Cold Email Resources – In this guide we are going to show you the ropes when it comes to cold emails and reaching out to find new customers with cold email marketing. We provide you with the best resources on what a cold email is, how to craft a great subject line and message and follow up effectively.
Why cold email?
Cold emails
You are tasked with the unfortunate burden of reaching out to complete strangers to let them know you exist, and not only that, but that you have something that they need.
This is where the cold email comes into play. It’s a tool that every successful marketer and company has mastered and employed to procure sales; and not just a sale here and there, but a portion so sizable that they simply can’t afford to ignore it.
But what is a cold email exactly?
A cold email is when you reach out to a cold lead through email.
Pretty simple, right?
To give you a little more insight: a cold lead would include anyone who has had very little or no contact with you or your company whatsoever. In order to call them a “lead”, though, they must have the potential of having interest in your product or service.
What would qualify someone who has the potential of interest in your product?
Essentially, it would be anyone in your target audience. If you offer B2B services or products, you are looking for the person in a company who is in charge of approving the use of your services.
If executed correctly, cold email can be an overwhelmingly efficient means of advertising. With the possibility of a stunning 4300% (or more) ROI, it’s imperative that you learn to use this tool to your advantage.
But what exactly does a cold email entail? Why is it so successful?
First off, a good cold email isn’t exactly something that you should improve.
Just because 86% of business professionals prefer to use email to communicate for business purposes — and this gives you a very effective platform — it does not mean that cold emails are inherently productive.
So, how can you make it productive?
A successful cold email should be carefully crafted to appeal to, not just your general target audience, but (in many cases) even to the specific person you are emailing.
You are making the effort to reach out to someone in the hopes that they are interested in your product, but not just that, you are trying to deliver them real value — not spam.
A good cold email is never annoying.
In as simple terms as possible, the steps for crafting a cold email is as follows:
- Locate high-quality leads that are likely to respond
- Find the right emails to contact these leads
- Form a subject line that impels them to open the email
- Craft a kickass cold email and hit send
- Follow up promptly
But that’s not all. If you want to use this tool wisely, you need to be able to scale easily and economically.
Thankfully, there are a lot of guides and tools on the web meant to help you use cold emails to your advantage.
Unfortunately, there are too many, and some just don’t stack up. In fact, some of them even give bad advice. So it’s our goal to help you muddle through the plethora of information.
Below you will find 7 other topics that cover necessary aspects of the cold email and how to add it to your marketing arsenal.
We sifted through hundreds of articles, blogs, and tools to show you what kind of information is available on cold emails and how they stack up against each other. We will tell you what we like and what we don’t like about each article.
This should help you get your feet wet in this sector of the marketing ocean as well as whet your appetite for an upcoming comprehensive guide to cold email marketing that we are working on just for you.
Essentially, where to look in the first place…
What good is even the most compelling email and sales pitch without a high-quality lead to send it to?
Finding the right places to look (and I stress the plural; it’s important to look in as many places as possible) is essential to your cold email strategy.
When it comes to these three articles, we think that each one adds value.
These articles will help you find high-quality leads:
This article is straight to the point. Slaps you with 25 places to start looking for your prospects right away and gives you a sentence or two describing why each place works. This list can be valuable for newbies and experts alike. You are likely to find a good number of these suggestions to be fruitful.
Without taking away from the importance of searching for leads on LinkedIn (because it is renowned as one of the most effective places to find leads), the author shares more advanced ways to find leads for your business, right down to your niche.
Each niche is broken up into sections. For example, startups have their own subheading, software companies have their own subheading, etc.
Here at SalesRipe, we find you the highest quality B2B leads possible with direct email addresses and phone numbers.
How?
We provide you instant access to 25+ million B2B contacts filterable by industry, contact title, location, sales volume, number of employees, job function, management level, technologies used and more. All in one easy simple to use platform.
We have a free 7-day trial here: SalesRipe – Free Trial
Let’s say you know where to start looking, how to you start extracting emails?
Finding the emails to leads can easily become a hunt that takes hours and even days out of your life and holds you back from making money.
If you don’t know how to do it, searching for emails can occupy unnecessarily copious amounts of time.
So what can you do?
Take a look at some of these resources that aim to make your search a little quicker:
This resource helps you develop your email hunting skills. Finding the emails in hard-to-find places on and off the business’s website.
Hubspot put out this article that helps you make educated guesses if you can’t seem to locate the email anywhere. They offer a free service that lets you check to see whether or not your guess was right, making the process go a little smoother.
The author of this resource doesn’t want you to guess-and-check.
Thankfully, they offer an alternative.
This article is actually more of a curated list of free email-finding tools.
If you want more tools that can help you with cold emailing, take a look at chapter 7: “cold email tools, both paid and free”
Alright, so you know who want to send your cold email to; you have their address, and you’re ready to start crafting a kickass cold email.
But what do you write as a subject line for your cold email?
What you write as the subject line will be the difference between a prospect ignoring your email — and landing a sale. (and possibly a lifelong follower)
Having never heard of you before, your cold lead’s journey to becoming a loyal customer begins with the subject line.
Unfortunately, there is no “one true proven” subject line that is heralded as the best. It largely depends on what you are offering and who you are offering it to.
Thankfully, we have some resources for you:
This resource breaks down four different types of subject lines that work, why they work, and examples of each one.
The four types are as follows:
- The fake referral (my personal favorite)
- Congratulations on the thing!
- Customized generic subject lines
- Fully generic (this is more effective than you might think)
Rather than breaking down different types of subject lines, this resource gives you 13 specific examples, of which, 1, 2, 4, and 9 are my favorites.
The boys over at Sales Hacker put together this awesome resource that breaks down 7 types of subject lines and then lists the reasons why they work as well as some examples.
The importance of crafting a compelling subject line just can’t be ignored.
If you want your email to be opened, you need to do your research.
Once your prospect opens the email, what they read inside is their first impression of who you are and what you do — and you want that impression to be a good one. Do your best to provide them with real value.
This is where the fun really begins. Crafting your kickass cold email is no task to take lightly.
If you have:
- Done your research
- Found the right emails to your prospects,
- And come up with an awesome subject line that is sure to get opened
Then you are ready to start writing the cold email that will land you that sale.
But where do you start?
The resources below are, when used together, perfect for getting you started with your first email and templates for future emails.
While this resource isn’t entirely dedicated to writing the body of your template, it has a lot of good tips that you should keep in mind before you start writing.
Something else to keep in mind:
You can fail miserably when writing your template. So these tips are important. If you make just one mistake, it can mean that the rest of your email becomes useless. (We have another resource in chapter 6 that touches on mistakes that you need to avoid)
If you want pre-made templates that are tried and true, this is one place to look. You should, of course, tailor each one for your market and target, but these are great to get you started. Each of these templates even comes with a suggested subject line.
If you want to really dive into the science of cold email crafting and what makes it work so well, then this is a must-read.
The guys over at Yesware aren’t exactly handing you templates to adapt, they are showing you in-depth strategies and explaining the science behind why they work.
This kind of resource is for the more advanced email-crafter, and it can help bring you to that level.
There is a lot more to using cold email than simply writing and sending it.
An effective cold email strategy has high response rates, is well organized, and can be easily scaled.
Below are some resources that can help you along.
If you skipped to this chapter, I want to point you back to a resource from chapter 5:
This resource is full of tips to incorporate into your campaign. Do’s and don’ts for writing your templates, tips on how to improve your response rates, and a lot more.
If you need more suggestions and a little more guidance on what you absolutely must include in your emails, no matter who you are sending them to, then this resource can help you with that. It’s somewhat of a guide to writing the email.
You will find some solid advice here as far as your cold email marketing strategy goes.
Just one thing, though, at the end of this article the author instructs you to not use a template. We have to disagree with him here.
Why?
While it might not be advisable to send mass copy/paste emails with zero personalization. A good template makes your cold email campaign scalable, which is invaluable.
So use a template, but build off of it, and personalize it.
While it’s important to know all the things you should be doing when it comes to an effective cold email campaign, it is arguably equally important to watch out for common mistakes.
Like we said earlier, one mistake can render your email as useless.
The above resources and previous chapters have hopefully been helpful, but in order to really be effective, you’re going to have to read on below.
As mentioned above, an effective campaign must have good response rates, be organized, and be scalable.
Here’s what can help:
Tools
There is simply no way to get around cold email tools if you want to build an effective and scalable cold email campaign
Free and paid tools alike can help you easily scale your campaign by allowing you to send hundreds or thousands more emails than you would ever be able to personally, all much quicker and with an excellent ROI.
One of our personal favorites is Woodpecker.co. This is a paid tool that will help you easily send your emails en masse without seeming like a robot to the recipient’s inbox. They allow you to automate your follow-up process (which we will talk about more in chapter 8) as well as provide you with helpful statistics and analytics for your campaigns.
Another tool we highly recommend for sending out cold emails is MailShake – This tool is simple and easy to use and even includes many cold email templates to make your sending a breeze. Give them a try today.
Of course, we also directly offer an invaluable tool when it comes to scaling your cold email campaign. It becomes absolutely necessary to use a service to assist in email finding. Searching for an email on your own for each and every person can absorb innumerable hours of precious time.
That is where SalesRipe comes in. We help you quickly identify and connect with the right people. Filter by 30+ search criteria and find your perfect prospects in seconds and download them into an excel spreadsheet.
There are a lot of email-locating services out there, and it is suggested to use more than one, since each has their own strengths.
It’s important to find the tools that work best for you.
But the more the merrier.
There are a seemingly limitless amount of cold email tools out there, both paid and free.
Here are a couple (long) lists of other helpful tools that can help. Take your time shopping through them:
This one focuses on email-finding tools, which, like we mentioned already, are literally invaluable to cutting down on time-spent and therefore increase profits.
This resource lists more general services that will help you organize and scale your email marketing.
The follow-up email is an important strategy to nail down and add to your arsenal.
Why?
It’s an effective way to squeeze connections and sales out of emails you have already found without needing to look for more.
Here is an interesting statistic:
92% of salespeople give up after four “no’s”, but 80% of prospects say “no” four times before they say “yes”. — Marketing Donut
But how can you follow up without being annoying?
The fact of the matter is — just because you aren’t comfortable with sending a follow up email, it doesn’t mean the recipient is annoyed by you.
But let’s take a look at a couple resources that dive into the subject a little deeper:
This resource from woodpecker.co discusses just how many emails, and how often you should be sending them. You will realize quickly that there is no hard-and-fast rule.
Understanding how to act, and what to say, when you send a follow up email is important.
Although it might be a little harder to annoy your average recipient than you might think, everyone feels a little different about their inbox; it’s important to use the right email etiquette when it comes to a follow up.
This is a great (short) article that will help you decide whether or not to follow up and how to do it.
Your Effective Cold Email Campaign
As you can see, cold email is no joke.
It is an indispensable tool for any growing business, especially B2B businesses.
It will take a lot of hard work, but with the help of the resources in this guide we are sure you can effectively employ cold email to your advantage.
Hold on to your pants, though, because this guide of curated articles is just the tip of the iceberg.
Very soon we will be providing you with “The Definitive Guide to Cold Email — Everything You Need to Know”, so you won’t need to read and refer back to a hundred different articles — just one.
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