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 are seeing up to 60% response rates and 80% engagement rates from cold emails.
However, because these emails 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 need to have all the necessary information about your recipient if you want to actually drive results from a cold email. Without this information, the time and effort that you put into crafting your email will go to waste and your email might actually be marked as spam.
While there are various types of email marketing, cold emails deliver a personalized message to a recipient. This recipient can 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.
Though it serves a similar purpose 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.
Cold Email Best Practices
We’ll dive into some tips for getting an email marketing campaign ready shortly. First, it is essential to understand that all email best practices rely on a few basic elements.
These elements apply 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 whom your company already has a relationship with. It is essential to research the email recipient’s company and job description to ensure your solution can support their unique business. It is also necessary to look up every recipient’s digital footprint to craft a more personalized message that refers to content that they have created or shared in the news.
A successful email campaign message should combine the following: relevant and accurate personalization, meaningful content to the audience, and a specific call to action. Beyond crafting an appealing message, you can also increase response rates using 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, more people will read a marketing email than those who will respond to it. Every message you send will be seen by more people 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. They can also use them for persuading other companies to collaborate with them or earning links to boost SEO for specific content. No two email marketing campaigns are identical, so testing emails is a crucial step to getting the best results.
Tips & Strategies for Cold Email Marketing
First and foremost, the success of a cold email strategy depends on how well a company knows its target audience. After all, most email marketing aims to persuade. In order to do that successfully, you need a good understanding of what matters most to a specific audience. As a result, the fundamental part of any cold email strategy is to organize a campaign around what benefits your company’s target audience. Ultimately, the people you’re targeting are more likely to engage with something that will help them somehow.
Understanding the people who will receive your 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 out there that can help in this process. While you can create a media list manually, it can be very time-consuming and may not get the best results. If you need help with this, there are PR agencies that can help create a customized media list based on a company’s needs and niche.
Pressfarm is a PR agency that helps startups and companies of various sizes create newsworthy content. This content can then be distributed to media professionals or published on the company’s owned channels. The team of PR specialists, expert writers, and certified designers is skilled at creating content ranging from email pitches and press releases to guest posts and press kits. This team has what it takes to give you as much media exposure as possible.
The Pressfarm team also has a winning distribution strategy designed to boost online visibility for brands. These experts submit your content to the right media outlets and startup directories. In this way, they can help your brand to feature in relevant search results across different search engines.
Moreover, the Pressfarm account executive builds custom media lists for each client. When combined with their media database of 1 million+ journalists, bloggers, and influencers, these media lists should help you to connect with the best people to tell your brand story.
With a PR package from Pressfarm, you can take your media outreach to the next level.
Writing a cold email is not that hard, but writing one that converts can be challenging. Let’s look at some cold email best practices that can increase the visibility of your emails.
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 using your real name and addressing the 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. If you can’t do this, the recipient will assume that you don’t care enough to do any preliminary research before your media outreach. As a result, they will most likely ignore your email.
3) Create a connection
Every cold email you send should be designed to create a connection. While it would be ideal for the recipient to get 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 still 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. This results in an increased chance of getting a response, by creating a connection through relevance and common interest. In this way, you can take a cold email and make it just a bit warmer.
4) Make it about them, not you
Once you’ve established a connection through your email intro, it is crucial not just to start talking about your company and its products. Instead, the entire email should be written to serve the recipient’s needs. It should discuss why you appreciate their work, what solutions you can provide, and what the recipient might need. Steer away from talking about who you are as a company, why you are unique, or why you need the recipient to respond. Instead, you should take time to learn about the recipient. This will help you to focus on their interests and keep your email relevant to that individual. Even as you pitch your company, it’s always important to convince the recipient of your email of why they should care about your news.
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 have a split second to create a connection and show them why reading your email is worth their time. The best way to do so is to offer immediate value or value through a call to action. Some examples can include offering a solution to a problem they might have, sharing valuable data or information, a resource, or valuable networking contact. Alternatively, you can offer them the opportunity to connect with someone of similar interests. Regardless of what kind of value you offer a recipient, it is important to show that there is something in it for them.
6) No clickbait
A 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 an email that gets sent to spam and one that actually gets read. For this reason, your 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 had to connect with the recipient, both now and in the future. After all, the next time this recipient sees your name in their inbox, they’ll probably hit the “delete” button before they bother reading the email.
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 a sender’s first email, they are not interested. However, that is not the case most of the time. In reality, people get busy and things fall through the cracks. Usually, a recipient doesn’t get back to you because they have a busy schedule and simply forget to get back to you, since so many things run through our minds at any given moment. It is possible that a recipient needs to be reminded of the email that you’ve sent.
However, when it comes to following up, you should only send a maximum of two follow-up emails. If a recipient does not reply after the second follow-up email, then it’s safe to assume 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 each recipient will help you to 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.