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The Ultimate Guide to Cold Emailing: Strategies, Examples, and Best Practices

ryan

Cold email is the first step in creating a relationship with potential clients by creating awareness of the products and services your company offers.

It’s a prospecting tactic for sales outreach is complimentary to other sales activities, like cold calling and social selling. 

In this post we’ll share our best practices to help you set-up, execute and optimize an effective cold email strategy.

What is Cold Email? 

Cold email is an email drip campaign for outbound B2B sales. The goal of cold email is to initiate a relationship with your prospects by sending a personalized sequence of emails.

If the initial message doesn’t get a response, the follow-up emails warm up the lead over time. 

B2B outbound sales teams typically have a BDR, SDR, and Account Executives who are responsible for generating a pipeline of new business contributing to a company’s Monthly/Annual Recurring Revenue (MRR/ARR).    

The sender initiates a conversation with a recipient via email without having a prior relationship. 

Why Is Cold Email Good for B2B Sales?

Typically, a cold lead progresses through multiple stages of a company’s sales funnel until the opportunity converts in your CRM as ‘Closed-Won’ or ‘Closed-Lost’.

Prior to the invention of the telephone in 1920, door-to-door sales was the primary tactic for initiating the conversation with a prospective customer.  

As technology has evolved over the past 100 years, outbound sales channels have expanded to new mediums of communication like phone, SMS, email and social media. 

Email is much less intrusive than a cold call and provides the recipient a convenient way to decline or continue the conversation.

When to Use Cold Email

Cold email is often used for networking, recruiting, job seeking, partnerships, lead generation, and B2B sales prospecting.   

It is most effective for B2B product and service companies.  The sales executive leverages this channel to establish one-to-one communication with a decision maker.  

Automating outreach helps sales professionals focus more of their time building relationships with leads who may convert rather than chasing bad leads.  

Most recipients will NOT reply back to your first message.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t interested.  It’s your job to follow up a few times to find out if maybe your first email just caught them at a bad time.  

Is cold email spam?

Cold email gets a bad rap for being spam even though it sits in a gray area of regulation.  When it’s done correctly the email could be the start to a mutually beneficial business relationship.    

It’s rarely phishing, malware, spoofing, money related, or commercial advertising. 

Spam is regulated by the FTC and the CAN-SPAM act lists 7 requirements:

Make sure you’re adhering to any geographically relevant regulations like GDPR or CASL.

Pro Tip: To be can-spam compliant you MUST include an unsubscribe link or clear instructions for a recipient to opt out of future communication from you. 

Understanding the Basics of Cold Email

At Replyify, we have an interesting perspective on what works and what doesn’t for cold email.

You have to be an effective communicator to grab the prospect’s attention long enough to demonstrate value before your email gets deleted. 

The goal of the subject line is to get the email opened.  

The goal of the intro sentence is for the prospect to read the email body and then the call to action.

Pro Tip: Pay attention to how you react to cold emails landing in your inbox.  What are the characteristics of the cold emails that you delete before opening compared with the emails you read through and consider?

How has cold email changed in the last 20 years?

In 2003, when Congress passed Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (“CAN-SPAM”) Act, mass emailing was out of control.

Back then, cold email meant you were blasting out large quantities of impersonal emails with generic sales content.  

By 2014, companies began developing new technology for sales people and the market has continued to mature ever since.  

Spray and pray was replaced by research and rapport.  

Solutions Based sales surged in popularity.  Salespeople focused on asking more questions to better understand their prospects vs. the high pressure ‘always be closing’ approach to generate business. 

Every sales call presents an opportunity to learn more about your prospects, regardless if they buy or not.

Adjusting your messaging to align the prospect’s pain points with your company’s solutions is critical to a successful outbound sales strategy.   

The Anatomy of a Cold Email

A cold email has 5 components that must all work together following a set of best practices that we’ll cover in detail throughout this post. 

Before we go too deep into writing effective cold emails, we need to know how to find prospects and discover what they care about.    

How to Plan Your Cold Email Strategy

Setting clear objectives for achieving success with your cold emails is step 1. 

Example cold email campaign objectives include:

On paper, reaching out to the decision maker is the most efficient way to sell into an organization.  

Once you have your prospect targets defined, cold email automation makes it easy to test different hypotheses.

The problem with this assumption about reaching out to ‘decision makers’ is that these folks get blasted with emails from hundreds of different companies.  

Time to think outside the box. 

I could have a strategy that targets the end-user of my product or service.  If I present a solution to their pain points, maybe they will recommend you to the decision maker.  

Your cold email platform makes it easy to run experiments to test different hypotheses.

Researching Your Target Audience

The first step I like to take with prospect research is to audit a sample pool of at least 10-20 current, active customers on Linkedin.

Look for patterns once you have the spreadsheet filled out with information like Job Title, Industry, Company Size, Location, Mutual Connections and Profile Keywords.

For example, let’s assume that after my research I discovered three groups.

This is a great starting point to find other people on Linkedin who are similar to current clients.  

Pro Tip: Even if your company provides you with a suggested ICP, doing your own research can uncover prospect segments that you may not have thought about.

Building a Targeted Email List

Before you start building your cold email campaign, you need to refine your Linkedin searches using the data (ie- title, industry, headcount) collected from the previous step.  

Remember that this is a starting point.  Depending on the quality and quantity of the search results for each persona, you can edit the search criteria to include or exclude data.

Next step is to save your search because you’ll be working through these three Ideal Customer Profile segments over time.  

Prospect List Building Tools to Find Emails

Finding the prospect’s email address is easier today than it’s ever been.  Generic role-based emails, like info@, are often treated like spam traps.  These honeypots waste time and can hurt your deliverability.

We recommend getting a tool like SellHack for targeting list building.  Install the Chrome Plugin > Open on your Linkedin search results page > add prospects to list and auto-discover their email. 

Alternatively, you can outsource list building to a freelancer on Upwork.  This strategy works best if your prospect segment is generic and broad.  Examples include a list of Realtors, lawyers, HVAC companies, and studios.

Pro Tip: Don’t waste your time building a big list of 1,000+ prospects before you start sending emails.  If you have three segments, build an initial list of 100 prospects for each segment and set your campaign live to get instant results.

How to Write a Good Cold Email

At this point you should have a sample list of three different prospect segments. 

Now you need to think about the similarities and differences of each of these groups so you can write effective emails. 

Your ‘Sales Operations Manager’ at a midsize tech company is very different from the Vice President of a staffing firm.

Here’s an example of how you can map out the differences between your segments so you can write email content that highlights the benefits for each group.

SDR/BDRSales Operations ManagerVP Sales
Decision MakerNoYesYes
End UserYesNoMaybe
ResponsibilityHit individual quotaEnable sales teamMeet revenue target
ConcernsLearning new processTraining teamBudget

Writing a Compelling Subject Line

The Subject Line is your chance to make a good first impression signaling that you’ve done your research.  

It’s the first thing a prospect will see and could make the difference between your email getting opened and read vs. delete or marked as spam.  

Personalizing with information or insights can make your subject line interesting and compel your prospect to take action.  

According to Campaign Monitor, 74% of marketers improved their email engagement with subject line personalization.

Cold Email Subject Line Dos and Don’ts

There’s no one size fits all solution to creating effective subject lines.  

Think about your prospect’s point of view.  What’s in it for them?  

Do’sDon’ts
PersonalizeDon’t make it about you
Keep it shortDon’t mislead the recipient
Address a pain point or flatteryDon’t use special characters
Sound like a humanDon’t use spammy or sales-y words
Ask a questionDon’t ask for a favor
Pique their curiosityDon’t be negative

If you ask a question, keep it simple and make it easy to say ‘yes’.  Your prospect is going to answer the question in their head before deciding what to do.  

Examples of effective subject lines:

The goal of cold email is for the recipient to complete your call-to-action.  A cold email campaign is heavily influenced by the subject line which compels the recipient to open an email, read the contents and take action. 

Check out our other posts to learn more about the different strategies for creating and testing subject lines.

Tips for Personalizing Cold Emails

Now that you know how to write a good cold email subject line, let’s talk about how to make your email feel personal and relevant to your prospects.  

I’m always shocked to read a cold email sent to me that starts with something generic or weird like: ‘Hello sir!’, ‘Greetings’, or a misformatted variable ‘Hi {Insert_name}.  This is an easily avoidable self-inflicted mistake.  

A simple ‘Hi Ryan’ or ‘Ryan,’ suffices for the greeting.  Remember that each component of the email is meant to encourage the recipient to keep reading.

The first sentence after your greeting is called the connection statement and you now have 2.7 seconds to capture their attention.

Rather than talk about you or your business, this is an opportunity to grab their attention and signal to the prospect that you’ve done your research.  

Be deliberate in signaling that you’re reaching out to them specifically and that they’re not part of a generic mass email outreach.

Here are examples of different types of cold email opening lines:

Looking at the example cold email above… I opened it because I open all cold emails to evaluate them.  The opening line congratulated me just for being a co-founder.  This was a little too much, but it landed in my primary inbox.  Short, sweet and to the point with a simple one-sentence question as the CTA. 

Note: Replyify has a feature to edit a template before it sends.  We call this a manual email and it’s typically used for hyper-personalizing the first email in a campaign sequence before the automated follow-ups.

How long should my cold email be?

Be respectful of your prospects’ time.  Keep it short, like this section.  

2-5 sentences with a simple ask to get the conversation started.

Make it easy to quickly scan with no more than 2 sentences per paragraph.  

If your first draft is too long, cut some content and consider using later on in your follow ups. 

Avoid the lengthy sales pitch.  No one cares about your product, service, company or personal accomplishments and you can get into the details about the offering later.

Writing Persuasive Sales Emails

The main benefit of cold calling is that it gives you the opportunity to adjust your tone and convey your personality while building rapport.  

Cold email is much more limited because it’s a one-way conversation. 

It’s ok to loosen up your message enough to show your personality.  You risk offending a prospect, especially if they are the special ‘snowflake’ type of person.

Think about it from the perspective of ‘addition by subtraction’.   Imagine how annoying it would be working with a customer who is genuinely annoyed by your authenticity.   

Tips for cold email copywriting:

For example: let’s say you’re in sales at an agency offering digital marketing to small businesses.  Don’t cold email with a generic list of services you offer.  

Instead, highlight the benefits the business would realize by working with you. 

Close with a Strong Call to Action

To encourage a response to your CTA, make it simple, easy and frictionless for your prospect to schedule a meeting or learn more.  

They should be able to complete the CTA immediately.  

At Replyify, we’ve seen clients have the most success when they ask a question as a call to action as opposed to asking the client to complete an action.

For example:

Even if you need more than the 15 minutes you suggested, anything longer could discourage the lead from progressing to the next step.  

You’ll likely need a few meetings to close the deal anyways and an intro call with your prospect puts them in a position of power to introduce you and a different stakeholder.  

Examples of effective CTAs:

Pro Tip:  If there’s anything compelling that you left out of the email body, consider using a ‘PS – ‘before singing off.  

Customize your Cold Email Signature, From Name and Unsubscribe

Your email signature is the last thing your prospect will look at before considering whether to delete your email, opt-out, or reply back. 

Some folks want to check out your website and look up socials.  

Linking to an article, blog post, Youtube video, ebook or landing page at the end of your signature is a great way to share more information without sacrificing the conciseness of your message.

Avoid doing anything in excess.  Too many links, more than two thumbnails of your social handles, inspirational quotes, non-mandated disclaimers, or HTML formatting can actually do more harm than good by adding to your spam score. 

Here’s how bad it looks when you land in an inbox that doesn’t load images by default.

Pro Tip: Remember to include your physical address in the email signature to be compliant with CAN-SPAM.

Below the signature you’re also compelled to include instructions for the recipient to unsubscribe and opt-out of future emails.  

Replyify provides a customizable, single-click unsubscribe button which you can replace with text instructions for the recipient to reply back with the word ‘stop’ or something similar. 

Testing out different signature formats and opt-out methods is easy to do.  Over the course of a multi-step email sequence I may use 2-3 different signatures, often with different ‘from names’, depending on the message tone and content.

Should I edit the ‘from name’ for cold email?

Your prospects don’t know who you are.  When scanning the inbox, it’s likely they will read ‘from name’ before they read the subject line.  

You can edit your ‘sent from’ name for each signature you use depending on the how relevant it is to your email content.  

Example of different ‘from names’ for cold email:

Before making any big changes to your ‘from name’, send your self test emails to see how it looks and feels on mobile/desktop email clients.  Consider your client’s perspective since this will be the first thing they see when your email gets delivered. 

Prevent Cold Emails Going to Spam

Getting emails delivered and avoiding spam filters is an art and a science.  You can read our detailed post about cold email deliverability if any of this is unfamiliar to you.

Spam filtering happens on multiple levels and can affect your ability to reach the recipient’s primary inbox.  For example:

Best practices to lower your spam score:

Cold Email Technical Setup

Choosing the right email host for your business should be addressed sooner rather than later.  

For example, let’s say your company has been using Office 356 and recently decided to pursue a cold email sales strategy.  To limit the chances of damaging your domain reputation (unlikely), it may be prudent to set up a new email address on a different domain.  

Try setting up a Google Workspace account for cold email.  

You can hedge your exposure even more by setting up an alternative cold email address using a different email host like Google Workspace.

Email Setup Best practices:

Warming up an email address is strongly recommended by Google as a best practice.

Increasing the sending volume too quickly can result in delivery problems. Send email at a consistent rate. Avoid sending email in bursts. Start with a low sending volume to engaged users, and slowly increase the volume over time. Avoid introducing sudden volume spikes if you do not have a history of sending large volumes.  For example, immediately doubling previously sent volumes suddenly could result in rate limiting or reputation drops.

Google Sender Guidelines

How to write a cold email follow-up

Even if you’ve written the perfect cold email, there’s no guarantee that the recipient will open and read it.  

Or maybe they read your email but forgot to reply or didn’t want to set up a call.

There’s no way to know for sure.  Having the courage to follow-up on a ghosted cold email is worth the effort. 

Be persistent without being pushy.  Send at least one follow-up email to each prospect.  At Replyify, we find that sending an additional 3-5 follow ups generates the most appointments. 

Writing Effective Follow-Up Emails

Even though your ideal customer profile is researched and defined, you’re dealing with 16 different personality types.  

Even if your prospects are segmented into similar groups, people are different.  

Some prospects will appreciate a concise first email with a simple ask.  Others may be motivated by an offer or require more data to back up your claims.

One of my favorite follow-up strategies is to ask for a referral.

Example Follow-up: ‘breakup’ email + internal referral 

When to use it: At the end of your campaign.  

Why it works: Some prospects are subconsciously embarrassed they ghosted the previous 4 emails on the thread.  It’s easier for them to keep ignoring your outreach unless you give them a way out.  

How to do it:  Acknowledge that they are ‘probably too busy’.  Let them off the hook by asking if there’s anyone else they should be speaking with.  This puts your prospect in a power position where they can redirect your email to someone else in the company. 

Most sales people just give up at the end of their outreach campaign. Your prospects are just people and they are all different.  Take your last shot before signing off with a weak closing email.

Best Practices for Follow-up Emails:

Pro Tip: Replyify’s ‘Bump’ feature automatically keeps your follow-up on the same thread as the original email.  You can turn the bump off to start a new thread anywhere in your campaign sequence.  

Handling Responses to Follow-up Emails

Sending a cold email without permission can offend certain personality types.  

“How dare you email me!”  “This is spam and I’m forwarding it to our legal department!”

Managing replies to cold emails requires thick skin and a short memory. 

Do you really want a customer who is so self-absorbed that they felt the need to chastise and belittle you for reaching out?

Don’t take it personally and remember that it’s ok to be vulnerable.  

Showing appreciation and gratitude without desperation may break down barriers and shift perceived ‘power’ back to your recipient.

Scheduling Your Email Follow-Ups

The number of follow-ups depends on your campaign strategy.  Specifically, what information do you want the prospect to know and how aggressively will you send your messages?

Example cold email follow-up sequence:

Just because a lead hasn’t replied back right away, doesn’t mean they aren’t interested.  Maybe you caught them on a bad day, in the middle of a project or dealing with some personal stuff at home.  

Pro Tip: Pay attention to the cold emails you receive from other companies.  What do you like or dislike?  If a subject line got you to open or a CTA encourages you to act then try it out.  Cold email is all about experimentation.

Measuring Cold Email Success

The most important cold email success metric to track is your average number of emails sent per day.

This target number has nothing to do with maxing out volume.  It has everything to do with executing on a consistent and persistent strategy.  

It’s easy to get bogged down with the day to day responsibilities.  Forcing yourself to keep the top of the funnel full helps to develop good habits.

Cold Email Metrics to Track

Focusing too much on email open or click rates can be misleading because there are too many factors contributing to false positives/negatives that can skew the stats.  

Your cold email platform records an open when the tracking pixel is loaded from the contact’s device(s). A link click is similar but uses a redirect which includes a timestamp and the user agent (browser) of the person or bot that clicked the URL.

An open can occur in a number of different scenarios:

Generally speaking, open and click tracking are most helpful in discovering potential issues if they are egregiously low.

Is my cold email open rate good?

Is my cold email click rate good?

Is my cold email conversion rate good?

If you’re not getting engagement with your outbound emails, check your inbox for bounce reports.  Replyify has reporting filters to help isolate reasons why your cold emails are bouncing. 

Types of bounces for cold email:

A/B Testing Cold Email

A/B testing can help you make data driven decisions when optimizing your cold email campaigns.  

It’s critical to only A/B test 1 element of your emails at a time.  So, if you are testing different subject lines, don’t edit the anchor text of your links. 

Replyify gives you an option to create a new email sequence from scratch or by editing a duplicate version of the original timeline.  

After the A/B test, you can pause the losing version to direct all future contacts to the winning variant.  When you’re ready to test another element, click the ‘+’ on your campaign stats page.  You can create an unlimited number of campaign timeline variations to test. 

Common cold email A/B tests:

The only way to figure this out is by working alongside your analytics and testing out different approaches.

Note: You may notice that your open, click and response rates are lower with cold email outreach compared to traditional email marketing.  Low engagement doesn’t mean it’s not working, you just have to stick with it.  

How to create a cold email campaign

The best sales prospecting strategies leverage a cold email automation platform.

Sending initial cold emails and follow-ups one by one is a huge waste of time when you can automate the entire process.  I’ve experienced this first hand and efficiency is the reason behind why we built Replyify.

Benefits of email outreach:

Risks of cold outreach:

Automation isn’t just about consistently sending emails out. 

For example, let’s say you upload a list of 1,000 new prospects you researched. 

Your automation settings can control just how many contacts your list are added to an A/B variant and sent the first email every day.   There’s even an option to customize settings to ensure you’re sending within a specified time of day (and day of week) to generate the best results.

Suppression Lists and Account Based Sales

You can use the ‘Account Based’ setting if you have multiple contacts for the same company (email domain). This campaign setting allows you to have control over how contacts from the same company are handled. For example, you can ensure that you don’t email more than 2 colleagues at the same time. 

What if another person at your company uploads the same contact to their account?  Depending on your team suppression rules, we’ll automatically prevent double outreach.

Maintaining a Do Not Contact list for cold email is another automated feature.  There may be contacts you accidentally prospect that are competitors or existing customers.  Replyify has that figured out for you in our easy to manage ‘Contact Suppression’ section.  

Suppression lists are maintained in your account and can also be applied to your internal sales team or cold email agency.

How to Create a Cold Email Campaign

Here’s an example of a really good video on setting up a cold email campaign.

1. Login to Replyify to set up your outreach campaign.

2. Add the first step to your campaign

3. Create your first email template

4. Add follow-up emails to the campaign

5. Review and Set Live

6. Add your contacts 

If you’re sending out cold emails for the first time, we suggest you enable the Email Warmup feature to avoid spiking your delivery too quickly.

The automation platform should be easy to use and intuitive.  If you have any questions check out the cold email help section or contact the support team with the in-app chat.  

Examples of Good and Bad Cold Emails

We covered a lot in this post and you should be armed with the most important information to get your campaign going. I read, evaluate and save every cold email that lands in my inbox (or spam).

Let’s take a look at two very different examples of real cold emails that I received recently.

Example of a bad cold email

Here’s why this email is so bad…

Example of a good cold email

Here’s a good cold email I received that checks all the boxes.  I’ll break it down below. 

Here’s why this email is so good…

Additional resources and more information:

All you really need to get started with cold outreach is a Linkedin Account, authenticated email address, an email finder tool, and Replyify’s cold email automation.

If you made it this far, congrats!  As a reward, send your best cold email campaign to team@replyify.com us.  We’ll review it and send you feedback and something to A/B test.

Talk soon!

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