Five easy tips to make your sales emails stand out
The long-running debate over cold emailing in sales and marketing boils down to two important points: is cold email intrusive and disrespectful to the recipient’s time and inbox? And is cold email effective? On the one hand, being disrespectful of others and wasting your time with something that is not working is rarely a good strategy in life. On the other hand, if your message does deliver real value to the recipient, they are unlikely to feel interrupted. In this scenario, you would celebrate cold email’s effectiveness.
As with many things, the balance is somewhere in the middle. Can cold email campaigns be interrupting and disrespectful? All too often this is exactly the case. Can personalized cold email be valuable to both the sender and the recipient? This is also 100% true. Finding the balance is dependent on many factors. In this post, we will examine many ways to help your cold emails deliver value, instead of annoyance. Additionally, we will explore some of the best cold email software, technology, and tools leading cold email practitioners use to maximize the chance of a mutually beneficial engagement.
Five Easy Tips for Cold Emails that Get Responses
As with any sales or marketing practice, cold email outreach is made more successful through the use of some best practices. For example, data shows that having an email signature in place increases recipient trust in the message. Additionally, email copy free of misspellings and grammatical errors improves the chance of a reply. These best practices are both simple and intuitive.
In addition to basic professionalism and clean verbiage, your cold emails will immediately become more effective by implementing some (or all) of the following cold-email optimization tips to your next campaign.
Add Personalized Greetings in the Subject Line
Adding a personalized greeting to your subject line can make a world of difference when trying to stand out from the rest of the inbox. Personalizing the recipient’s name in the subject line is one way. You can also take it a step further by adding some context about who you are and why you’re reaching out. For example, “Hey John, I hope you’re having a great day” or “John, Saw you spoke at an event last week, here’s my pitch” are both more effective than a generic subject line. According to research conducted by Boomerang, using personalized greetings can result in a 16% higher click rate.
Taking things a step further by adding the personalized greeting in the subject line increases the chance that the recipient will actually read it in full. A subject line of “John, great speech at the tech conference last week” will resonate more fully than a subject line of “Time to connect?” followed by personalization in the message body itself.
Add Relevant Content to the First Sentence of the Email
Adding relevant content not only applies to subject lines but also to the preview text that recipients see when they open an email. Adding relevant information in the first two sentences of a cold email can improve response rates by more than 10%. For example, if you’re reaching out via email about a customer opportunity, then your first sentence should mention that opportunity instead of taking a broader approach. A personal touch will go much farther than reading off an agenda or talking about topics at large.
For example, an introduction sentence of “Congratulation on the recent funding round. VC Co. should be a great partner to help Acme Inc. keep growing into the future” will create a stronger connection than “I saw your company mentioned on LinkedIn and wanted to reach out.” Does a relevant first sentence guarantee the outcome you are after? Of course not. But it does increase the possibility that the recipient will keep reading, which can lead to more cold emails that get responses.
Randomize Your Send Times
When possible, send emails at random times during different days and days of the week. This prevents your email from being flagged as spam because it doesn’t follow a pattern. More to the point, different people check their inboxes at different times of day and with different levels of attention.
For example, if you always email a prospect first thing in the morning then it is possible you are arriving in their inbox while they are taking their children to school or in a morning team huddle. Your email may not get more than a cursory glance. Yet later in the day, perhaps right after lunch, the prospect has two hours of uninterrupted work time where they focus on replying to messages.
Optimizing for success by trying new things is key to succeeding in cold email outreach. Find things to A/B test above and beyond subject lines, messaging, and calls to action. Sometimes success is as simple as finding the right sending window.
Offer Value Instead of Asking for Something in Return
Most cold email ends with a call-to-action, or “CTA,” that serves the sender and not the recipient. Examples include “Do you have time for a ten-minute call?” or “Can you click here and answer a short survey?” Unless the recipient is dealing with the problem you propose to solve at that very moment, your CTA has almost no chance of resonating. Even worse, most people in a business environment have been conditioned to expect an end of message request. Standing out from the crowd means doing things differently. And that means turning a traditional — and expected — call to action upside down.
Instead of asking for a return favor in an email pitch, try instead offering value upfront before asking for anything in return. This establishes trust and a relationship right off the bat, rather than coming across as self-serving. For example, a digital agency may find success in offering a complimentary SEO audit. A law firm may find success in offering a short consultation about estate planning. A software company may garner great response by inviting the recipient to a webinar or sharing an interesting white paper.
Instead of including something like “I’d like to schedule a short conversation to discuss your software needs” try “I have three insights to share about optimizing software for a company like Acme Co. If I send them over, will you take a look?”
Approach your cold email from a position of offering value instead of asking for it and your conversions will improve.
Leverage New Technology and Tools
The ever-changing face of cold email means that new tools and technology are coming to market on a regular basis. From tools like GMASS that test deliverability to platforms like Apollo that schedule, send, and track sequences, sending cold emails one message at a time and by hand is wildly inefficient. While many platforms and systems require investment, tools like YesWare, Lemlist, and others provide significant value and time savings for just a few dollars each month.
If cold email is a part of your sales or go-to-market strategy, you absolutely should consider sequencing/campaign software like Apollo, Outreach, or Mailshake. Additionally, tools that test for deliverability like Lemwarm (by Lemlist) and GMASS can keep email addresses healthy and keep messages out of SPAM.
Other new, cutting-edge tools that impact cold email effectiveness are also critical in today’s competitive environments. Integrating video and custom animation in the message body is more engaging than text-only emails. Since standing out in a crowded inbox is key to conversion optimization, this technology can be a game-changer for your cold email initiatives.
The best cold email software for your business depends on what you are offering, your goals, and your target prospects or market. A one-size-fits-all approach to cold sales email is unlikely to work. Testing new ideas and new tools should be a constant part of your efforts. Technology that makes executing, analyzing, and iterating sales email campaigns will accelerate
your speed to success.
Can Video Help Improve Sales Email Conversions?
Windsor allows sales and marketing teams to create custom, personalized videos at scale for outbound campaigns. Record a video once using spoken merge fields, upload a list of prospects, and Windsor creates a personalized video for each of them. Whereas merge fields are common in text-only emails, Windsor brings this same technology to video. Even more, integration with most email clients and outbound platforms means that Windsor likely works with whatever email stack you currently utilize.
Everyone wants to feel special, even in small ways. When competing for attention in the busiest place of a busy workday — the prospect’s inbox — Windsor is the difference between a recipient’s perception of “just another email I didn’t ask for” and “this video is made JUST FOR ME.” This bridge is often the difference between auto-delete and a positive reply.
To learn more about how Windsor’s cutting-edge video technology can improve your cold email conversion rate by an order of magnitude contact us at team@windsor.io
