Cold email marketing has generated millions in revenue for businesses worldwide in multiple industries. It works. The question is, how can you make it work for your business?
Prospecting with cold email is arguably the most cost-effective lead-generation strategy. Automation is simple; scaling from 1,000 to 10,000 monthly emails is relatively easy.
So, returning to the question: How can you make cold email work for YOU?
Today, we’ll teach you actionable cold email tips and best practices for everything from technical aspects to email copywriting and persuasion techniques. Let’s dive in!
- Reasons why cold email isn’t working for your business
- Best cold email tips for generating sustainable growth
- Email outreach none-negotiables
Why Isn’t Cold Email Working For You?
Cold email newbs can fall for several pitfalls. Once fixed with best practices applied, all that’s left is to scale. So, watch out for these common cold email mistakes:
Sending Large Volumes in the First Campaigns
Cold email is a numbers game. It’s easy to rush into it, thinking you can just use a template, keep buying email lists, and send large volumes of cold emails until somebody bites.
Volume and quality are definitely important. That means generating quality email copy, maintaining healthy email domains, and warming up your email-sending accounts.
Even if you’re offering the best products or services, prospects won’t bite if your cold email practice comes across as spammy. That usually happens when you focus only on selling.
Focusing Purely on Selling on the First Email
Is getting a sale on the first sales email possible? Yes! But most first cold emails that end up in sales don’t even focus on selling. They focus on delivering value and engagement.
Once you start a conversation, email sequences or follow-ups are more likely to convert. Instead of selling, build trust through email copy that provides immediate value.
Understanding your prospects’ business and implementing in-depth personalization is the best way to provide value. Without this level of lead enrichment, emails come off as generic.
Lack of In-Depth Personalization
If the only personalization you do is {{first name}} or {{company name}}, then what separates your email from generic automated ones? We’re not saying automation doesn’t work.
Automation has to be paired with lead intelligence tools. But if you can’t afford these tools just yet, spending time researching high-value prospects will always be worthwhile.
Tools like Instantly B2B Lead Finder help you enrich your lead list with up-to-date information about recent company news, allowing you deeper personalization and a unique sales angle.
But no matter which angle you go for, you shouldn’t go overboard with your CTAs. That means limiting questions to just one per email.
Including Multiple CTAs (Call-to-Actions)
Are you asking for a meeting? Do you want prospects to look at your case study? Or are you hoping for a reply? Whatever the case, only ask one question or have one CTA per email.
Let’s say you have a case study and want a prospect to read it. But at the same time, you want them to reply and give their thoughts on the study.
In this situation, you can say something like:
{{your company}} did a new case study (insert link) on {{topic}} and found {{interesting, relevant result}}. Being a well-respected name in {{industry}}, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
This CTA kills two birds with one stone. Still, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. Each element in your email needs variations, including your subject lines, main body, and CTA.
Sending the Same Email to Your Entire List
Never make the mistake of sending the same copy to your entire list of prospects. It signals email providers that your accounts are probably spam.
To avoid this issue, use spintax to generate variations of the same email automatically. The thought remains the same; only the semantics change.
You can use spintax on opening lines, greetings, or salutations. For the main body, the variations already come in the form of personalization. Remember, go in-depth.
Best Cold Email Tips for Sustainable Growth
As you get better at cold email, scaling up outreach is the natural next step. But as mentioned, we don’t want to get too excited. What we want is sustainable growth.
We must ensure that scaling doesn’t compromise our domains, email reputation, and deliverability. Here are 7 cold email tips to help you run sustainable outreach campaigns.
Always Warmup Email Sending Accounts
Sending accounts should warm up for at least 2-3 weeks before they are used for cold outreach. New email accounts sending large volumes will be seen as spammy.
Warmups protect our sending accounts, ensure deliverability, and increase the chances of our emails reaching the primary inbox rather than being flagged as spam.
It occurs naturally over time as we send and receive emails. There are tools or services that can automate warmups.
With Instantly, you can do unlimited warmups for unlimited sending accounts for no additional charge. You just need to add more domains to sustainably scale sending volume.
Add Domains and Emails Accounts to Scale Sending Volume
Email providers tag email addresses sending hundreds of emails daily as spam, not even warmups can prevent this. To protect deliverability, add domains and email accounts.
It’s best practice to create 2-3 sending accounts per domain. Each sending account can send 30-50 emails daily without any issues. Don’t forget to allocate sending limits to warmups, follow-ups, and initial cold emails.
You can buy domains from sites like GoDaddy, Namecheap, or any vendor of your choosing. Get alternate domains, similar to your main one. For example, “ABC.com” can be “GetABC.com.”
After adding the domains to your email service provider, ensure that you redirect/forward these domains to your main one and have done all the necessary technical setups.
Finish All Necessary Technical Setups for Cold Email
Once you’ve added new domains, you need them authenticated. That’s where SPF, DMARC, DKIM, and MX come in. Here’s a quick rundown of what they do.
- MX records allows your domains to receive emails.
- SPF signals email providers that your domains are authorized to send emails.
- DKIM adds a digital signature to emails, preventing spoofing.
- DARC authenticates your emails, signaling email providers that they’re legitimate.
These technical setups vary depending on your provider. Here’s our guide for both Google and Microsoft 365 users. With the technical aspect taken care of, we can now focus on copy.
Optimize Email Copy: Personalization, Spintax, and Automation
Personalization is at the heart of every successful cold email. It helps you gain a deeper understanding of prospects and position your unique selling points to fit their needs.
Several strategies can help us craft personalized and persuasive emails. But no matter how good an email is, we can’t just send the same one.
We must create variations of our emails through spintax. Try using 2-3 spintax sentences if you’re sending around 1-2k emails daily. If you have a more than one phone number, you can spintax that as well.
Tools like ChatGPT can help you create spintax. If you’re using Instantly, you can create spintax right from the email editor. Users can leverage Instantly’s advanced features that automates personalization, spintax, and A-B testing.
A-B Test Your Emails
Iterating on your best-performing emails through A-B testing is the best way to improve your campaigns, get more replies, and land more meetings.
It’s basically pitting one variation of an entire email against another and finding the best elements of each one.
With Instantly, you can do A-Z testing. Users can create variations for subject lines, email copies, CTAs, or whatever element you want to test for in the same email sequence.
Let’s say variation A has a better open rate, and variation B has a higher response rate.
This might mean that variation A has a better subject line and variation B has the better email copy. Then, you could create variation C, combining the best aspects of A and B. We’d need to monitor email metrics and analytics to find our winning emails.
Track Key Email Metrics and Analytics
Tracking email metrics provides data-driven and actionable insights on how to improve your cold emails. Here are the main metrics to look out for:
- Email deliverability: Are your emails landing in primary inboxes or spam folders?
- Open rates: Do you have engaging subject lines worth opening?
- Reply rates: How effective is your email copy and CTA?
- Bounce rates: How clean/validates is your email list?
- Campaign ROI: How profitable are your cold email campaigns?
The Best Email Copy Length Depends on the Industry
The general consensus has always been to keep emails short. However, longer emails might work in specific industries like B2B or SaaS.
If you want to stand out from the competition, 50 words or less might not be enough to fully explain your value proposition. You also have to include in-depth personalization.
Choose a Quality Lead Source and Validate Email Lists
Getting leads from quality sources and validating lists streamlines the entire sales process. It ensures high deliverability rates, reduces bounce rates, and makes qualification much easier.
With Instantly B2B Lead Finder, you get all these and more. Users can find over 160 million verified leads from several industries globally and identify ICPs using advanced filters.
The B2B Lead Finder’s News Filter also allows users to get in-depth, timely, and relevant information about company updates, ensuring each email is hyper-personalized.
Key Takeaways
Cold email isn’t dead. But bad cold email is everywhere. You need to standout above the fold by following cold email best practices and these tips:
- Always warmup emails.
- Finish technical setups.
- Add alternate domains with 2-3 sending emails each.
- Optimize email copy using automation, personalization, and spintax.
- A-B test emails and track email metrics with analytics.
- Choose quality lead sources and validate emails before running campaigns.
The most important tip for cold email is to leverage the right tools. Instantly.ai is a cold email tool built by cold emailers for cold emailers. Start growing your business at scale today!