How To Get Your Cold Emails Noticed, Read & Replied To [Whitepaper]

Anyone with an email inbox knows that, when it comes to sales, cold outreach is one of the most popular techniques today.

Your potential clients are being constantly bombarded by cold emails, many of them are from your direct competitors. If you want to stand out in their inbox and get that reply, you’re going to need to put some real effort in and dig below the surface.

Just like traditional advertising, it’s important that your cold email grabs attention and motivates action. No one enjoys receiving boring emails, selling generic products and services.

If the idea of creating a compelling email campaign seems a bit overwhelming, don’t panic! We’re here to help you with every step, from writing an email that will appeal to your ideal client, to making sure it’s delivered to the right person. We’ll even show you how to add an extra sprinkle of magic that’ll have potential clients filling your inbox with replies.

What exactly are cold emails?

Before we go any further with cold emailing, it’s important that we’re on the same page with our definition. When we refer to cold emailing, we’re talking about reaching out to complete strangers (and potential customers) who’ve have had no prior relationship with you. Importantly, this isn’t to be confused with spam.

Spam emails will typically use misleading subject lines and bulk messages without any personalization. They’re untargeted and typically try to trick the recipient into opening or responding to the email. To make sure you’re not unintentionally sending spam, a good starting point is checking out the CAN-SPAM Act to ensure your email complies with the guidelines.

A successful cold outreach plan will typically use personalized cold emails to make contact with potential customers you’ve never connected with. With a professional, friendly tone and effective choice of words, the right cold email will get your potential customer’s attention and lay the groundwork for an ongoing customer relationship.

This is cold outreach and, love it or hate it, it has its purpose. Cold outreach is one of the most efficient lead generation tools you can use. If used properly, it can get you positive leads with minimal effort.

Better yet, when the leads generated from cold emailing actively respond to your campaign, their conversion rate is higher than leads gathered from other sources.

Why cold emailing is perfect for you

Cold emailing has been given a bad rep, with overflowing inboxes and annoyed customers. So why should you spend your time learning this technique? The answer is simple:

Leads!

When done properly, cold emails are one of the most efficient ways to generate new leads and find new customers.

The reason cold emails have such a bad rep is they’re often composed and executed terribly, with no thought or planning.
Most people treat cold emails as a poster advertising their business. That would be great if it were 2005, but now everybody advertises, and consumerism is at its peak.

You can’t list your services and expect recipients to call you up with their requirements and demand you take their money.
Instead, you have to put some real work into the email to ensure it’s liked by the recipient.

A great performing email campaign is one that is personalized to the last detail; that kind of hard work can get you significant response rates of 50%, or even higher.

If that’s not a good enough reason for you, here are some more reasons cold emailing is perfect for you:

How to use cold emailing

To understand how to effectively use cold emailing, we have to understand the objective.

Many people think of cold emailing as a sales tool and sure, the goal is to, at some point, make a sale. But does that mean your email should read like a sales letter? Absolutely not!
Emails focused on sales are less likely to generate leads than emails providing value.

Your aim should be to start a conversation, rather than selling your product. Unless you’re in retail, a direct conversion from your email is simply not going to happen.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Their inbox is flooded with emails daily, most of which they have zero interest in. An email saying “Grab our new data science course!” may be straightforward but it’s impersonal and practically invisible in a crowded inbox.

Instead, a great way to boost reader engagement is by providing tangible value, along with any marketing message. This is a great way to boost reader engagement. For example, the subject line “Learn how to survive in the age of automation” promises valuable, useful information for readers interested in the topic. It’s then easy to include sales information for your product/service, without appearing like a pushy car salesman.

To get the balance right, this checklist will help you compose an effective cold email that your recipients will actually want to read:

What you need to know about cold emailing before you get started

Hopefully you’re now convinced of the benefits of cold emailing and you’re ready to get started. Use these hacks to make sure you’re getting the best response rates possible:

Easy fix – templates that work

Using the above hacks you now have the principles of a great cold email campaign, but what about composing the actual email copy? What are some great ways to do that? USe the following list is something you can use as a quick tool to devise any cold email:

To see this in action, take a look at some templates that have worked well in the past.

Template #1: HubSpot calls this a repeat website visit template and this is one of our favourites.

Template #2: Here’s a helpful sales template by the guys at Right Hello:

This is a great example of a flattering outreach email. You reach out with a warm compliment and an offer to help. Most recipients will at least agree to hear you out after such a friendly message. If not, you’ll still gather a few brownie points for the future.

Template #3: Pipetop’s Focus on benefit Template is no nonsense, which is why it works so well:

This template addresses real issues concerning the recipients as an introduction and then offers a viable solution. It also offers social proof that the sender isn’t a complete newbie and knows what they’re doing. It’s also specific and has a nice clear call to action. It’s likely to get appreciated by busy professionals who don’t like people taking their time for granted.

Try these templates and see the results for yourself. These are tried and tested templates that will ensure a good response rate, and serve as a ideal starting point for setting up your own tests for optimization.

What’s the bane of cold emailing?
The dreaded “Mark All As Read” button.

Many of us pass a cursory glance over the emails that have arrived in the morning, select them all, and mark them as unimportant.
So how can you get past this mental Adblock that people have developed after years of being subjected to relentless advertising?
Well, there’s a few tricks to that.

Let’s break down the process of email marketing, starting with the first major hurdle – are your emails even reaching your target audience?

Spoiler Alert: Your emails aren’t getting delivered

Plenty of us have this unfortunate belief that bulk marketing has very low returns.

The truth is, returns on cold emailing can vary greatly. The latest figures show an average CTR of anywhere between 4% and 13% depending on the industry. A highly targeted campaigns can receive much better rates, and conversely, a poorly thought out campaign can do much worse.

So what’s the difference between the guys who send ten thousand emails and get one response, and the guys who send a hundred emails and get twenty responses?

The answer is twofold – data quality and targeting.

Rather than compiling their own email lists, most people buy them instead. Due to the assumption of a low return, very little care gets put into curating the email addresses. The low quality of this data means that only a small percentage of the recipients will actually be interested in your product or service, further lowering the response rate.

The second aspect flows out of the first. Low quality data makes targeting your desired market that much harder.

The worst case scenario? Sending emails to too many uninterested people can have you tagged as spamming.

While getting tagged as a spammer isn’t a death knell, it does make your job much harder. Even though spam filters are getting smarter over the years, plenty of them still take a blanket approach towards blocking spam. This results in completely legit emails getting sent to the spam folder for reasons as ridiculous as mentioning Oprah. No joke. Other examples of words that have previously been known to set off alarm bells include ‘Earn $,’ ‘f r e e’ and ‘Urgent.’

My point is, once you have identified your market and acquired the email addresses, it’s time to figure out how to get through the ever-upgrading spam filters.

Let’s make friends with spam filters and avoid their wrath

So here’s the secret to getting past every single type of spam filter: You don’t.

It would be pointless to list all the requirements to avoid all the spam folders. Reading a six hundred page book to write one amazing mail is counterproductive, and that book would be out of date as soon as it was released anyway.

Instead, here are the overall best practices to make sure that your emails don’t wind up in the spam folder.

Following these best practices will help your emails get into inboxes. Once they’re delivered though, the next step is to capture the recipient’s attention! What better way to do this than craft the perfect subject line?

The big S – Subject lines!

A good subject line should do three things –

Let’s break each of these down.

Invoke the desired emotion in the reader – There are four emotions particularly effective at getting readers to open your emails: Curiosity, urgency, fear and excitement. Blatantly transparent efforts at tugging on heartstrings get ignored, but piquing the reader’s interest can pay off. Here are some examples of each type of subject line –

Be relevant – Putting in a reference to current affairs or a recent event can improve CTR.

It implies the email contains fresh content or an opinion on recent events that could prove insightful.

A general rule of thumb is your references shouldn’t be older than a month. Depending on how often the story is running in the news cycles, the time to reference an event may increase or decrease. Keep an eye on trends.

Engage attention with interesting preview text – In many email clients, the first few words of the email will often appear as preview text, making them a vital part of getting your email opened.

The same rules for evoking emotions apply here too. If the preview text is engaging, the odds of opening the email shoot up.

If these guidelines are followed, people will open the emails you send them. But unless the content is good, well, there go your customers. So once they’ve opened your email, how do you make the most of the opportunity and keep them onboard?

Your target audience needs to be wooed

Like any good relationship, you need to keep the spark alive and woo your readers!

All the information given in this book shouldn’t be treated as a simple checklist. Instead, it should be viewed as a foundation to build your relationship on. What does this involve?

Pay attention to what your audience wants, as well as what they could want. Give them your time and attention. Treating your audience well benefits them as well as you, for the simple reason that reputation (whether good or bad) spreads.

If you create a product with care, catering to the requirements of your audience, they will respond. High-quality products attract a high-quality audience.

If you manage this well, you win the elusive prize marketers chase: a loyal customer base! Once you’ve built your email campaign on this solid foundation, all that’s left to do is wait.

Watching the replies trickle in

Once an email campaign is launched, and everything that can be optimized has been, it’s time for the hardest part of the campaign.
The wait for responses.

If your campaign has been crafted properly and carefully targeted, the responses should start trickling in soon enough.

While the number of responses will likely be low, the quality of the responders will be high. They will be far more likely to buy your products and use your services because they will have seen the value you provide. After all, while scams and poor quality products may have a brief short-term success, only products providing true value will succeed long-term in the market. If you become known for providing true value to your customers, nothing will stop you from running a successful marketing campaign!

It’s a great feeling to pull off a successful campaign and watch the results unfold in front of your eyes.

You can’t wait to do it again, right? Wrong?

Planning and executing an effective email campaign is a lot of work, after all.

If you were to spend all that time on email campaigns every day you wouldn’t have time to work on the rest of your funnel, such as actually converting those leads you’ve generated into loyal customers.
So what can you do in order to achieve the same results, without going through all that work every time?

The best way is by automating your campaign, creating new campaigns with minimal effort based on the foundation laid by you in the initial campaigns. This will help free up your time to work on those conversions and other business activities.

Find the optimum pattern

As you send out campaigns you will start noticing patterns in the responses.

There will be certain campaigns that will perform better than the rest. You’ll notice the same with subject lines, formatting styles and a whole host of other factors.

This data can help you find your optimum campaign for your audience. Just follow these simple steps:

This testing gives you the data for the best setup you need to follow for your automated campaigns. For maximum effectiveness, this will need to be updated at frequent intervals, but between updates, you can be sure your campaign is still performing well.

Using this pattern you can change the content and send out a new campaign without having to go through the entire planning process every time.

Schedule your campaign with the precision of a surgeon

Now you know how to automate your campaign, there are certain other pointers you need to keep in mind too.

Scheduling is also a very important part of a successful campaign.

The frequency of your emails, the precise delivery time of each campaign and the right content at the right time will all contribute to the success of your campaign.

Consider the following when you schedule your next campaign:

Execute campaigns in shorter time frames and with less effort

As we come to the end of what’s hopefully been an informative experience, we’d like to ensure you’ve understood the mechanics of cold emailing down to the last detail, so you confidently execute campaigns flawlessly.

The easiest way to get the most out of a campaign is to automate it.
Tools like Reply do all the work for you and help you reach the most people in a low time frame.

This whole purpose of this ebook has been to help you reduce your time and effort spent executing your campaigns and ensuring your emails are opened and replied to.

Automation helps you do all of that in a more effective manner as automation ensures:

You can create a checklist based on the pointers in this book and use it to create an optimum strategy for yourself that will replicate great results every time you execute a campaign.

To get you started, here’s our checklist of top tips to remember:

Before you go…

If you’re still staring at a blank screen, wondering how to get started and implement all this knowledge, don’t worry. We’ve compiled a few sample templates for you. Read through them, see which ones would fit in with your brand and your industry, then modify them to make them your own.

The respectful open The cheerful open The transparent beginning Straight jump to a helping hand The Biz-Dev introduction The referral email The social hook The sports talk ice-breaker The research backed direct ice-breaker The “competitors’ faults” opportunity The statistics hook

And there you have it. I hope you’ve found this useful, and you’re now ready to get cracking with your next campaign. Remember, if you ever have any questions about optimizing your cold email campaign, check out our resource library, or get in touch at sales@reply.io and we’ll be more than happy to help out. Here’s to having a great business sales@reply.io and better sales!