How confident are you with your cold email skills?
Are you getting 32 responses for every 100 B2B cold email you send?
Or do you only get 1 or 2 people responding?
Why didn’t all the other people you emailed respond?
You and your company are amazing, so what’s happening? Why aren’t the other 98% of people you’re emailing interested in hearing what you have to say?
If you’re hearing back from less than 10% of the people you’re cold emailing, you’re probably committing one of the 7 Sins of B2B Cold Emails.
#1. You’re sending B2B cold emails with crappy subject lines
Do you know your open rates? If less than 20% of people are reading your emails, your subject line sucks.
How are you ever going to get a higher response rate if 80% of your audience never even reads your email beyond the subject line? You can spend all day improving your email’s body text, but it won’t matter if you have a low open rate.
If you aren’t sure what your open rates are, but you wish you had some kind of crystal ball that would show you, get a tool that lets you track them.
#2. Your B2B cold emails feel impersonal like a robot
Do you have a docking station that you charge at, or are you solar powered?
If you’re human, then write like a human, not a robot.
People want to communicate with people, not machines.
Your readers are much more likely to respond to you if your emails are personalized to them. Including more specific details about the person, company, or industry will increase your success. Use custom inserts in your email with “[ ]” or “<< >>” depending on which script or tool you are using for the mail merge to include personalized details beyond just “<<First Name>>” and “<<Company>>.”
Going as far as to include a “<<Custom Sentence>>” by using a column in your spreadsheet for 1 custom sentence about that company takes time, but is highly effective. Using multiple custom inserts in one sentence like “We recently helped <<Competitor Name>> improve their sales by 23% on the <<Campaign Name>>” also works well.
#3. Your B2B cold emails are longer than the Great Wall of China
Your emails shouldn’t be longer than an episode of Game of Thrones.
Keep things short. Aim for about 3 or 4 sentences. No more than 5 sentences!
Remove any jargon, redundancies or other non-necessary details. Synthesize all your points to the bare minimum, leaving only the gold nuggets.
D O N ‘ T F O R G E T T O S P A C E O U T Y O U R W R I T I N G !
No one wants to read an email that looks like a book, so don’t jam it all into one paragraph. You want it to be easily read, even from a smartphone.
#4. Your value is missing or muddled in a sea of junk
Why should your reader open, read or respond to your email? Where’s the value for them?
Don’t mistake your features as benefits.
“Matching new leads against pipeline and customers” is Feature. Benefits are things like “saving 7 hours a week with Salesforce” or “Getting 5 more customers for every 10 emails you send.”
Your readers don’t care about your features, even if they’re really cool, unless they are beneficial to them.
#5. Selling too hard: Don’t take your pants off on the first date!
Never try to sell someone in a cold email.
All you’re trying to do is get someone’s permission to start talking. If you try too hard to sell them it will backfire and they will either (A) recoil and mark you as spam or (B) laugh and share your terrible spammy cold email around with their friends and coworkers.
You wouldn’t take your pants off at dinner on the first date, so don’t talk about “sales, discounts, or a big opportunity.”
Resist the temptation to write like a marketing/sales email, even if that is your end goal!
#6. Dropping the ball with the Call-To-Action
Your call to action is the second most important thing for your B2B cold email after the subject line for getting your desired response.
What exactly do you want the recipient to do?
If all you want is a 15 minute call with them, be clear about it. Just saying, “I’d love your feedback” isn’t enough. You should say something like, “When’s a good time this week for a 15 minute phone call to discuss…?”
#7. Thinking you’re done after you sent 1 B2B cold email
Just sending someone a cold email once is not enough for B2B, or anything else.
It’s great to have people respond on your first email, but you can’t stop trying there or you’ll be missing out on many more qualified leads.
EXAMPLE:
- I had 100 prospects I was cold emailing. I got 18 responses from the first email.
- I removed the positive responses from the list and sent the email again with a different template and tactic. Result: 12 more responses.
- I sent to the same list again with another template and got 5 more responses.
- On the 4th email I got 2 more responses. On the 5th I got 1 more response. On the 6th I got no responses, but I sent one more email just to be sure no one would respond.
FINAL RESULT: 7 emails and I got 38 responses from 100 prospects. That’s 20 more responses than if I had quit after the first email.
You want to be relentless with your emails if you want to grow your business. Keep emailing your list until you hear a yes or “F*#& off, I’m not interested!”
And if you don’t get responses from those contacts, try to reach other contacts at their company instead.
Keep Iterating on Your B2B Cold Emails!
No one is perfect.
You don’t have to be a saint to get 10% response rates, but avoiding the 7 deadly sins of B2B cold emails will go a long way.
The more you practice sending cold emails regularly and test your templates to iterate them, the better they will get. And your response rates will definitely follow.
Check out our Cold Email Mastery Course for more tips on crafting cold email campaigns.
