Cold emailing is the process of sending emails to someone with whom your business has no relationship yet.
Cold emails are harder since you don’t know how prospects might behave. This is the reason why most cold emails fail.
The email response rate of cold emails is around 1%, meaning you might get a response after sending 100 emails.
Personalization, A/B testing, catchy subject lines, and email follow-ups are some of the ways to increase email response rates for sales outreach cold emails.
Writing a powerful email that actually works is an art. Persuasive copywriting tricks play a significant role in getting people to read your emails and respond.
In this article, I will discuss the top five tips you can use to write a killer sales outreach cold email.
Let’s begin!
1- Work on Your Subject Line
Your email subject decides whether your emails will be opened by your prospects or hit the delete button. The entire email efficiency rests on the subject line.
Here are some tips for preparing click-worthy email subject lines for your next sales outreach cold email:
- Personalize the email by including the name of the recipient in the subject line. For instance, you can write “Hey [recipient name] can we have a quick chat?” or “[recipient name] these offers are just for you”
- Get to the point and make it clear why you are reaching out. Here is an example – “5 best ways to drive more traffic to your site”
- Drive curiosity to persuade your prospects to read your email. For example, you can write “It’s here! [Your product name] or [this single strategy helped me earn $3000 extra]
- Keep it short, genuine, and relevant. Here are some examples – “6 quick SEO wins”, or “Join me this Wednesday on [webinar name]
- Ask questions. For instance, you can say “Still looking for [product name]?” or “Can’t generate enough funding for your business?]
- Use lowercase text because it signals familiarity and people assume that they already know you.
- Include your prospects’ pain points to make your email stand out. For instance, you can write “Still spending hours tracking rankings of sites?” or “Convert 20% of your site visitors into leads”
- Leverage the power of urgency. For example, you can say “20% off just for today” or “Only a few products left, hurry up”.
- Make it easy for your recipients to say ‘YES’. Here are some examples: “Available for a quick call this week?”, “Love roses? You can’t say NO to this”, “The perfect gift for your valentine with free delivery” etc.
Remember, a boring subject line will always make your sales outreach task harder. You should never ignore the power of powerful and relevant email subject lines that invites the prospects’ to take action leading to more leads and ultimately sales.
If you need some more guidance, then here are some of the best cold email subject line examples to get inspiration from.
2- Don’t Take the Obvious Route
The email body is the next important part of your email campaign. After you have nailed your subject line, it’s time to power up your email body.
Here are some excellent hacks to improve your email copy:
- Focus on a single copy after carefully segmenting your users. Email that is written for everybody won’t convert anybody. For instance, you can segment your male and female audiences and send a specific copy for each group.
- Include interactive quizzes such as this in your email to engage with prospects more quickly.
- Set the goal upfront so that your prospects know where they want to reach ultimately.
- Apply the Star Story Solution (SSS) copywriting formula. Under this formula, you share the testimonials and case studies of your existing customers to win others. For instance, you can discuss how one of your customers worked with your business or used your products to increase their profits by x%. Case studies involving real people are loved by people and they also help to improve customer trust in your business.
- Validate yourself: most email recipients would like to know who is sending those emails and whether they matter to them. Therefore, it is important to mention who you are to your recipients, especially when sending emails for the first time.
- You have to show your recipient that you are credible and that they can trust your emails. Most people will hit the delete button on any emails from a stranger. Take a line or two in the email to explain who you are.
- Make it short: if you want to make your email worth reading, you should make it as short as you can. Ideally, longer emails are pissing off most people. If you’re sending a long email, you can be sure most people will not read it. Short emails are more likely to be read than longer ones. Focus on keeping your emails short, easy to read, and actionable. It should be brief and straight to the point.
- Add a CTA. A call to action should come as the last point of your emails. If you can, ensure what you want your readers to do comes out clearly throughout the email. Without a CTA, your email marketing may not yield results.
- Be appreciative and submissive: When writing your cold email, you should be a little submissive, vulnerable, or grateful in your tone. In this email, you are asking your recipient to do you a favour. That means you shouldn’t command them but rather ask politely for their action.
3- Follow Clever Techniques to Ask for Sales in an Email
Asking for businesses in an email is never easy. If you are writing a cold email for the first time, you should master the art of persuasion and influencing people to take action.
You want those reading your email to take one more step and visit your online store, or better, subscribe to your channel or newsletter. That means you should be clever enough to convince your recipient to make that move without offending them.
Follow these to make asking customers for business in your emails a walk in the park:
- Try to be clear, concise, and effective with your emails if you want to mention business. You should avoid writing emails that suck to your recipients.
- Imagine yourself talking to the recipient of this email (customer) face to face. Would you say the same words you are using in the email? Read the email aloud after writing it and find out if it speaks to the reader as you intend.
- If you want to mention business in the email, then keep it short, about 200 words maximum. Long emails are boring and tiresome to most readers.
- Personalize the emails and make the recipient feel like the email they are reading is actually meant for them. You should focus on showing value in the email.
- Know a bit about the recipient. You can research a little about the recipient and understand their struggles and find a way to help them out. Most people will open your emails if you are offering solutions in the email body.
- Use the right words to describe what your business does and how you are out to offer solutions to most problems.
- Add a coupon or free trial product to the email. This way, you give your recipients a chance to visit your store and buy.
- Create educational content and attach them to your emails. The content should inform people about your product and how it solves their problems.
- Include a case study in your emails to show your target customers how your products have helped other customers like them find relief or realize results.
4- Use Tools
Sales enablement is the practice of equipping your sales team with the necessary tools and guidance to help them succeed in their sales goals comfortably.
As a business, you need the best email marketing services and tools for your marketing team. Your marketing team will adopt the best cold email strategy, based on customer insights like demography, online behaviour, and gender with the right tools.
Your team needs sales enablement if you are looking forward to growing your customer base.
Here are some of the best sales enablement practices your sales team should adopt to get results.
- Get buy-in from your sales team: Be clear with your message when you communicate to your sales team about what they should do to reach out to customers. When coming up with a sales enablement strategy it makes it easier for your team to get their hands on it. Avoid any misunderstanding that results when you don’t communicate well with the sales team.
- Make it clear to your sales team who owns the sales enablement. Your team should know who is responsible for equipping them with all they need to enhance customer relationships. Sales enablement should come from the sales revenue side of the business and putting it elsewhere can damage the sales team.
- State the strategy clearly: If you want to help your business align itself to your growth strategy. Advocate for a pull strategy to align your business sales process to a way that your customers prefer to buy from your store.
What tools can you use for cold email that is in line with a sales enablement? Let’s look at some of them.
GMass
This email tool helps your sales and marketing team create effective emails right from your Gmail account. Most Twitter, Google, and Uber employees use GMass because of its effective and powerful mail-merging capabilities.
GMass is simple to use, and it takes just minutes to get started with the tool. All you have to do is download the Chrome extension and sign up with your email.
Woodpecker
Take your cold email and pitch to the next level with Woodpecker. This software has been designed to make your hard emailing work easier. It integrates Outlook and Gmail to help you send personalized emails and follow-ups to those on your email list.
Some key features that make Woodpecker stand out include automatic reply detection, automatic email response, and cold camping tracking and scheduling. It is also easy to understand this software if you’re a beginner at sending out emails.
Lemlist
Make your email marketing easy to handle with the Lemlist tool. This tool is effective for personalizing any content to fit your recipient. You can use it to customize your images, videos, and texts before sending them to your recipient. You can also generate an email template using Lemlist and send it to those on your email list.
Some key features to look out for when you choose Lemlist to include automatic follow-ups, automation triggers, and advanced campaign reports.
Yesware
Add Yesware to your list of the most effective tools you can use to take your email campaign to another level. This tool helps you create custom templates for your regular emails and set up follow-up reminders. You can also do email tracking with the tool and make your work much more manageable. You get that chance to view each campaign result on the dashboard.
Also, the tool helps you track how your recipients use the attachments. It also comes with Salesforce integration, making it easier to track results from every email you send.
Snov
Snov offers you an easy-to-use interface and more powerful features to make your email campaign successful. This software has been designed purposely for cold emailing. It helps you to customize and send straightforward emails to your recipients fast. It saves you time by automating emails.
You can download and add Snov to your Google Chrome browser. The extension helps you locate a customer’s email on your website so you respond to it.
5- Measure Your Success and Don’t Forget Follow-Ups
A successful sales process consists of five steps. These are prospecting, qualifying, presenting, closing, and following up.
Therefore, following up is always a necessary step in every sales email. In sales emails, often follow-ups are done to initiate closings and interestingly, the first follow-up email generates an 18% response rate.
Hence, email follow-ups are something that you must never ignore in your sales outreach cold email strategy. Here is how you can create precise and effective email follow-ups:
- Focus on context: When writing email follow-ups, you should add some context. Remind the recipient of a previous email you had sent them and how it relates to the follow-up. If the recipient can recall your last communication, they will respond to your follow-up email.
- More value: A follow-up email should have more value than your previous email. Don’t send emails meant to catch up with your recipient and not add any value to the content you sent earlier.
- Explain yourself: You should explain to your recipient why you are writing this follow-up email. Be creative and tell the recipient what exactly you want. You can follow this pattern to explain yourself:
We are happy to announce [new product name], which could change your [elements of prospects role]. Here is a link to a resource that will help you change your mind about our products.
- Add a CTA to your email: Your recipient did not take any action or reply to your email because you forgot to ask them to do so. Therefore, when sending a follow-up email, you should not forget to ask them to take action. For instance, if you arrange a meeting with the recipient, you can use words like reply with ‘yes’ to get more details about our products. Does 7 p.m work for you?
Final Thoughts
Every business is different so there are no fixed rules as to what email response rate can make your business successful. Follow the cold emailing tips discussed in this article to close more business leads comfortably. Also, don’t forget to A/B test your emails to identify the elements that are working best for your target audience. Continue optimizing your cold emails to achieve success. Happy cold emailing!