A Cold Email Campaign can be very effective and it’s one of those things that seems simple, but once you dig into it you find a lot more than expected. In theory, a cold email campaign seems to have very easy steps, just load up your list of cold contacts, assemble your email, and pull the trigger.

However, there’s quite a bit more to it. Email lead generation is both art and science.

Let’s look at 3 Steps that will help you get it right every time.

Is it Time to Update Data on your Purchased Mailing Lists?

If you’re not sure when to update your data, it depends on how much your list has degraded. How often have you sent? The more you send, the higher your degrade rate is. If unsure as to when you should top-up your email list, the answer is every six or twelve months.

When it comes to purchased lists, you must be aware that every year thousands of people change jobs and move to other companies. That’s why it’s critical that you use a list cleaning and hygiene checker solution before sending your cold B2B email campaigns. This will clean out all the dead email addresses, remove spam traps or honey pots and reduce the high degrade rate that some may get when sending to them the first few times.

Clickback can help you here as our software does a list clean and hygiene check on every contact imported into our solution. It’s designed to help you decrease your bounce rates and keep you out of spam folders with cleaner contacts to send to.

Audience Segmentation

The second step is the segmentation of your targeted audience. This is the key to any marketing campaign. If you have identified your potential customer well, and know who it is you are targeting, you will have better engagement, higher inboxing and strong delivery. Overall, if you have a targeted list, very well crafted content, your campaigns will net strong results.

If you are unsure as to who your audience is, or you have yet to segment your targets, don’t worry, we will get deeper into it.

How do you define your target audience? The correct answer is “Study Your Best Customers”.

You can start by exporting all the data from your CRM. Once you have all the data, look very closely into it.

Sort each field looking for similar attributes, that your customer possesses. This includes company size, industry, and title of the persona whom you persuasively closed the deal with.

If you’re a new business and are building your customer base, look to your competitors to uncover who their audiences are. It’s a very high chance that those are the audiences you would want to go after.

What about my email messages?

When you write emails at scale, personalization really means using different information you have about a target audience and understanding their pain points you’re selling to. Focus on identifying their industry, size of the company, location, interests, business goals, and more.

Once you have identified all segments from this exercise. Then it will be easier for you to develop the right email content for each of them. This will improve engagement rates and overall delivery and success of your campaigns.

When creating your cold email content strategy ask yourself the following questions:

• Who am I talking to? Is it a decision-maker or a gatekeeper?
• Is this content relevant enough to generate an interaction?
• Does it bring any value?
• What are their interests?
• What are their pain points?

Now that you have gathered the information above, you are ready to start testing your messages and subject lines. And don’t get your hopes down if you don’t generate the response you were looking for within the first few campaigns. Cold Email Campaigns take time and hard work before you begin seeing results.

So, whether they answer or not, your metrics can give you the right answers on where to pivot or. Just remember to create content according to your segmentation and your audiences’ interest.

Follow-Up to Win Interest

The art of doing cold email doesn’t end with just one email. You always will have to develop a strategy to send more emails to your purchased lists. To be honest, most of the time, it will take several follow-ups to reach someone, build trust to get that reply back.

Very few prospects reply after your initial contact, but research proves that 13% of the prospects usually respond in the fourth attempt and 27% in the sixth attempt.

How Many Follow-up Emails Should You Send?

There is no general rules for this, you should experiment with the timing for subsequent follow-ups. You want to do follow-ups without annoying your prospects with daily messages.

But usually, we suggest up to 10 to 12 total. As you can see follow-ups are a long game plan. Sometimes the perfect prospect may not be ready to buy at the time you send the email, so the key is to keep sending emails that provide value, that way the prospect will keep you top of their mind.

To maximize your follow-up success, focus on the time, frequency, quantity, and value of the message. Be consistent. And automate.

Talking about automation, you must know that it’s nearly impossible to stay on top of your prospects if you are doing it manually. Instead use an automation tool to make your communication scalable.

Find some examples of follow-up emails here.

Conclusion

Using Automation Software like Clickback Lead Generation Software can make your cold email marketing campaigns so much easier. However, you may need to work harder at the beginning of your cold email efforts.

Don’t forget to consistently update your data, ensure your systems work properly and create a strategy to follow up. If you follow these 3 easy steps in preparing for your cold email campaigns, most of your work is done.

Ready to Send Your Cold Email Campaigns? Check out or live 1-on-1 software demo.