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What is cold email & how to write effective cold emails

What is cold email?

A cold email is a method of sending someone an email without any interactions with that person beforehand. Its a technique adopted by businesses or to say sales professionals globally to reach out to other businesses in order to generate leads for their products or services.

A cold email is often referred to as outbound sales. Where “out” means when you reach out to someone from your side before even they show interest to buy your product or service.

Once you send someone a cold email they may or may not open your email and thats referred to “open rates

If they reply you back then its referred to as reply rate and is calculated in terms of percentage.

If someone sends cold emails to 100 people and get 10 reply from those emails then the reply rate will be 10%.

How to write effective cold emails

Sending cold email is an art. If you can learn how to master this art then this can become a defensive and low cost lead generation technique for your business.

In order to do it right take care of following key cold email points:

All these key cold email points are explained below.

Create an ideal customer profile

First of all you will have to understand why do you want to send someone a cold email and whom you want to send cold emails to.

You will have to work on your Ideal Customer Profiles before you decide on sending cold emails and make cold emails an effective sales lead generation strategy for your business.

If you send cold emails to random businesses before understanding their needs and whether they will have requirement of your product or service then you are basically spamming and spamming is not good for your business.

That’s why always have an understand of what kind of businesses will be more likely to buy your product or service and only then reach out to them via cold emails.

Find the right contacts and their emails

After understand the type of businesses who will need your product or service, next step is to find the right decision maker and get their emails and create a B2B targeting list for your cold email campaign.

There are many tools which you can use for free for creating your B2B targeting list.

You can use email finder tool like EasyEmail to find verified emails of decision makers of businesses that falls in your Ideal Customer Profile. The tool is free to use.

Create an email template

After creating a well targeted B2B list of decision makers the next step is to create an email template.

Having a good B2B email template can make or break your cold email campaigns.

You will have to make sure you personalise all your emails while writing the templates.

Use a good subject line

If you get an email from some stranger and the subject line is boring and not relevant to your business would you care to open that email and read whats it all about?

I would say I will not open that random email.

But if someone have my name in that subject and the subject line is super short and may include some context to my business goals or problems then I am more likely to open that email and read further.

And if the body of email is more relevant to my problems or challenges and there is solution to that problem in that email then I will be more interested to reply further.

Having a good B2B subject line for your cold email is super critical for ensuring a successful cold email campaign.

Work on your email deliverability

Once you start sending cold emails then you need to work on improving your cold email deliverability in order to get good response rates.

We get so many emails and most of them either land up in our promotional box or spam directly and thus we only reply to most relevant emails we get in a day.

Monitor and improve your sales targeting

Start slow and keep progressing with your cold email goals. Start by sending 10 or 20 emails in a day and warm up your email deliverability and monitor how much open rates and response rates your are getting on your emails.

If the open rate is at least 25-30% and you have a response rate of 5-7% then you are in good shape.

Monitor and improve your B2B targeting and see if you can improve your open rates and response rates further by changing the Ideal customer profile, subject lines or email copy.

Respect laws

If you are sending cold emails to citizens in the European region then there are laws like GDPR which prevents you from sending emails to strangers without their consent and irrelevant emails.

You can send email to businesses on their email addresses that are available on public domain i.e their website and if you want to send someone an email then that should be super relevant and not sent like a spam.

There are laws in other countries like USA which is CAN SPAM ACT law and most of the countries have email sending laws that you must adhere to while sending cold emails to anyone.

Uplead have also written an in-depth article on writing effective follow up emails, you would like to read that as well.

Cold Emails