Cold emailing is an email prospecting strategy that consists of sending an email to a potential customer with whom you have no prior connection. This person may not know your brand or may have never used your content. This strategy is mostly used in B2B marketing
Cold emailing is a widely used strategy for prospecting and 89% of marketers say it is their main lead generation channel. This strategy allows you to be efficient and productive while keeping your costs low.
But in concrete terms,
- How can we define cold emailing?
- What are the benefits of cold emailing?
- How to plan and launch a successful cold emailing campaign?
In this article, I will provide answers to these questions and the necessary resources to succeed in a cold emailing campaign.
Chapter 1: What is cold emailing
Companies used to get in touch with the prospects they wanted to convert into customers by phone: this is called cold calling and it is a strategy that has remained for a long time a key means of prospecting for companies.
But today, the limits of this technique have led marketers to diversify their strategies. This is how many marketers have chosen cold emailing to do their prospecting. In this chapter, I will explain the concept of cold emailing and the advantages of its use.
1.1. how to define cold emailing
To better understand the concept of cold emailing, let’s look at its ancestor, cold calling.
1.1.1. Cold calling
Cold calling is a prospecting practice that consists of contacting prospects who have not yet expressed their interest in a given service or product. This practice involves telemarketing, telephone solicitation and sometimes home visits.
Unfortunately, prospects tend not to appreciate this prospecting technique. Thus, cold calling generates different reactions from prospects such as interruptions, call hang-ups and sometimes verbal attacks.
The progress observed in the field of telephony has caused the abandonment of cold calling and has given rise to new prospecting methods such as social network marketing and email prospecting.
1.1.2. Email prospecting and spamming
Email prospecting is the use of emails to promote services or products and develop relationships with the prospect. It is a form of marketing that makes it possible to propose a company’s offers to a prospect, newsletters or exclusive offers for subscribers.
Prospecting by e-mail is easy to set up and particularly less expensive. This is why the strategy is heavily used even if it turns into spamming.
Although spamming manifests itself in different ways, it can be defined simply as the act of sending unsolicited messages. It is usually promotional in nature and annoying with a large number of users.
To use it, spammers create distribution lists with the help of spambots and send the emails through automated programs. Gradually, the technique has become popular and spammers send mass messages with the intention of interacting with a small number of people.
The problem with spamming is that prospects find their email inboxes flooded with unwanted messages and may decide to file it away in a dedicated folder.
So for your email prospecting strategy, you need to avoid having your email labeled as spamming. This is the main reason why cold emailing needs to be adapted.
1.1.3. Cold emailing
Cold emailing is a technique that represents any email sent without prior authorization to a prospect who has no existing link with you. To ensure that it really works, cold emailing is often sent by an individual to a public figure such as an influencer or from one company to another.
Unlike spam, which is sent to a very large number of email addresses at once without categorization, cold emailing targets qualified prospects segmented into specific categories.
All this requires some research to determine if the recipient’s profile matches the desired profile and if the email address is valid.
Cold emailing is a great tool that companies can use to their advantage.
1.2. what are the benefits of cold emailing
To begin with, cold emailing allows you to reach new prospects, especially those with whom you have never interacted before. It can lead to a sale and generate new customers.
As mentioned above, cold emailing is less intrusive than cold calling. The latter is perceived by prospects as an annoying and aggressive practice. From this point of view, we can say that emailing is a great alternative especially to make a good impression at first contact.
Moreover, cold emailing is less expensive and remains better in terms of return on investment. This practice remains accessible to both large and small companies.
In view of these advantages, we can try to understand the factors that make cold emailing effective.
1.3. What are the factors that make cold emailing effective?
An effective cold emailing is one that makes the recipient interested in what is being offered. Ideally, the Internet user responds by giving you more information, visits your website and makes a purchase. To achieve this, there are 4 factors that make a cold email effective.
Firstly, a cold email you send must be able to reach the recipient and above all not be considered as spam. This is one of the reasons why the practice requires research on the target in order to have accurate information.
Secondly, you must target your recipients in your cold emailing strategy. This means sending emails to the right people for the right reasons by considering their wants, needs, values and priorities. You must then specifically choose a niche audience that you fully understand.
Third, the email must immediately capture the recipient’s attention so that they read it to the end. If the cold email does not cause immediate appeal, the recipient may delete it and your efforts will not be rewarded.
Fourth, you must provide value to your recipient through the cold email. This value can be in the form of content, statistics, tips or special offers to get the recipient to interact with you.
Chapter 2: How to launch your cold emailing campaign?
Creating a cold email requires some preparation to not only reach the right target, but also to get your recipients to interact with you. In this chapter we will discover the essential steps to successfully launch your cold emailing campaign.
2.1. Create a list of valid emails
The first step to a good cold emailing campaign is to build a list of valid emails a list of valid emails of the people you want to contact of the people you want to contact. It consists in defining the characteristics of your target and search for the prospects that best match your target.
To do this, I recommend that you opt for a manual prospecting method and avoid buying email addresses. These tend to be inaccurate, incomplete and unreliable.
Although manual prospecting is time consuming, it will allow you to get a better quality list with qualified prospects. It’s all about using human intuition to identify the right candidates for your list. To do this, you can use platforms such as LinkedIn to collect emails from users in your niche.
2.1.1. Find an email address on LinkedIn
Finding an email address on LinkedIn requires a working account. LinkedIn is a very powerful tool that will allow you to easily find professional information related to your target and their email address. Once you have found your target on LinkedIn, send them a request to be added by clicking on connect.
When the person accepts your add request, you will only have to click on contact information to see all the information related to the person including their email address.
If you can’t find the target’s email address in the contact information, you can retrieve a website to which the target is linked and try to find the email addresses linked to that site.
2.1.2. How to find the addresses linked to a domain?
We will use an online tool to find the addresses linked to a website Hunter is an easy-to-use tool, but it requires registration
To use it, enter in the search bar, the domain name of the website you want to find the emails of and the tool generates the emails belonging to the website:
Among the emails retrieved with the above tools, you will check if any are invalid.
2.1.3. Test the recovered emails
We will then use the tool Mail Tester tool to see if the email addresses you have retrieved are indeed valid. You just have to copy and paste the recovered emails in the mail bar and launch the verification.
After a few moments, the tool presents an analysis result that informs about the validity status of the verified emails. It also shows the possibility that your cold email has been thrown into a spam folder. After that, all you have to do is write a great email to seduce your recipients.
2.2. Write a great email
After you have built your list of people to contact, you will then craft the message in the most appropriate way. It will be a matter of addressing your target with the appropriate language register.
Moreover, apart from the register, to really incite the recipients to open your email, you must write the subject of your message with great care. It is written according to the content of your message, your target and mainly your objectives. In principle, the subject line must be concise and catchy to provoke the immediate attraction and curiosity of your recipient
The subject line will then guide you in writing the body of the email while being convincing. The body of the email starts with a personalized introduction. Avoid standard introductions that don’t even take the recipient’s name into account. You need to prove to your recipient that you have done your homework so that he or she feels concerned by what they are reading.
You must therefore apply yourself to write a unique text. Each sentence of your text must make the recipients interested in the next sentence. Also, you must make sure to add value to your content
For example, you can offer a free consultation assuming that you have something to offer. Another fairly consistent way to bring value to your recipients is to offer them very meaningful content.
As an example, we can mention e-books or an infographic that presents interesting statistics. At the end of your message, insert a call to action, which is a clickable element such as a link to your website or blog. Calls to action are important because they allow you to push the user to perform a desired action and thus initiate the buying process. Finally, we don’t need to remind you that you need to write a message without mistakes. Texts that are full of mistakes don’t add credibility to the message you want to convey
In addition, avoid overloading your message with elements that could slow down its loading time. It is clear that an email that takes forever to load properly leaves a bad image of your brand and also has very little chance of being viewed.
Once you’ve finished writing your cold email, it’s time to start the actual campaign
2.3. Launch the cold emailing campaign
We are now going to take action and start the cold email campaign properly. It consists of managing the sending of emails, the follow-up and the responses of your recipients.
2.3.1. Managing the sending of emails
You must plan the sending of your cold emails over a given period. Sending emails manually is a complicated task that you can do without. You just need to set up an automatic email sending system after having well segmented your list of valid emails into several categories.
You can also define a time to send more cold emails in case some of your prospects do not respond. There are tools for this purpose such as Lemlist that allow you to automate and schedule the sending of cold emails.
After sending the cold emails, it is essential to monitor the performance of your cold emailing campaign
2.3.2. How to track the cold emails you send?
There are several indicators such as the open rate and the click rate that will allow you to track the effectiveness of your cold emailing campaign.
As far as the open rate is concerned, it represents one of the fundamental measures in email prospecting and indicates the number of people who actually opened your email compared to the number of people who received it.
When the open rate is low, it means that the subject line of your cold email is not convincing enough or simply that emails are not sent to the right people.
The click-through rate measures the number of people who clicked on a link in your message after they opened it. It tells you how persuasive your message is. If you have a low click-through rate, it could mean that your message is not persuasive enough. Finally, the conversion rate is the number of people who take action after reading you. This could be filling out a simple form, making a purchase on your site or downloading a guide.
You can use EmailAnalytics to track the performance of your emails and measure the success of your cold emailing campaign.
In summary
Cold emailing is a good strategy to make the first contact with prospects
Together in this content, we have reviewed the benefits of this strategy as well as the methods for its implementation
You now have all the resources to use this strategy to generate qualified leads and increase your sales
If you’ve already conducted a cold emailing campaign, feel free to share your experience with us in the comments.
Thanks and see you soon!
