Cold emailing is the technique of soliciting complete strangers about your business and its products or services. Just like with cold calling, because it’s unsolicited, it’s a huge gamble. Still, when done correctly, cold emailing can be one of the most effective ways to connect with new client prospects.
Let’s get right to it and cover 5 cold emailing tips to improve your conversion rates substantially with cold emailing.
Cold Emailing Tips
Cold Emailing Tip #1 – Know Your Narrow Niche
The first of the cold emailing tips is another way of saying the more narrow your niche focus, the better. Depending on your industry, odds are you’re not going to be targeting just anyone out there.
If your net is too wide and you attempt to go after too many niches, then you risk appealing to none.
Make sure that your offer is precisely targeted to the person whom you are cold emailing before you start or you’ll both be wasting your time as well as risking getting labeled as spam.
Cold Emailing Tip #2 – Your Subject Line Will Make or Break You
The cold emailing subject line is the single most important part of the email. Without a good title, your target recipient won’t even open your email, or worse they may label it as spam.
Remember that your recipient is receiving dozens if not hundreds of emails per day. Yours needs to stand out without being offensive or blatantly spam. It’s a tightrope to walk.
The best advice here is to be personal, brief, and pique their interest if possible. Generating curiosity with your subject line is the best thing you can do to ensure a healthy click through rate.
You can also use your subject line to offer a freebie if it makes sense for you to do so.
Cold Emailing Tip #3 – Be Personal and Leave the Box
This relates to the actual email itself. Even if they open your email, remember that they’ve been cold emailed hundreds of times before. You need to stand out.
Leave the box and be personal are two of the best ways to accomplish this.
Example: “I know you probably get a ton of emails selling you something. I’m a small business owner, too. So instead, I want to give you something that will actually help your business, no strings attached.”
I’ve long talked about incentives being a great way to lock up leads. Give your target a free marketing report relevant to your niche but have them get it through signing up for your email list at which point you can sell to them moving forward. This is an easy way to subtley succeed at cold emailing without the target knowing that you converted with them.
Cold Emailing Tip #4 – Finish With a Killer Call to Action
A call to action is some line of text which is meant to elicit a response, typically a click through to your site/offer. This is why you’re sending this email in the first place, so make it simple, direct, and enticing. You might offer some kind of incentive to get them to click through such as offering a freebie through the link.
Here are 60 call to action examples for you to work off of.
Cold Emailing Tip #5 – Split Test Your Cold Emailing Template
Split testing is the final of these cold emailing tips: the process is constantly pitting two versions of something against one another to see which one is more successful. You want to split test every aspect of your cold emailing template to ensure that it’s constantly improving.
The email marketing service you use will almost certainly have analytics which will show you how engaging your emails are in terms of click throughs.
Using these analytics you can identify both how often people open your email based on your title/subject line as well as click any links in the email so that you can adjust accordingly. Many providers allow for split testing so that you can send two versions out at the same time to see which one better performs over the other.
Remember that some recipients of cold emails will be completely turned off to the approach and never want to be bothered that way; there’s no way around that and it’s a fact of life. Cold emailing is by design a numbers game. It’s this way to save you time and reach a larger number of potential clients.
Depending on the niche, a successful response rate may be well under 10%. But like with anything else in online marketing, the more you develop your craft, the better a response you’ll get with cold emailing.