When it comes to cold emailing, too often, I see people sending emails like mad, thinking that it’s totally a numbers game, and all that matters is sending as many emails as possible.
Yes, cold emailing is overwhelming a numbers game. But! This is important. Strategy still matters. Quality still matters.
By the end of this blog, you will have several slightly more advanced tactics that you can apply to your own cold emailing campaigns to improve your response and conversion rates.
If you want even more help from me, go check out The 7-Day Secret , which is my mini-course that will help you start getting results with cold emailing in one week.
Alright, let’s do it.
Psst! Do you prefer video? Here you go!
Cold Email a Human Being
First, you need to use the email addresses of people, not addresses that start with info@ or support@ or anything like that.
Now I know that those more general email addresses are easier to find. That’s usually what companies make available on their websites.
And as a result, how packed do you think those inboxes are? Very, because that’s the email address that everybody is using. You’re going to have a really hard time being seen in that inbox, because that email address is what’s been made public.
So, you’re going to need to track down a human being’s email address — someone with a pulse — and send your cold email to that person. Does this mean you’re going to have to look for it manually? Probably. But it really doesn’t need to take that long. You can get email addresses on LinkedIn or sometimes with a simple Google search. Or you can use a tool like hunter.io .
Hunter.io lets you put in a web address, and then it’s going to show you the structure of that company’s email addresses. This way, you can actually guess the email address of the person you want to reach out to. Pretty cool. You can do this for free, by the way.
Understandably, some people want to automate the entire cold emailing process. And that often means that they’re scraping email addresses or buying lists or something like that. When you do that, more often than not, the quality of those email addresses suffers tremendously. How successful do you think you’re going to be with cold emailing if you’re sending all of your messages to the wrong inbox?
It’s not going to work.
Put in this few extra seconds of energy, and the results will be more than worth it.
Test Every Element of Your Emails
I’ll explain what this means.
To think that you’re going to use one email template, with one subject line, and immediately see incredible results is wrong.
Part of using cold emailing to sell your services, since it’s a numbers game, is having to test different approaches and compare the results, because some templates are going to work better than others.
So, you need to test your emails in batches, and you need to isolate one variable at a time.
Let’s go through an example.
Let’s say you’re preparing to send out a batch of 20 cold emails. And in this batch, you’re using Subject Line A and Email Template A. Cool.
In the next batch, you want to use Subject Line A and Email Template B. You’re testing a different template, but you need to keep everything else the same. You do not want to test multiple variables at the same time, because then, if it causes a change in the results, you won’t know which variable triggered those changes. Make sense?
So, you’ll want to test the subject line and the email template. And even within the template, you’ll want to test different CTAs. A CTA is a call-to-action. Some CTAs might be more effective than others.
If you need help crafting effective subject lines that’ll improve your open rate, go check out this video.
I also have a free download containing 60 cold email subject lines that you can test. Do it!
If you want to copy my cold email templates and use them on your own leads, you can!
If cold emailing hasn’t worked for you and you haven’t done any testing yet, you need to start immediately. Testing is going to help you pinpoint where your cold email outreach is weak, and conversely, where you’re doing really well.
Next, let’s talk about the cold email itself.
Make the Cold Email All About the Lead
One of the biggest mistakes people make here is that when they’re using cold email to sell their services, the email is all about them, their services, their rates… and I get why. Why wouldn’t they take that approach?
Here’s the problem, though.
Your leads don’t care about you, because they don’t yet have a reason to care about you. Your leads care about themselves and what you could potentially do for them.
This means that every cold email you send needs to be all about them, and it has to answer this question: What do they get out of this?
Why should they even read your email? Why should they care? What’s in it for them?
That’s what your cold email needs to convey.
You’ll have time later to talk about yourself. I’m not saying that that’s not important information. But for that first contact, that first email, it’s not about you. They don’t care. You can talk about yourself later.
This means, and this is key, you need to understand your leads’ pain points forward and back. This is easy if you’ve picked a niche. If you’ve picked a niche, then that hopefully means you eat, sleep, breathe it, so you know it like the back of your hand.
If you haven’t picked a niche… go pick one.
If you need help with that, I’ve got a couple videos that’ll help.
Your cold email is speaking to these pain points and helping your leads understand how you can make things better.
As an example, I’m a writer. When I reach out to leads, it’s ultimately to sell my writing services. But my emails aren’t saying, “Here’s what I do and here’s how much it costs.”
Instead, I’ll say something like, “I help brands improve their keyword rankings, appear higher in Google search results, and get more organic website traffic.”
I’m speaking to their pain points, which are often poor rankings and low traffic. I’m saying to them, “Hey, this is what you’ll get out of me, so let’s have a conversation.”
Next tip…
Monitor Your Numbers
If you’re going to try to sell your services with cold email outreach, and you’re going to follow the previous tips I shared, which you should, then track and monitor your progress.
Otherwise, everything that comes before it is 100% a moot point.
You should know, at a minimum, your open rate, your CTA conversion rate, and your closing rate.
Open rate is how many people have opened your cold email out of the total number of cold emails you’ve sent.
Your CTA conversion rate means how many people have taken action out of the total number of cold emails you’ve sent. As an example, if your CTA is asking them to get on a call, how many calls have you scheduled? That’s your CTA conversion rate.
Your closing rate is how many clients you’ve landed from your cold emails, out of the total number of cold emails you’ve sent.
These numbers tell you a lot. For example, if your open rate sucks, it’s probably your subject line. Or, you might be going to spam. I’ve got a video on how to avoid that.
Also, if you check out this video, I’ll tell you about a free tool I LOVE to use that lets me monitor my email opens.
If you have a good open rate but a poor CTA conversion rate, then there’s something going on with the email template or the CTA itself.
When you monitor these analytics, you can figure out where you’re losing people. As a result, you’ll know what you need to do in order to improve your strategy.
If there’s one thing you take away from this blog — hopefully you take away a lot more than that — but if not, it’s this: Using cold email outreach to sell your services is not a set-it-and-forget-it approach, and automating 100% is not in your best interest. There are bits and pieces you can automate, but if you want it to work, and you want to stand out in people’s inboxes, it’s going to have to have a human touch. That’s something that no bot, no software, no tool can mimic.
Nothing replaces relationships. It’s that simple.
Don’t forget that I’m offering you 60 cold email subject lines for free , as well as the five cold email templates that I use , and that my students in Revenue Spark use. If you want to take this to the next level, enroll in The 7-Day Secret , my mini-course for people who want to land clients with cold emailing.