many criteria as possible to refine your targeting.
• Write the prospecting email you are going to send them. Be persuasive and emphasize a catchy headline, while humanizing your message. End it with a call-to-action in the form of a short question (also consider preparing a follow-up email).
• Automate your process to save considerable time.
• Analyze the results of your campaign (open rate, response rate, etc.).
• Manage the feedback you have received (a positive response means a first contact for a possible meeting!)

5 Cold Email Marketing Tips for Reaching New Prospects

1. Identify The Ideal Prospect Profile

Identifying an ideal prospect type profile is essential to understand the centers of interest of the recipients and thus communicate effectively. A cold email that specifically targets a customer segment increases the chances that this email will be opened, its open rate.

Another way to identify the profiles of prospects most likely to be receptive to cold email is through an online survey. A short online survey can quickly collect a large volume of data and thus understand the expectations of prospects.

2. Create A List Of Email Addresses

Keeping a list of prospect email addresses is mandatory to automate the process and assign a typical profile to each email address. More than a simple list of email addresses, this database should be used to store and quickly view prospect information associated with each email address.

To feed this list, you must either collect the email addresses on your landing page, buy an email address book from a company or use tools like Signalhire to find professional email addresses in seconds and connect with the people that matter for your business.

3. Create An Eye-catching Cold Email

Recipients spend only a few minutes at most checking their mailbox and barely a few seconds to see if the content of an email interests them. A sharp grip is therefore essential to guarantee a good open rate of cold email.

Here are some tips for writing a cold email that will appeal to your prospects:

• Avoid any email address that suggests spam. An address of the type “contact”, “info” or “noreply” is not desirable.
• Write an email subject line that stands out from the rest of the prospect’s mailbox. By using special characters, symbols or even emojis, the subject of the email stands out visually from other emails even before being opened.
• The content must be readable and synthetic. A few explicit sentences, graphic elements to facilitate reading and highlight the offer. The reader should be able to understand the content in about ten seconds.
• Put some of the corporate personality into it. Whether that’s a word to talk about the ambition of the company or the leader, humanizing a commercial email can bring a certain sensitivity to some prospects.

4. Aim For Conversion Without Appearing Intrusive

Being considered spam or junk is the worst thing that can happen to a cold email. This is why the email should appear as less intrusive as possible, announcing good news to the recipient in a straightforward way (without falling into clichés such as “Bravo! You are the lucky winner of …”).

5. Test and Reiterate

The test is essential to measure the effectiveness of the cold emailing campaign on a small scale. The test is carried out on a sample, that is to say a small group of people representative of all the prospects who will be targeted during the campaign.

Reminders are mandatory to increase the open rate of cold email and thus hope to expand its customer base. It is still advisable not to make more than 3 to 4 raises. First, because there is no point in continuing to send an email that is not opened. Then because the fact that your emails are not opened will cause the mailbox services to consider your address as spam.

  This article was written for Business 2 Community by Peter Navarro.
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Author: Peter Navarro

Peter Navarro is responsible for employer branding at Sixt SE. When he's not at office, he finds solace in writing and reading.… View full profile ›

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