A Fool Proof Cold Email Marketing Strategy

Every marketing or sales team needs a well-thought-out cold email strategy in place. Why is this important, you ask? Without one, you might miss your target audience, fail to build credibility with recipients and lose track of your cold email performance. No one wants that.  Cold emailing efforts can be a hit or miss. Fret not! Here are some tips to help you make the most of them.

What is a Cold Email Marketing Strategy?

A cold email strategy is carefully planned to help you achieve your goals for an email. Goals might be getting new customers, recruiting passive candidates for jobs, or even getting beta and alpha users to try out your product. Did someone ask what a cold email strategy consists of? Cold email strategy describes:

1. Who are your cold email recipients.

2. How to write your cold emails.

3. Which hard email metrics to track.

4. What does your cold email follow-up schedule look like, and more.

The cold email strategy provides a clear map for your marketing and sales team to follow for successful cold emailing.

Few Smart Tips for a Successful Cold Email Strategy:

The first tip is that you should only send emails to your target audience (No point in bothering others). Cold emailing is the act of contacting a stranger. It's like cold calling, only more accessible! Cold emailing is a proven method for marketing, but it is not without its risks. Sending an unsolicited cold email could hurt your campaigns in the long run. How though? For example, your sales rep is sending outreach emails to random contacts. It's essential to be careful with the leads you are sending your B2C or B2B sales emails because many might find them irrelevant. Additionally, some people might even mark your emails as spam, which could ruin your email sender's reputation. Credibility is called into question, and the effectiveness of your emails takes a hit. How to stay away from spam filters? When sending emails, your marketer or sales rep should pinpoint the right audience and only reach out to them. If you send emails to your target audience, they will likely find them relevant. Your cold emails are no longer perceived as spam (Win-win!). This boosts your open rate, response rates and other email metrics. Determining the target audience for cold emails can be done by relying on your ideal customer profile. Creating a buyer persona is another way to do this, as it will allow you to know who your customers are and what they want.

What's an ideal customer profile?

An ideal customer profile is a statement that can broadly describe your target market. There are many examples of ICPs. For example, if you're a real estate broker, your ICP may specify that the potential customer should:

• Live in California.

• Have a budget of $1-2 million.

• Have a credit score between 740 and 799.

What's a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a specific type of person in the target audience. For example, the typical buyer persona for a real estate broker could be someone who:

• It is between 35 and 45 years.

• Is a first-time homebuyer.

• Has a family of four.

If a lead or prospect matches both your ideal customer profile and buyer persona, you would likely be able to engage them in meaningful communication.

Personalize Every Cold Email You Send

Your recipient's inbox is probably flooded with cold emails. If you send a generic (read: boring) email, the recipient will likely ignore it. The thing is, with personalized cold emails, you might see much better results. This statistic should provide you with an idea of the effectiveness of personalized emails: The research found that your subject line can increase your email response rate by 30.5% when it is personalized. To create a customized cold email, you have to research and find out about the customer or target audience. You should know the details, such as:

1. Which industry or niche do they belong to? 

2. Where your recipients are based? 

3. What their specific interests and challenges are, and more.

Creating personalized emails that incorporate these insights would make your emails feel tailor-made to each recipient; everyone appreciates the extra effort. Furthermore, the cold prospects would appreciate it if you took the time to understand them and their unique needs. They'll be more likely to respond to your cold emails if you get right down to the point. Creating personalized cold emails for a few recipients isn't the most challenging thing.  But sending personalized emails is tedious when you have long email lists. With the right tools, you can automatically scale up personalizing and optimizing bulk emails. It saves time, money, and effort for those who need to send out thousands of personalized messages in a short amount of time.

Build Credibility with Your Cold Email Recipients

With the right tools, you can automatically scale up personalizing and optimizing bulk emails. It saves time, money, and effort for those who need to send out thousands of personalized messages in a short amount of time. If the prospect doesn't know you, they won't trust you. You have to make the first move to build credibility with a stranger. There are a few ways to build rapport and credibility: Mentioning any mutual connections you share with the cold prospect can help verify that you are indeed an authentic person (and not a bot). Show your potential client that other real people benefit from your solution by sharing a testimonial. This is just one example of how social proof can help you persuade new clients in the marketplace. The potential client must have reasons to trust you before they will be willing to take the risk of doing business with you. But remember, when you are sharing social proof or talking about mutual connections, don't go overboard. Remember, the goal is to establish credibility and not show off.

Provide Value in Your Cold Emails

Successful cold emails create win-win situations. What do I mean by that? For example, a marketer could send the potential client an email highlighting a study or helpful piece of content from your company. Such a cold email could accomplish two things: The best way to help your prospects is by addressing their pain points. This email adds value to the recipient's life and contributes to your outbound marketing and lead generation efforts. Wins all around! You might not be able to help the recipient you are trying to support, but know someone who can. If that's the case, offer to introduce them! The idea is quite simple: give before you ask! Successful cold emails make the recipients understand that engaging with your message is in their best respect.

Write Concise and Actionable Cold Emails

In many cases, cold outreach marketing and B2C or B2B sales professionals send long-winded emails elaborating why their solution is the best. Don't forget that yours is just one of the hundreds of emails in a prospect's inbox. My point? You'll need to create concise emails that briefly yet clearly, explain the value proposition and the next steps that the recipient can take. This way, you can capture the prospect's attention, offer more clarity, and make it easier for the cold prospect to take action. Additionally, your B2C or B2B marketers and sales reps can further enhance actionability by including a short, enticing call to action in your email body. Studies have shown that including a call to action in your cold outreach email can significantly improve your clickthrough and conversion rates. It has been found that adding a single CTA into an email increases clicks by 371%.

Develop a Cold Email Follow-Up Schedule

It's rare for someone to respond after just one email. Maybe they: Missed the email. Didn't remember to reply or didn't care. (ouch) Did not find the value proposition appealing. Sending follow up emails can help increase recipient engagement levels! With that being said, don't just randomly send out follow up emails. It is important to be systematic about the number of emails you send. You also need to know when and why they are being sent for them to get their desired effect and not be a waste of effort. Essentially, it would help if you had a proper follow-up schedule. Such as the following schedule:

1st follow-up email two days after your first cold email  2nd follow-up email on day 7 3rd follow-up email on day 15 4th follow-up email on day 30 5th follow-up email on day 60, and so on.

This routine can vary depending on your industry and the target audience. Feel free to experiment until you find a plan that works best. If you want to increase the likelihood of receiving a reply to your email, send at least five to eight emails. It is shown that around 55% of replies happen during the fourth and eighth email follow-up. Sending any more follow-ups might annoy the recipient, ruin any chances of connecting in the future and damage your reputation. Follow-ups are a great way to ensure recipients interact with your content. Make sure you keep tabs on them!