Cold email marketing campaigns can provide many benefits for a business if handled correctly and with purpose. Research shows that cold email campaigns can pay off big-time. In fact, companies see up to 60% response rates and 80% engagement rates from cold emails. However, because they only have an average open rate of just 14-23% to begin with, you need to understand that you are up against a significant amount of inbox filtering and competition. Additionally, you have to have all the information if you want to actually drive results from a cold email. Without the right information, the time and effort that you put into crafting the email will have gone to waste and your email might end up being marked as spam.
While there are various types of email marketing, cold emails deliver a personalized message to a recipient to start a conversation. The recipient could be a media professional, a company, or a consumer, Unlike a bulk email sent to hundreds or even thousands of people, cold emails are targeted towards a small subset of people and should only be sent to a lead previously researched and defined as a quality prospect. Although cold emailing is designed to meet the same goal as cold calling, cold email marketing is much easier to scale for the sender and is less intrusive for recipients. Much like advertising, the aim is to introduce a company or product to a targeted recipient and persuade them to respond or buy. However, it is far more cost-effective and often more precisely targeted.
Before we dive into some tips for getting an email marketing campaign ready, it is essential to understand that all email best practices rely on the basics. This is regardless of whether it is a cold email that is sent to people unfamiliar with a company or warm emails that are sent to people that your company already has relationships with. It is essential to research the email recipient’s company and job description to ensure yout solution can support their unique business. It is also necessary to look up every recipient’s digital footprint to have a more personalized message that mentions content that they have created or shared in the news.
A successful email campaign message should combine relevant and accurate personalization, meaningful content to the audience, and a specific call to action. Beyond the actual message, response rates can also be increased by technical performance aspects like list accuracy, email timing, deliverability, A/B testing, and sender reputation. While the immediate goal of email marketing is to get a response, it is essential to remember that more people will read a marketing email than those who will respond to it. Every message sent affects a larger audience than those who reply. For that reason, a cold email marketing strategy should also inform, create a lasting impression of a brand, influence referrals, and set the foundation for a potential relationship.
There are many types of cold email campaigns, with sales emails comprising the majority of bulk emails. Even so, businesses also use “mass” emails for public relations, community awareness, brand engagement, networking and influencing within their sector, persuading other companies to collaborate with them, or encouraging links to boost SEO for specific content. No two email marketing campaigns are the same, so testing emails is a crucial step to get the best results.
Tips & Strategy for Cold Email Marketing
First and foremost, the success of a cold email strategy is determined by how well a company knows its target audience. This is because most email marketing aims to persuade. In order to do that successfully, there needs to be a good understanding of what matters most to a specific audience. Your strategy should be to organize a campaign around what benefits a company’s target audience. After all, they are more likely to engage with something that will help them somehow.
Understanding the people who will receive a company’s marketing emails is just as important as creating quality content. Once you have done the research and determined your target audience’s persona, you will need to find the contact information of the people that match that criteria.
There are many tools that can aid in this process. While creating a media list can be done manually, it can be very time-consuming and may not get the best results. If you need help with this, PR agencies can create a customized media list based on your company’s needs and niche.
Pressfarm is a PR agency that helps startups and companies of various sizes create newsworthy content to be distributed to media professionals or on their owned channels. The team of PR specialists, expert writers and certified designers are skilled at creating a range of content from email pitches and press releases to guest posts and press kits. With this content, the Pressfarm team works to give companies as much media exposure as possible.
With a winning distribution strategy, Pressfarm can also boost your online visibility. By submitting your content to the right media outlets and startup directories, Pressfarm can ensure you rank in relevant search results across different search engines. Pressfarm’s account executive also builds custom media lists to fit your needs. Together with a database of 1 million+ journalists, bloggers and influencers, these media lists should help you connect with the best people to tell your brand story.
With one of Pressfarm’s packages, you could take your media outreach to the next level.
Writing a cold email is not that hard, but writing on that converts can be challenging. Let’s look at some cold email best practices that can increase your email’s visibility.
1) Personalization
The most important practice when trying to maximize results with cold emailing is personalization. Your email should look and feel like a personal email from a friend or colleague. You can achieve this by making sure you use your real name, and address your recipient by name as well.
2) First-name basis
While you may not be on a first-name basis with the recipient of your email, referring to them by their first name sets a friendly and personalized tone. Without it, recipients will assume that you’ve not done even the most basic research. If you can’t even figure out your recipient’s name, your email will most likely be ignored.
3) Create a connection
Every cold email sent should be crafted with the goal of creating a connection. While the ideal relationship would be a referral from a friend or someone familiar, cold emails cannot use that tactic because there is most likely no mutual acquaintance. However, you can create a connection and make an email relevant to the recipient. When you take the time to find common ground, your cold emails become relevant to the recipient, which results in an increased chance of getting a response. By creating a connection through relevance and common interest, you can take a cold email and make it just a bit warmer.
4) About them, not you
Once you’ve established a connection in your email intro, it is crucial not just to start talking about a company and the products and services. Rather, the entire email should be written to serve the recipient. You should highlight why you appreciate their work as well as what solutions you can provide to fulfill the recipient’s needs. Rather than talking about who you are as a company, why you are unique, or why you need the recipient to respond, you should learn about the recipient. Once you know what your recipients need, you can make your email relevant to them.
5) Provide value
Following the last point, every cold email should provide value to the person who receives it. Once a recipient opens an email, you get a split-second opportunity to create a connection and show them why it is worth their time to read it. The best way to do so is to offer either immediate value or offer value from a call-to-action. For example, you can offer a solution to a problem the recipient might have, data or information, a resource, a valuable networking contact, or the opportunity to connect with someone of similar interest. Regardless of what kind of value you offer a recipient, it is important to show that there’s something in it for them.
6) No clickbait
Your subject line is the first thing that a recipient will see when they go through their inbox. A good subject line will make the difference between your email being read or going into the spam folder. For this reason, a subject line should not be clickbait-y and should match the body paragraphs of the email. If you resort to clickbait, you will ruin any opportunity you could’ve had to build a connection with the recipient – both now and in the future. After all, if your name ever shows up in their inbox list again, they’re likely to hit the delete button before they’ve even read anything.
7) Follow up
Following up on an email is a step that many people often overlook. It is common to think that if a person does not respond to your first email, they are not interested. However, that is not the case most of the time – people get busy and things fall through the cracks all the time. Usually, a recipient fails to respond because they have busy schedules and forgets to get back to you. Since there are so many things running through our brain at any given moment, it is possible that a recipient needs to be reminded of the email that you sent.
However, when it comes to following up, the ideal number of follow-up emails should be just two. If a recipient does not reply after the second follow-up email, then you can safelt conclude that they are not interested.
Conclusion
When you’re developing an email marketing campaign, the essential thing to remember is that it is designed to create a connection between the sender and the recipient. Personalization is critical in this type of situation because the recipients may get thousands of emails a day. Customizing your emails to the recipients will help you stand out from the crowd. It is also essential to provide value to the reader to help them understand why they should read or even respond to the email. All of those steps and proper email marketing outreach will help your cold email stand out.