Have you got a list of cold contact emails and aren’t sure what to do with them? Or maybe you’re looking for what you could do with a list before you buy one?
In the B2B world, cold emails are the secret weapon in many marketers’ arsenal.
Let’s examine the benefits and how you can do it yourself in four steps.
4 Steps to Turn Cold Contact Emails into Opted-In Leads
Why Cold Email?
Email lead generation comes with a range of benefits. For one thing, you can reach your target audience in immense numbers. The only limit is how large a list you’re willing to purchase. You could realistically send campaigns to a list of millions of contacts at once, all belonging to your target audience.
Another perk is the scalability of the process. Whether you send to 50,000 or five million contacts, you’re spending the same amount of time and work creating your campaign. That means when you want strong growth, the only thing you need to do is increase your list size.
Considering the low effort and cost of an email campaign, that’s some serious value you’re getting back.
If you’re using Clickback’s email lead generation software, you also get in-depth insights out of the deal thanks to built-in Website Visitor Intelligence™ (or WVI) technology. WVI lets you see how contacts engage with your website after clicking on a link or CTA in your email campaign, providing high-impact data for campaign optimization as well as CRO.
Step 1: Check Your List Quality
The first thing you need is, of course, some cold contacts to send emails to. However, not all lists are created equal, so here are some things to keep in mind when you’re shopping for yours.
The vendor you buy from is an immensely important factor. Check how they get their data – whether they’re scraping or aggregating.
Aggregated lists are made of real contacts that are collected over time and curated into categorized lists. This is what you’re looking for.
Scraped lists, on the other hand, are more or less random lists of email addresses that may or may not even be real contacts. This sort of list is typically full of bad addresses, spam traps, honeypots, and generally undesirable data that will hinder you instead of helping.
The real people on scraped lists, if there are some, are most likely not in your target audience anyway. Scraped lists aren’t worth your time or money.
If you’re unsure where to find a reputable data provider, drop us a line. We partner with a number of them and will happily refer you.
Step 2: List Verification
Before your list is ready to use, you need to clean it. Even if it’s the best aggregated cold list in the world, this step is still critical.
That’s because every single email list out there will decay over time as people leave jobs, change domains, and repurpose their emails as spam traps. You don’t want to send to addresses that have no chance of becoming leads or customers.
The solution is list verification. This is typically a third-party service that you pay for, where your lists are run through a series of checks and filters that strip out bad data.
If you’re using Clickback’s email lead generation software, there’s a cutting-edge list verification process built right into the upload process, so you don’t need to worry about this step at all.
Step 3: Create Your Campaign
Once you’ve got your freshly-cleaned list ready to go, it’s time to build your campaign. That includes creating killer copy, of course – you can check out our guide to cold email copywriting for an in-depth look at that – but it also means creating a landing page.
This is an important step that it’s very easy to neglect. If you just point your links/CTAs to your website’s home page, or a relevant product page, you’re shooting your campaign in the foot.
Instead, create a dedicated landing page that’s only for that specific campaign. That way, you’re not forcing people to click around your site to learn more about whatever your email message contained.
A dedicated landing page means you can put all that information in one spot and make it very easy for them to learn everything they need to drive a conversion. Think of the landing page as an integral part of your messaging where you can expand on and reinforce your email content.
This also enables you to keep your email messages short and punchy, with the goal of driving a click rather than a conversion. The landing page can back your email up effectively and push the contact to a conversion.
Check out our guide to designing killer cold email landing pages here.
Step 4: Iterate
Now that you’ve got a complete campaign out in the world, it might be tempting to just move on to the next one. However, it’s worth analyzing the data you get from each campaign. You can consistently improve your results that way.
If you’re experiencing a poor open rate, for example, you know you should focus on your subject line, since that’s what people see first and what typically drives an open.
If, on the other hand, your open rate is fine but your clickthrough rate is low, it’s a good idea to rework your email content to be more compelling. Maybe you missed the mark with your angle.
If your open and clickthrough rates are fine but you’re getting no conversions, look at your landing page and see what improvements can be made there for next time.
If you do this sort of analysis for each campaign, then the next one will be better and you’ll achieve steady improvement.
