Cold email is not an easy tool to use correctly. For some – those who get it right – it can be a great way to develop leads that become customers or clients. For those who do not take the time to learn how to write cold email it can be an expensive waste of time and money.
If you are considering trying cold email yourself, it will be up to you to decide how successful it will be as it will be up to you to decide whether you are willing to take the time to learn how to write a cold email, and to execute all the steps involved in doing so. Well, are you? If so, then read on to get some helpful hints to get you started on the right track.
Research Your Prospect
One current definition loose definition of spam email – but one that is often used by most spam filters – is an email sent to a person you have never contacted before that is not directed specifically to them – ie; personalized – and is in no way relevant to them. If you buy an email list and then proceed to blindly send a message to every name on the list, then you are not cold emailing, you are spamming.
Cold emails have to be sent to a specific person, using their name, and offer something that could be of value to them. This means researching your prospect and their business and being reasonably sure that what you offer is something that they may be interested in.
Failing to do this is one of the biggest reasons a cold email campaign falls flat. If, by some miracle, a blanket cold email makes it passed the intended recipient’s spam filter it will still be dismissed instantly, as who would ever want to consider doing business with someone who couldn’t even be bothered to find out their name and what they do?
To Template or Not to Template?
Because learning how to write cold emails is something many people struggle with it is tempting to make use of one of the many cold email templates you can find almost everywhere you turn. But that’s the problem; too many people end up using them.
Here is a case in point. There is a popular cold email template out there – available in several different wordings but all following the same basic premise. The template is a series of short cold emails asking to be pointed in the right direction, to be given the email address of the ‘appropriate person’.
Perhaps this was not a bad idea once, but these emails are now failing to pass corporate spam filters due to the sheer volume of people now sending almost the exact same template. So making use of it is a futile waste of time (and resources)
As hard as it is, write your own cold emails. Or, if you despair that you will never master how to write cold emails, hire someone who can do it for you.
Send Your Cold Emails From a Warm Domain
You have written a great cold email, one that will apply to your prospects directly. You’ve done your research and know a little about each recipient. Your copy is original. Everything looks great. But then you make the mistake of sending these emails from a brand new email domain you just obtained for the purpose of this campaign. Sorry to tell you, but as hard as you have worked it’s probable that your cold email campaign will still fail.
That’s because email providers and their spam filters usually take a dim view of email sent from a brand new email domain, and will take an even dimmer view of one that seems in any way promotional. So as hard as you have worked if you do not take the time to warm up your email domain – or if you use one that has been used to send questionable messages in the past – it will be almost certainly doomed to failure from the start.
