8 Actionable Tips for Killer Cold Email Campaigns

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close deals 3x faster

Not all the cold emails I receive go straight to my “bad cold emails” file. Some have just enough promise to make me take a second look.

You might have a killer benefit-focused message, but if your call to action is weak or you’re bombarding your prospects with excessive information, your cold emails will fail to make an impact.

My cold email critique this week focuses on how you can make minor tweaks in your messages to craft an amazing cold email that impresses your prospects.

If your emails are in decent shape, but could use some extra polishing, follow this advice. These DOs and DON’Ts  can help you transform your good cold emails into kick ass messages that pack a punch.

This email was sent to the Salesfolk team:

cold email tips

Cold Email Tip #1: Do engage your prospects with a thought provoking question.

What are some of the most significant problems facing enterprise sales teams?

If you want your cold emails to stand out from the all the other emails filling up your prospects’ inboxes, you need to find a way to make them notice you. Your prospects probably receive dozens of emails every day. The emails that grab the most attention are the ones that make them stop and think.

Your cold emails should be the start of a conversation with your prospects. Instead of throwing out a list of all your product’s features right off the bat, try warming them up with a thought provoking question.

Ask your prospects a question that is relevant to both your product and their business. Make them think about their business and the areas that can be improved. Once you can get them to recognize there’s a problem, it’s easier to offer your prospects a solution.

This question could be a little bit more thoughtful or specific, but it’s not a terrible start.

Cold Email Tip #2: Don’t bombard your prospects with too many questions or ideas

Are you facing similar problems? What’s your strategy now?

Asking too many questions can confuse your prospects and distract from your message.

Limit your cold email introductions to one or two sentences. Remember, the goal is to get your prospects to think about one specific idea, benefit or pain point. If you make them think too much, they’ll lose interest and stop reading.

Whether you use a question or not, your first sentence should be highly focused and conversational. Your aim is to solve your prospects’ problems, but you need to do one thing at a time to be effective.

Cold Email Tip #3: Show that you can add value to your prospects’ lives

Our leading research and technology takes these challenges head on, applying predictive and prescriptive analytics to the sales process and codifying industry best practices.

Your prospects probably aren’t responding to most of the cold emails they receive because they’re way too self-focused and feature-driven. They aren’t geeking out with you about all the bells and whistles your product has to offer.

Your prospects crave messages that speak to them and their unique needs. Show them that you understand them and the issues they face on a daily basis. Offer them benefit-focused messages that show your prospects how your product can improve their business and make their lives easier.

This sentence would be better if it explained more concretely how this company was able to benefit their clients, and it would be ideal if they could quantify the impact of these benefits.

Perhaps it would be more relatable and credible if it said something like:

“We helped Client X’s reps close deals 3x faster by comparing their sales process against industry best practices to spot inefficiencies that were holding back their sales cycles.”

When your prospects relate to your message, they’re more likely to take notice and respond.

Cold Email Tip #4: Don’t be vague about how your benefits

Our leading research and technology takes these challenges head on, applying predictive and prescriptive analytics  to the sales process and codifying industry best practices. As a result, your reps automatically focus on the prospects they are most likely to contact, qualify, and close.

Don’t just list the benefits of your product; add context to your messages so your prospects can clearly see how your product can help them.

While this example does highlight potential benefits to customers, it doesn’t connect with the bottom line benefit, which I assume, is optimizing sales cycles/processes to close more deals faster.

However, they do say that their “enterprise clients typically see double-digit gains in KPI’s, close rates, and top line revenue within about 90 days.”

That is a solid benefit, but they should focus on that idea more and build out that message to be the center of their “Social-Proof” sentence.

You need to make it dead simple for your prospects to understand your product’s biggest value to them if you want them to respond.

Cold Email Tip #5: Backup your claims with proof that your product actually works. 

Our enterprise clients (Microsoft, ADP, Groupon, Marketo) typically see double-digit gains in KPI’s, close rates, and top line revenue within about 90 days.

Doing business is full of risks for your prospects. Including supporting evidence like this not only helps to prove the effectiveness of your product, but also helps to ease your prospects’ doubts.

Social proof, like case studies and performance statistics, builds trust and credibility with your prospects and shows that you can back up your claims.

Name dropping a few satisfied clients like, “Microsoft, ADP, Groupon, Marketo,” offers your prospects the promise of future value. When your prospects can see that other companies have benefited from your product, it makes investing their time and money with you less risky.

Cold Email Tip #6: Don’t distract your prospects with articles, videos or external links.

Hear what our clients are saying, and find out why Salesforce.com refers to us as “the holy grail of what sales organizations have been looking for”. [article worth the read]  

Your prospects don’t have time to read through pages of information about your product.

The longer your message drones on, the more likely your prospects will get bored and give up on you. Keep your emails laser focused. The goal is only to get your prospects on the phone. You don’t need to educate them on every single feature and benefit your product has to offer just yet.

Adding external links or PDFs can be a fatal mistake. Any time you take your prospects away from your message, you risk losing them for good.

Don’t worry about giving your prospects all the facts at once. You can explain your product in greater detail once you’ve got them on the phone.

I’m not 100% against including any links whatsoever, but cold emails are not drip email marketing campaigns. You should not rely on prospects to click a link to be interested in your product; your copy must do that. Links are just a “cherry on top,” but alone are not enough substance to get someone to respond.  When I do include links in email campaigns, it’s usually in the “PS” of a later email, or in a breakup email.

Cold Email Tip #7: Do set a time limit to your phone conversations

If your interest or curiosity is piqued in the slightest, let’s have a 5 minute conversation within the next few days to see if our platform aligns with your role and priorities.

The thought of getting stuck on the phone listening to another boring long-winded sales pitch doesn’t excite anyone. You need to make the next step as easy and enticing as possible for your prospects.

It’s easier to get someone on the phone when they know you’re only going to only take 5-10 minutes of their time. This approach is less threatening than asking your prospects to commit to a demo or a phone call that might take up the entire afternoon.

Cold Email Tip #8: Don’t forget to reward & incentivize people for their time

How about later this week?

Believe it or not, your prospects aren’t jumping for joy to hear you talk about how wonderful your product is. They need to know that there’s something in it for them as well.

The problem with this call to action is that it doesn’t offer us anything in exchange our their time.

If you want to move your prospects to action, you need to incentivize your CTA. Offering a few actionable tips or a piece of valuable information suddenly makes a phone call with anyone’s time.

Why Every Outbound Campaign Needs 8 Emails

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Just sending your prospecting list one or two cold emails is not enough.

If you’re sending any less than 8 emails in your outbound campaign, you’re likely missing out on the opportunity to set up dozens of appointments with qualified leads from your list.

Recently we helped Ambition, a cool YC startup that helps businesses gamify their sales to increase productivity, with their outbound email campaign to help them crush their Q4 numbers. Using our cold email copy and email automation software to load their prospecting list, Ambition was able to get 73 responses from new leads, with 23 of those responses coming from emails 6-8.

To learn more about the premise behind the engagement, you can read our recent blog post, but here’s an overview of what happened:

  • Ambition built a list of 578 prospects (291 VP/Directors of sales and 287 VP/Directors of Sales Operations)
  • We created 4 email campaigns (2 campaigns for each sales persona), each with 8 email touchpoints per campaign, totaling 32 unique cold emails.
  • There were some bounces in the first few initial touches (81 in all 4 campaigns), so we removed those contacts from the list.
  • End result: 73 responses from Ambition’s leads

Because I’m a HUGE game theory nerd, here’s a visualization of what the process behind our campaign looked like: game theory for outbound campaign

The reason for setting up the campaign like this instead of just writing 8 email touches for all 578 emails is that every email campaign should be specifically written for a clear persona. In this case, Ambition has 2 personas: VP/Director of Sales and VP/Director of Sales Operations. While these roles are similar, they are not identical and therefore should not receive identical copy.

The purpose of splitting up each persona into 2 groups is so you can A/B test different messaging to see what works better with your audience. In our campaigns we tested Ambition’s various value props and what psychologies resonated better (fear of loss, value add, competition, etc). These are the actual stats from our campaigns:

Ambition outbound campaign stats 1 Ambition outbound campaign stats 2

Why Successful Outbound Email Campaigns Require Persistence

The overall results of our campaign helped us discover more about which of Ambition’s value propositions resonated most strongly with their target audience, and what messaging they should use.

Notice that email touch #6 and #8 in the “VP Sales: 1B campaign” actually have more responses than the first email? Touch #6 has 5 responses and  Touch #8 has 3 responses, but Touch #1 only got 1 response. If Ambition had stopped emailing after only 4 touches, they would have missed out on 11 responses from their “VP Sales: 1B Campaign.”

Looking at the chart below, look at how many responses Ambition got across each of their 8 touchpoints:

Ambition outbound campaign stats 3

If Ambition had quit sending emails after touchpoint #3, they would have missed out on 40 responses from their leads. That’s over half of the total leads they got in their entire campaign.

Looking at the stats above and dozens of other cold email campaigns we’ve run, persistence definitely pays off for outbound email. However, you can’t email people indefinitely either without seeming creepy or like a spammer.

That’s why sending 8 emails is typically the magic number because it’s just persistent enough without being too irritating. (But you should always test to see what works best for you and your industry!)

Every email you send has a clear cost and benefit. While measuring the benefits of sending cold email is fairly straightforward in terms of generating warm conversations with qualified leads, the costs are a little more opaque. One simple indicator of the cost of your cold email would be the number of unsubscribe emails that you get, or the equivalent, when someone tells you to “never contact them again.”Generally you’re in a good direction as long as you’re getting more positive responses than unsubscribes, but other factors such as the value of a lead also come into play.

Although SPAM laws vary around the world, cold email etiquette dictates you’re typically in good shape as long as you’re smart with your targeting, adding value in your emails, and not obnoxious.

Check out our Cold Email Mastery Course for more tips on crafting scalable cold email campaigns.

Don’t Wait for Inbound to Deliver Your Leads

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waiting for leads

I’ve seen too many new companies believing “Build it and they will come” over the last 6 years with the startup “Gold Rush,” but no matter how awesome their product is, companies begin to question and regret this philosophy after sales numbers continue to fall flat after 6 months of their product launch. While creating a product people actually want is important for finding product market fit, you won’t be selling much if no one knows your product even exists.

Why Inbound Marketing isn’t Enough

Sharing great content is a great way to strengthen and expand your audience, but what do you do if you don’t have an audience at all?

Some people may discover your awesome blog posts and videos on the internet organically if your content has good SEO, but in today’s ocean of content that’s getting harder and harder to even get noticed. Unfortunately it usually takes between 6 months and 2 years for most blogs to take off and give the company the ROI they’ve put into their blog. Whether your company hires writers or it’s just the opportunity cost of the founders’ time to write articles, creating content is never free. Today having a successful and widely read company blog often requires using advertising spend to promote content on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.

Like SaaStr‘s Jason Lemkin and Hubspot’s Mark Roberge I agree that every company should be creating useful and interesting content for their customers and prospects to consume (which is why I’m writing this blog post for you!), but that doesn’t mean you should put all your eggs in one basket. Even Hubspot, the creator of the inbound movement,  uses outbound sales and marketing to help them get enough extra leads in their sales pipeline to meet their high-pressure growth targets.

Using inbound As Predictable Revenue‘s Aaron Ross says,

“Inbound & Outbound go best together, like peanut butter and chocolate.”

Outbound Email Still Reigns King

Few people see cold email as sexy, but even with the popularity and hype around social media, it’s still a powerful force to be reckoned with. Recent white papers and articles from Ken Krogue, Aaron Ross and MarketingProfs all conclude that in 2014 nothing besides expensive executive seminars can beat sending outbound emails.

Reasons Outbound Emails Beat Inbound & Cold Calling:

  1. Email is incredibly scalable. Mail merge templates, custom inserts, and automation software make it easy for you to create mass cold emails that feel personal enough for them to seem like individual emails. Once you have great email templates with high response rates it’s easy to scale your sales pipeline by just adding more contacts to your list.
  2. Better and more affordable data. We have so much information at our fingertips today and have great apps like Rapportive that make it too easy to research your prospects that you have no excuse not to. Likewise, scraping tools and outsourced prospecting research makes it affordable to get the contact information for the decision makers you need to reach, along with the everything you need to know about them and their company to get a conversation going.
  3. Unlike inbound, you control the volume. Unlike blog posts, events and white papers, which leaves you waiting for responses from your prospects, you get to make the first move with email. Want more people in your pipeline? After you’ve figured out the right messaging for your cold emails, all you have to do is increase the size of your contact list.

lots of B2B customers

The Winning Sales & Marketing Strategy: Inbound + Outbound

I would never tell you to quit doing inbound marketing.

You do need to be realistic about the results it will bring you and consider its costs though. Inbound marketing is a great strategy for building an online following and getting more customers in your pipeline, but it’s a longterm strategy that takes time. If you don’t have that time to keep spending on marketing without selling a lot (and who does?!), you should consider doing outbound emails while your inbound is still ramping up. Because once it does, you’ll have a killer sales and marketing strategy that you can continue to scale.

aint-nobody-got-time-for-that

Be a goat, not a sheep!

We always strive to create captivating copy that is unique, actionable and adds value to prospects’ lives.

Want help with your cold emails? Request a call: