Businesses with the best products or services should attract more customers. Cold email marketing is the fastest way to do this. It’s the most cost-effective, scalable, and easy-to-automate growth vehicle.
The problem is that industries are getting more competitive by the minute. Emails must stand out above the fold and make prospects want to reply. To do this, you need to have a unique selling proposition (USP).
What is a Unique Selling Proposition?
Your unique selling proposition sets you apart from the competition. Think lower pricing, better features, or faster customer support. Here’s where many get it wrong.
Many businesses use the same USP for all prospects. But not every prospect has the exact needs, even those that match your ideal customer profiles (ICPs).
Unique selling propositions must align with prospects' needs to be effective. Applying this principle to your cold emails helps you create copy that resonates with your prospects.
How to Align Your Unique Selling Proposition to Prospect Needs
You don’t have to find your USP. It’s already there. The trick is finding the right way to angle your USP to meet prospect needs. Here’s how you do it:
Shifting to a Customer-Centric POV
Always start with your customers. Research their decision-making process, pain points, and overall business goals. That’s why you need to emphasize prospecting and enrichment.
The more data you have on your prospects, the easier it is to align your USP to their needs. Instead of generic, hallucinated pain points, target specific challenges that help prospects grow.
Don’t Sell Your Service, Sell Growth
Your USP should contribute to the growth of your prospects’ business. Highlight tangible benefits like increased return on sales, improved efficiency, or market expansions.
When you focus on helping prospects grow, you shift from being a salesperson to a trusted advisor. Your products or services become an investment instead of another purchase.
Emphasize Credibility
Let’s say you found a killer, unique selling proposition. Can you back it up? One of the best sales tips you can follow is always to be prepared to show your work.
When sending a cold email to a prospect, share how you helped a similar client achieve their goals. But remember to make it tangible and relatable to your prospects.
Speak Your Prospect’s Language
Be concise with your email copy, and try to speak your prospect’s language. Specific jargon, phrases, or keywords, like KPIs or metrics, make absolute sense to a manager.
Meanwhile, prospects that are in operations might not care much about them. Email copy should be tailored to the demographic or target segment.
Have an Identity
Having an identity has more to do with marketing and branding. But, it’s essential to your USP because it anchors your messaging to prospects.
For example, Instantly is a cold email marketing tool that lets you Infinitely Scale Your Outreach with Unlimited Accounts. If we had a prospect that’s an SMB on a tight budget, our USP could be:
“If you’re worried about the additional cost of scaling, Instantly lets you add unlimited accounts with no additional costs.”
Unique Selling Proposition Examples in Cold Emails
Including a tailored, unique selling proposition in your cold emails adds a layer of personalization that leads to more replies and positive first impressions. Here are some examples at play:
Helped Prospects’ Competitors Grow
One of the easiest USPs you can add to your emails is how you helped a client grow its business. But remember, always contextualize it to your prospects’ needs. Try this customizable template:
Hey, {{first name}},
I can get you 10 annuity appointments monthly through {{service}}. My team helped {{competitor}} secure 14 appointments just last month.
Would you like to learn more about how this works?
Best,
{{your name}}
Prospects Don’t Pay if KPIs Aren’t Met
It’s easy to talk the talk. But a lot of services don’t deliver on their promises. If you’re confident in your service, you can use the “You don’t have to pay if…” USP.
Hey, {{first name}},
Saw one of the video ads for {{company name}} on my feed. Cool stuff! I like how you {{compliment}}.
We make engaging educational videos for companies like {{company name}}. All videos are directly implemented into your marketing pipelines. Everything is streamlined.
We’d love to share ideas on how you can improve your video ads. Here’s the kicker, if you go with us, you don’t have to pay for the videos if it doesn’t hit our agreed target KPIs.
Can I send you more info about our service?
Best,
{{your name}}
Compliment, Then Target Painpoints
The compliments act as an extra layer of personalization or an email icebreaker. It’ll be used to grab attention and as a transition to your unique selling proposition.
Hey, {{first name}},
I’m such a huge fan of {{prospect blog}}. Love the in-depth industry insights you bring, especially on {{recent blog topic}}. But, I did notice that there’s a significant gap between publishing.
Even with great content, {{company name}} can still be left in the dust as competitors ramp up content velocity. Our content team can level the field, helping you publish quality content at scale.
I’d love to send you more info on how we make this happen.
Best regards,
{{your name}}
Boosting Productivity Value Proposition
Many experience burnout due to heavy workloads. If you’re selling a product or service that can improve productivity by reducing the load, then you have a straightforward value proposition to add.
Hey, {{first name}},
Being a {{job position}}, I imagine you’re always looking to eliminate inefficiencies in your team’s workflow. Even with a CRM, things can still slow down due to clunky, unnecessary features.
That’s why we developed {{product}}. We’ve helped {{competitor}} save 15 hours per week by automating their manual, repetitive tasks.
If this interests you, I’d love to give you a personalized demo.
Thanks in advance,
{{your name}}
Hyper-Personalization
With all the generic fluff in the cold email marketing space, you can never go wrong with hyper-personalization. Do in-depth research on a prospect, find their company’s goals, and, more importantly, what your prospect’s goals are about their role.
Hey, {{first name}},
Noticed you had {{update}} planned for {{company name}} in your roadmap for 2024. I’d love to know your plans on dealing with {{pain point}} or if you already have a solution.
I run a {{service}} agency that helps businesses like {{company name}} overcome the hurdles that come with {{udpate}}. We helped {{competitor}} and cut their operational cost by 30% leading to {{update}}.
Can I share the details of how we did it?
Thanks in advance,
{{your name}}
Using AI Tools to Create Personalized Unique Selling Propositions
AI tools help create personalized, unique selling propositions for every lead in your email list. That means you can send relevant and valuable emails at scale. Here are the tools that can help you do just that:
Instantly.ai + B2B Lead Finder
Instantly.ai is the most intuitive cold email automation tool on the market. It lets you use custom variables and prompts to add personalized, unique selling propositions to your cold emails.
But as mentioned, personalization depends on the lead data you’ve gathered during prospecting. That’s where Instantly B2B Lead Finder comes in.
Lead Finder pinpoints your exact ICPs thanks to advanced search filters and provides insight into relevant company news, industry updates, and even tech stacks prospects use. All this data helps you align your unique selling propositions in your email copy.
After building an email list with Lead Finder, you can directly add them to your Instantly campaign without switching between apps. Then, use the AI Generator icon to create custom variables for each lead.
For example, you can use the prompt “Create a pain point based on the company description.” Instantly will populate your lead list with another column for “Pain Point,” which you can use as a custom variable.
Clay
Clay is a data enrichment tool that scrapes the internet for relevant information on your prospects. Let’s say you’re a lead generation agency.
Instead of saying, “We can get you more leads in your sales pipelines,” you can say, “We can connect you with prospects that match your ICP.” With Clay, you can do that in just a few clicks.
You can build your email list with Clay or import your email list from sources like B2B Lead Finder. Clay has dozens of templates built for enrichment that create custom columns based on consolidated data from 75+ data providers.
Once you’re happy with your enriched lead lists, you can upload them back to Instantly to create personalized cold email campaigns with more profound insights from Clay’s enrichment.
ChatGPT
If you’re looking at sending a handful of emails daily, then ChatGPT can be a pretty helpful tool to help align your USPs with prospect needs. But, if you’re looking to do it for hundreds upon hundreds of leads, you’d need to integrate ChatGPT with tools like GPT for Sheets.
To start, you can upload your knowledge base document to ChatGPT. The knowledge base should contain essential information about your company, products, services, or case studies. This way, ChatGPT can tailor the output based on your data.
Then, you can use prompts like: “Based on the knowledge base, create a 50-70 word email that aligns our services and case studies to XYZ company. Here is a summary of XYZ company:” If you want to do this at scale, here’s a quick guide we did using GPT for Sheets.
Copy.ai
Copy.ai is an AI content generator that has added a new cold sales email tool. To use it, you put in the target prospect’s LinkedIn URL and a quick description of your offer.
Then, Copy.ai will write a personalized email that aligns your offer with the data from the LinkedIn profile. It can even analyze your brand voice and writing style, making the AI-generated emails read like how you’d write them.
For example, after adding your prospect’s LinkedIn profile, you can add your company/product information in a format like this:
Company Name:Company Description:
Unique Selling Position:
About Me:
The same concept applies to ChatGPT. However, ChatGPT can’t scrape data from LinkedIn. Also, consider that their AI sales email copy tool can’t create personalized emails at scale.
Hubspot AI Email Copywriter
Hubspot combines its CRM and dedicated email tools to automate personalized sales email copy. It also has a library with hundreds of free email templates you can work with.
With its drag-and-drop email builder, you can easily create emails for newsletters or onboarding. For personalized USPs, Hubspot uses lead data from their CRM as custom variables.
Hubspot is a no-brainer if you want to focus more on relationship-building or nurturing warm leads. There aren’t many features for cold email marketing or sending large volumes of emails.
Unique Selling Proposition Best Practices
When people hear “unique selling proposition,” they’re likely thinking of a tagline or quote that sticks. But that’s just branding. How you align that branding to your prospect's needs is what makes it a unique selling proposition.
If you don’t know where to start with this, you can try to think of your USP in terms of “themes.” For example, you’re messaging can evoke an emotional connection, simplicity, or outcome.
Even if your product has fewer features than the competition, you can still have a unique selling proposition centered around simplicity, which also means it’s more affordable.
Key Takeaways
Every business considering email marketing needs a unique selling proposition to stand out. However, USPs must be dynamic and aligned with prospects’ needs and goals.
Remember to shift to a customer-centric perspective, emphasize your credibility, and have an identity to serve as an anchor when crafting personalized USPs.
To streamline this process, you can leverage AI tools like the following:
- Instantly.ai: Best for automating cold email from prospecting to USP personalization
- Clay: Transforms lead lists into a treasure trove of data through in-depth enrichment
- ChatGPT: Best free option for aligning offerings to prospect needs
- Copy.ai: Streamlines and automates cold email personalization for LinkedIn prospects
- Hubspot: Best for personalizing USPs for newsletters, follow-ups, or nurture emails
If you’re looking to create dynamic, valuable, and relevant unique selling propositions in your cold email, Instantly is the best option. Try it out today and start personalizing at scale.
