{"id":1289,"date":"2015-05-21T08:13:34","date_gmt":"2015-05-21T15:13:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/salesfolk.com\/blog\/?p=1289"},"modified":"2015-10-07T19:56:02","modified_gmt":"2015-10-08T02:56:02","slug":"why-your-cold-emails-suck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salesfolk.com\/blog\/why-your-cold-emails-suck\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Your Cold Emails Suck"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"goats<\/a><\/p>\n

Did everyone somehow\u00a0forget that their sales prospects were humans too?<\/p>\n

How did we reach the point that people think a 10-15% open rate is “good,” and that a 3 paragraph long email with a 2% response rate was awesome?<\/p>\n

Yes, sales is a number’s game, but people seem to have forgotten that there’s a living breathing person on the other end of the inbox.<\/p>\n

Everyone is looking for the fastest and easiest way to increase their sales revenue. There’s a hope and belief that there’s some kind of \u00a0“hack” which will magically triple sales, but if you don’t have your sales fundamentals right, even the best automation software won’t make a difference.<\/p>\n

There’s 3\u00a0mistakes I see almost every sales person making over and over.<\/p>\n

The #1 Reason Why Your Cold Emails Suck: You Don’t Understand Your Audience At All<\/h3>\n

Please don’t bother sending cold emails at all if you’re not going to take the time to define who your buyer persona is.<\/p>\n

How can you expect to write cold emails that get responses if you don’t even know who you’re emailing?!<\/p>\n

Sending a cold email campaign to a list of 100,000 crappy\u00a0leads you bought\u00a0from some sketchy website is usually a bad idea to begin with. Not doing any work to clean the list and segment it by title or other firmographic criteria is just lazy and is guaranteed to flop.<\/p>\n

Why on earth do you want to send this much volume?<\/p>\n

Because you want to get 100 responses and you only have a 0.1% response rate?<\/p>\n

This is a terrible plan.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Spamming the internet might help you fill your pipeline with leads in the short-term, but is not a sustainable strategy and burns through valuable leads.<\/p>\n

It’s basic resource management: there is not an infinite supply of leads, and if you spam with a high enough volume you will quickly run out of leads (although your mail server will probably get blacklisted way before that).<\/p>\n

Instead of polluting everyone’s inbox with untargeted garbage, which can destroy your business’ reputation in no time at all, why not take a more thoughtful approach and focus?<\/p>\n

Yes, sales is a number’s game, and sending on-one-one individual emails isn’t time or cost-effective, but neither is throwing spaghetti on the wall and praying that it will stick.<\/p>\n

Winning sales organizations have one thing in common: they understand the importance of velocity.<\/p>\n

There is a trade-off between speed\/quantity and results\/quality, but there is an optimal point where you can get the maximum volume for the most results\/responses, and this is the point of\u00a0optimal sales velocity<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I know this because I insist that our clients send a lower volume of emails to a laser-targeted list, and still get them more total responses than they got sending to a large untargeted list.<\/p>\n

Example<\/strong>: One of my clients\u00a0wanted to send 10,000 emails, and had a 0.2% response rate. This means they got 20 responses for every 10,000 emails.<\/p>\n

I sent 223 emails and got them 38 responses.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Instead of burning through their entire list, my targeted email campaign\u00a0only used 2.23% of their regular list and got them almost twice as many results for the same amount of effort.<\/p>\n

The #2 Reason Why Your Cold Emails Suck:\u00a0You’re a Terrible Writer Who Needs to Learn Basic Copywriting<\/h3>\n

I’m collecting a treasure trove of terribly written emails in a folder labeled “LOL BAD emails.”<\/p>\n

And clients, friends and colleagues send me dozens of new ones to add to my collection each week.<\/p>\n

I realize writing isn’t everyone’s strong-suit, but do people really think they can\u00a0copy-paste generic email templates that were written over a decade ago and still get results?<\/p>\n

They’re not horrible templates, but they’ve suffered the plight of the “tragedy of the commons.” Any working professional who has been around for a few years can recognize these “classic templates” a mile away, and send them straight to the trash.<\/p>\n

And then there’s the emails that look like short novels.<\/p>\n

One of the worst cold emails I have seen had\u00a0more than 1652 words!<\/p>\n

I doubt anyone would actually take the time to read through this email unless they had a “twisted obsession” with bad writing like I do.<\/p>\n

And of course you have\u00a0the same dozen or so mistakes repeated over, all of which leave prospects racing to hit “delete” or “spam.”<\/p>\n

Copywriting takes practice, but I seriously wonder if anyone actually reads what they wrote (or what someone wrote for them<\/em>) aloud to themselves before they press send. If they did they probably wouldn’t be sending this garbage.<\/p>\n

The #3 Reason Why Cold Emails Suck:\u00a0You’re Using the Wrong Tools & Misconfigured Your Mail Server<\/h3>\n

Even the best cold emails can have deliverability problems if your mail server isn’t correctly configured.<\/p>\n

This wasn’t something I was closely paying attention to and checking, but a few of my clients recently had very low open rates, which made me suspicious. I always have at least a 35% open rate (and that’s on the low side), and they had around 9% opens or less.<\/p>\n

I was perplexed and frustrated.<\/p>\n

My copy was good and their business was amazing.<\/p>\n

I immediately assumed that they had a garbage list, and so I asked\u00a0for another copy of the CSV they had been sending to take another look. But there was nothing wrong. It was a good list.<\/p>\n

I was baffled for half a day.<\/p>\n

And then I asked them to add me to their CSV and do a mail merge to my email address.<\/p>\n

Suddenly it all made sense. By analyzing the header data from the email they had merged to me I realized their servers had been horribly misconfigured.<\/p>\n

It’s an honest and simple mistake that was easily corrected, but the effect of this error had almost completely tanked their campaign.<\/p>\n

As soon as this problem was resolved they started to get about a 10% response rate<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It was crazy what a difference it made.<\/p>\n

Spammers obviously suffer from major inboxing and deliverability issues, but even I was amazed at what a big impact a 5-minute tweak had on their email campaigns’ results.<\/p>\n

(I’ll be writing a blog post and doing a webinar on this very topic soon, so stay tuned<\/em>!)<\/p>\n

Surprise Announcement: We’re Writing A Book About Cold Email!<\/h3>\n

I’ve been meaning to create a book and course on cold-email for a while, but as the business grows and we take on more clients this always took a “back-seat” to other priorities.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty good about blogging and writing each week, but creating an entire book seemed like a daunting task Haley and I never had enough time for.<\/p>\n

And then I remembered my collaboration on the sequel to Aaron Ross’\u00a0Predictable Revenue Book<\/em>, titled\u00a0Tripling Your Sales<\/em>. Aaron released the book in 3 bite-sized pieces that created the sequel to his best-selling e-book, and that seemed so much less daunting.<\/p>\n

The Salesfolk team is pleased to announce that we will be coming out with our Ultimate Guide to Cold Email<\/em><\/strong> e-book in late August.\"Salesfolk<\/p>\n

The first of the three guides is called: “The Human’s Guide to Writing Cold Emails<\/strong><\/em>.”<\/p>\n

It’s full of actionable advice that will help you write cold emails that don’t sound spammy or seem like they’re written by a robot.<\/p>\n

You can learn more about it here<\/a>, or check it out for yourself by downloading it using the form below:<\/p>\n

Don’t be a robot! Get the guide!<\/strong><\/p>\n

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