How to master cold email outreach

Cold email outreach is unequivocally still one of the best customer acquisition channels for B2B SaaS and tech companies. Yet, it is commonly overlooked in favour of other digital acquisition channels.

If done right, cold email outreach can consistently land your startup new customers every month. The trouble is that most people think it’s a matter of plug-and-play, and expect to see instantaneous results without putting in any real legwork. This is akin to running a Facebook ad without optimising it.

Cold email outreach sits at the confluence of both science and art. Without a comprehensive understanding of both its scientific and artistic elements, your outreach efforts will most likely garner lackluster results.

In my previous company, Contentellect, I was able to grow our MRR to over $25K almost entirely through cold email outreach. LinkedIn outreach represented a tiny proportion of our sales by comparison. I then took these learnings and launched SmartOutreach, an email outreach service for B2B SaaS and technology companies.

Here are 5 things you need to do in order to succeed at cold email outreach.

Build the right prospect list

It all starts with your prospecting. Sure, volume is important, but the validity of these prospect email addresses is even more important. If your campaigns end up being sent to invalid email addresses which bounce, this adversely affects your domain reputation, which in turn impacts deliverability. Once you’ve built your prospect list be sure to run it through an email verification service like Pabbly or Hunter.

Use a secondary domain

As you’ll be sending out relatively large volumes of emails everyday, doing this from your primary domain could compromise its reputation. If your domain ends up getting blacklisted, then you could find that regular emails you send to clients end up in their spam folders.

To avoid this issue, register a secondary domain and use it for your cold email outreach activities. If your primary domain is example.com, then you could register example.co or example.io. You can then run a simple redirect from the secondary domain to your primary domain.

Technical setup

Once your domain is registered you’ll need to create an email address for it. Before you start sending any emails from it, you’ll need to get the technical setup complete.

This includes SPF, DKIM and DMARC txt records in your DNS as well as ensuring that you’ll be sending your emails from a reputable mail server like Gmail for Sendgrid.

If you're unsure of how to do this yourself and then hire a professional like Hot Pepper Agency to assist.

Warm up your domain

As your secondary domain will exclusively be used for email outreach, it’s highly probable that it wouldn't have seen much activity before commencing any outreach campaigns. If this is the case, you’ll need to warm it up before starting any outreach campaigns.

Warming up simply involves sending and receiving emails, and making sure any sent emails that go into spam get marked as “not spam”. You can warm a domain yourself or you can use a service like Mailreach which automates this process. The minimum period for warming up a domain should be around 2 weeks.

Crafting great copy

Once your domain is warmed up, you’re ready to kick off your outreach campaigns. Remember that the prospects you’ll be emailing will most likely be receiving lots of cold emails every day.

Yours will be yet another email clogging up their inbox. To stand out amongst the mediocrity, you’ll need to get clever with your email copy. This comprises two key components - the email subject line and the email copy.

The subject line is the gateway to the email copy. Its primary purpose is to elicit intrigue around the content of the email. Without a compelling headline your email copy isn’t worth very much, as it probably won't get read.

Your email copy is where you convey the value proposition of your product or service. Your prospects will be skim reading your email, if they read it all. So make sure you convey your proposition as succinctly as possible using a spaced out and easy-to-read format.

If you fancy yourself as a wordsmith you can create your own copy, or hire a copywriter to do it for you. There are also AI tools like Jasper which are proving very popular for headline creation.

Following up

This is an essential ingredient in cold email outreach. Most prospects will be too busy to read your first email in its entirety, let alone reply. That’s why a simple follow up a few days later is so important.

Over 70% of the replies we get at SmartOutreach derive from the follow-up. Needless to say, the follow up message is a critical component in moving a prospect down the sales funnel.