The Ultimate Guide On Generating Leads Via Cold Email
By Will Cannon
While some business owners and sales reps believe it’s near impossible to generate leads via cold email, this simply isn’t true. There are multiple case studies which prove you can cold email prospects and get great response rates 1 .
If you haven’t done so already, you’ll definitely want to add cold emailing to your bag of tricks. In this chapter, we walk you through several tips and best practices on cold emailing and teach you how to get the most out of the cold emails that you send.
Identifying the Right Email Recipients
Only email prospects who match your ideal customer persona
When sending out cold emails, never make the mistake of going for quantity over quality. Sure, you can send out 100 emails everyday, but if you’re emailing folks who aren’t a good fit and would never buy your product or service, then you’re essentially wasting your time.
Instead, make sure you only email prospects who match your ideal customer persona. If most of your users are IT executives in the USA working for companies with 1,000+ employees, for instance, then make sure that’s who you’re emailing. This gives you a leg up from the get-go, and increases the chances that your prospects will reply.
Find contacts to email using UpLead
How do you find contacts to email? We recommend using UpLead, a tool that helps marketers and business owners build targeted prospect lists. With UpLead, you can search through a database of 46+ million business contacts and hone in on your target audience using 50+ different criteria (industry, job title, sales revenue, number of employees, location, technologies used, and more.)
If you’re keen on trying out UpLead, you can get a 7-day free trial at UpLead.com. For those of you who would like to supplement your lead generation efforts with manual research, you can also hire virtual assistants or research assistants on Upwork to put together a list of prospects.
Segment as much as possible to make your messaging relevant
If you can make your cold email (and your offer!) relevant to your prospect, that’s half the battle won. To do this, make sure to segment your email list, instead of sending the same generic email to everyone on your list.
Say you’ve segmented your email list by company size, for example. When you’re reaching out to small businesses, you might want to emphasize the fact that your product or service is cost-effective, and brings about a high ROI. In your email to larger conglomerates, you might highlight that you’ve worked with plenty of Fortune 500 companies and reputable firms and that you provide end-to-end training and support for teams.
Crafting Your Email
Optimize your subject line
Think of your subject line as the gatekeeper to your cold email. If your subject line isn’t interesting or compelling enough, your prospect won’t read your email, simple as that. Bearing this in mind, it’s important to continuously A/B test and optimize your subject lines.
Personally, at UpLead, we find that short email subject lines tend to work best. Two email subject lines that have worked well for UpLead are:
That aside, highlighting a key benefit that you can bring to your prospect may also make your subject line more compelling. For instance, this could be along the lines of:
Keep your email short and sweet
Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. If you open an email and you’re greeted by a wall of text, what would you do? Chances are, you’ll give up there and then and move on to reading the rest of your emails.
When you’re crafting an email (especially a cold email!), be sure to keep your email short and sweet. This applies to both the overall length of your email and the length of individual paragraphs. As a general rule of thumb, keep each paragraph to one to two sentences.
Remember: the point of your initial cold email is simply to make contact, and get your prospect interested in what your company does. You’re not trying to sell to them on the spot, so there’s no need to send them a long, rambling essay!
Personalize your email
When it comes to personalization, don’t just reference your prospect’s name in your email and call it a day. You should also go one step further in personalizing your emails based on your prospects’ location, company, background, the schools they went to, etc.
For instance, if your prospect is from Michigan and you know the area has been experiencing erratic weather, ask them about that. If your prospect happens to have attended the same school that you did, bring that up - it’ll help you build rapport and hopefully get a foot in the door.
Include all the relevant information
Every cold email should consist of the following information:
The last element - the Call To Action, is particularly important. The onus is on you to make the process as clear and straightforward for your prospect as possible and you don’t want your prospect to get all the way to the end of your email, then think: Now what?
Talk about how you can help your prospect
When cold emailing, many marketers and business owners fall into the trap of talking about themselves too much. Keep in mind that doing this makes your prospects lose interest and lowers your chance of getting a response.
What should you do instead? Simple. Tell your prospect what you can do for them and communicate the value that you bring to the table. Assuming that you’ve assessed their business needs accurately, this is a great way of reeling them in and getting them interested.
Formatting Your Email
Keep the format simple
A cold email is NOT a newsletter so there’s no need to utilize a fancy template when sending your cold emails. Remember: the more HTML you have in your emails, the higher the chances of your email going to the “Promotions” tab instead of “Primary”. If you’re unlucky, your email might even land in your prospect’s Spam folder.
The bottom line? While you can include images and videos (which we’ll discuss shortly), the bulk of your email should be in plain text. It should not contain a ton of HTML; nor should it be formatted like a newsletter.
Stand out with images and videos
We don’t recommend using fancy, over-the-top templates, but it’s perfectly fine to add a few images or videos to your cold emails. This helps add visual interest and breaks up monotony.
For instance, some marketers send their prospects emails titled “Message for {FirstName}”, and include video introductions of themselves in these emails. Note that these videos don’t have to be corporate videos, if you use a video that’s less ‘polished’, and looks like it was taken from your own webcam, this might help with your response rates.
Sending Your Email
SPAM test your email before sending
At the basic level, you’ll want to avoid using spam-like words in your emails and keep the text to HTML ratio high; this will reduce your chances of getting flagged as spam. On top of that, you can also use tools such as GlockApps.com and Mail-tester.com to check your reputation and authentication and find out whether your emails are getting delivered to the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Verify your emails
BriteVerify is an award-winning email validation service that helps you ensure that you’re sending your cold emails to accurate, verified email addresses. If you use a reputable tool such as UpLead to find prospects to email, you shouldn’t have any problem with email accuracy.
If you bulk-buy lists of email addresses for cheap, on the other hand, you might find that most of the emails on your list are outdated, and will result in hard bounces. To prevent this from affecting your email deliverability, run your emails through BriteVerify first, so you can filter out the invalid ones.
Fun fact: UpLead uses real-time email verification, which allows users to verify the contact information of prospects right before they unlock and download said information. All the contacts on UpLead’s database also come with a 97% accuracy guarantee.
“If you don’t receive a reply to your first cold email, don’t give up. Send at least two to four follow-ups over a month or so.” #TheGrowthHackingBook #GrowthHackingMovement #GrowthHackingDay
Automate your sending
To be frank, cold emailing takes a lot of effort. With each prospect that you want to reach out to, you’ve got to personalize your email, send it out to them, then follow up if they don’t respond. Luckily, there are several tools that you can use to automate the process, such as lemlist , Woodpecker , Mailshake and Reply.io . With these tools, you can personalize multiple emails, all at once and you don’t have to manually edit and send each email.
A/B Testing Your Emails
A/B testing your cold emails will help you improve open rates and response rates and bring you more success.
Here are a few ways in which you can A/B test your cold emails:
  1. Email subject title
  2. Call To Action (CTA): Type of CTA
  3. CTA: The number of times you repeat the CTA
  4. Images vs no images
  5. Videos vs no videos
  6. Send time
  7. Send day
  8. Benefits: highlight different benefits
  9. Framing: framing in a positive or negative light
  10. Follow ups: number of follow ups
  11. Follow ups: timing/day of follow ups
  12. Follow ups: reiterating existing content vs adding new content
Additional Tips to Keep in Mind
Follow up persistently
When you’re sending cold emails, it’s unlikely that your prospects will reply to you immediately. If you don’t receive a reply, don’t give up, send at least two to four follow-ups over a month or so. Don’t worry, you won’t have to do this manually. Once you’ve sent your initial email, you can easily configure the email automation tools we mentioned earlier to trigger follow up messages on day four, day seven, day 12, etc.
Improve email deliverability
You can do a number of things to ensure that your email deliverability is high. First, make sure your send volume is more or less consistent. You can use lemlist (or any of the other tools mentioned earlier) to spread out your email sending over a period of time.
On top of that, set up your Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and your own tracking domain correctly. Last but not least, make sure that your domain has been warmed up properly before you start sending emails in bulk, and check that you haven’t been blacklisted on mxtoolbox.
Use personalized landing pages
Many marketers and business owners assume that your cold emails are all about the emails but that’s where they’re wrong. Emails aside, you’ll also have to ensure that your landing pages are well crafted and consistent with your emails. Think of it this way: once your prospect clicks through from your email to your landing page, it’s up to the landing page to reduce any friction on the prospect’s part and encourage them to convert.
How do you do this? First, make sure you use the exact same headers or terminology on your cold email and landing pages, so there’s a message-match. This makes it easy for your prospect to process the information on your page and reduces the chances they’ll be confused. On top of that, personalize the page based on the prospect’s needs and situation and make sure you have a strong CTA on the page.
A final word on generating leads via cold email
If you’re intimidated at the thought of reaching out to prospects via cold email, don’t be. At the end of the day, remember that you’re bringing value to your prospect with your company’s product or service, and helping them achieve their goals. What are you waiting for? Start crafting and sending out those cold emails today!
1 www.singlegrain.com/email-marketing/6-cold-email-case-studies-with-great-reply-rates/