There’s an ongoing debate in the marketing world: is cold email dead or thriving? The answer is somewhere in the middle. Since the rise of the inbound marketing trend, it’s become much less common.
It’s not dead, though – and it remains incredibly effective. The problem is that it’s very easy to get it wrong, and when you get it wrong, it doesn’t work.
By the end of this post, you’ll know how to create cold emails that get responses and results.
How to Create Cold Emails That Get Responses
Before you dive into cold emailing, it’s a good idea to know not only what doesn’t work, but why.
Let’s take a look at where emails can go wrong:
- Subject line: A terrible subject line is just an invitation for the recipient to head for the delete button immediately, but subject lines that generate opens in the wrong way are just as bad, if not worse.
- Greeting: Getting the recipient’s name wrong, using a blatantly generic greeting, or – even worse – not personalizing at all is a good way to instantly sink your chances of getting any positive engagement, let alone a response.
- Body content: There are an almost unlimited number of ways this can go really wrong, and we’ll look into some examples in more detail shortly.
- Signature: You would think signatures are fairly hard to get wrong, but they can be the final nail in the coffin.
- Postscripts: In some cases, if you’re clever with it, a postscript can be a positive thing, but they can also easily come across the wrong way.
General Tips
Even if you’re sending out a cold email blast to 500,000 contacts, you want each of them to feel like they’re the only one you were reaching out to.
If your email is generic and applies only tangentially to most of your readers, they’ll reach for the delete button. Here’s how to prevent that from happening:
- Information: Learn as much as you can about your prospect. If you’re reaching out on a 1-on-1 basis, you can do deep research and tailor your emails very specifically. For bulk cold emails, on the other hand, you need to ensure the list you purchase has as much information as possible.
- Personalization: Once you have the required information, you can personalize your messaging. Add personalization tokens utilizing their first name and company name, for example.
In general, it’s a good idea to gather as much data on your prospects as possible, and then use that data to indicate that your email is directed at them as closely as possible.
If someone feels that you’ve done your research on them and their company, and that your product or service can genuinely be useful for them, you’re much more likely to make a sale.
The Key to Responses: Psychology
Knowing what your audience wants is good. Knowing how they think is better. Especially in the B2B world, marketers all too often will forget that although the business is the potential customer, the decision-maker is a person.
Most of the work that goes into getting responses to your cold emails happens before you even start writing the email itself.
Even if you’re targeting a business, sell to the individual. To learn how to do that, let’s look at a tried-and-true psychological model: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
How can you appeal to these needs in your email? Well, in a B2B setting, you’re most likely not providing the “basic needs” section. Your product or service probably doesn’t cover “belongingness and love”, either.
But the other two? You can use these to great effect when writing a cold email, particularly people’s esteem needs.
How could your product make the prospect look great to their boss? People naturally desire a sense of accomplishment and prestige.
Could your offering be so useful that they could use it to negotiate a promotion or a raise? If you can plant that seed firmly in their mind, they’ll want to make a purchase.
People very often make purchases based on emotional impulses, and rationalize the decision retroactively. In a B2B setting, this is harder to take advantage of, but if your prospect believes there’s real personal and professional value and benefit in using your product in particular, they’ll champion it to the other stakeholders.
Let’s take a look at how to apply this to each of the points we listed earlier.
Subject Lines Should Be Enticing
First and foremost, your subject line shouldn’t be an afterthought that you tack on once your email is written. Just the opposite, in fact.
The subject line is what gets your email opened, and if nobody opens your email, all that great content doesn’t help you one bit.
People gain a sense of accomplishment when they solve a problem. You can appeal to their esteem needs by clearly presenting a problem that they have, and how they can solve it by using your product.
In addition to that, you need to arouse curiosity and cut through the noise of all the other emails your prospect gets. They need to notice your subject line and want to open it.
Personalization is a major part of getting your subject lines noticed. Using the contact’s first name or company name in the subject line is widely known to improve open rates.
Making them want to open it is a little trickier. You need to convince them that opening your email will directly help them improve their lives somehow.
Typically, this means showing that you are aware of a problem they’re having, and insinuating that you can help them with it.
For example, if you offer a service for marketing podcasts, you could say something like:
“Is <their podcast title>’s listener base too small?”
Most podcast teams are eager to find ways to grow their audience. While you aren’t outright stating that you can help them grow their listener base, the implication is there.
You can also appeal more directly to their need for accomplishment with a strong claim. “Quadruple <podcast title>’s audience”, for example.
A strong subject line hits these points:
- Make them notice your email by standing out and personalizing.
- Make them want to open it by appealing to their need to solve a pressing issue.
Greetings Set the Tone
The days of “Dear Sir/Madam” are so long gone you can’t even see their dust in the rearview. If your email doesn’t immediately come across as though it were written with that reader and only that reader in mind, you’re sunk.
The way to do this will vary depending on your audience. Some will respond better to a more formal greeting. Some will be happier with “Hey <Name>”.
Avoid at all costs anything that sounds generic. If your subject line was great and the prospect opened your email hoping for something relevant to them and gets a “Dear Sir/Madam” in the face, that delete button begins to look very appealing.
Body Content Should Carry Weight
There are an incredible number of “terrible cold email” posts out there that prove how limitless the possibilities for getting this wrong really are. Some of them are so excruciatingly bad that it’s funny.
Don’t end up in one of those articles.
Keep your cold emails brief and to the point. You’re already asking someone to take time out of their day, unexpectedly, to read an email from someone they’ve never heard of. Make it as painless as possible.
Give them value. Remember how the subject lines should entice them with the promise (or implication) that they’ll find useful information inside? That needs to be true.
Whatever problem or claim you mentioned in the subject line should be a focal point of your email. Does their podcast have a small audience? They can reach a huge number of new listeners through your marketing service!
Now, the whole point of this email is to get people to take action. You want to get responses, or clicks, or whatever you key metric is.
That won’t happen unless you ask for it.
Include a calendar link for them to book a call, and tell them. “I’d love to get on a quick call with you and have a 15-minute conversation about how we can multiply your listener base. Here’s a link to my calendar – if you have a few minutes to chat, pick a time and we’ll go from there.”
You don’t get what you don’t ask for. Many marketers send otherwise-top-notch emails and totally fail to actually ask the reader to take any kind of action. So they don’t!
Signatures Make a Mark
It’s always nice to feel like the email you’re reading is from a real person, but signatures are another spot that you can botch your email.
For example, in the blog post we linked in the last section, there’s a series of emails in which the sender variously signed off as “The Colossus of Cold-Email”, “The Anti-Sales Man”, and “Owner/President/King”. Yikes.
It’s generally best just to stick to a factual signature. Your name, job title, company name and maybe a nice headshot are all you need.
You’ve managed to get someone to read all the way to the end – don’t ruin it with a terrible signature.
Postscripts are Passé
In the world of marketing, postscripts are pointless. If you haven’t delivered the value of your email quickly in the body content, you’ve already shot yourself in the foot.
You could make an argument for adding something humorous in certain contexts, but again, why not just have it in the body copy?
Before They Can Respond, They Must Receive
All of this presumes your emails have reached your contacts’ inboxes. If your campaigns are languishing in spam folders, the best subject line in the world won’t save them.
The problem with cold emails is that they often get filtered out and don’t get to inboxes. The best way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to use the right platform to send them.
Clickback MAIL is the tool for the job. It’s an email sending platform designed from top to bottom to get your cold campaigns into inboxes, not spam folders.
It keeps your lists clean of bad data and spam traps, helps you write content that doesn’t scare spam filters, and has many other useful tools, too – all designed to let you get the best results from your cold campaigns.
You can see it in action with a 1-on-1 live demo and learn exactly how it helps you turn cold contacts into warm leads.
