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Proven Cold Email Marketing Strategies to Outreach B2B Leads

December 20, 2022
10:14 AM

Table of content

What Is A Cold Email?
Types of Cold Marketing Emails
5 Steps to Effective Cold Email Strategy
The Top Cold Email Marketing Strategies for 2022
End Note

It’s no secret that cold email marketing strategies are one of the most effective and proven tactics to bring in B2B leads. Cold email marketing or bulk email marketing, in the hands of intelligent marketers, can be a powerful tool to boost the sales and revenue of a company. This method is usually used for networking while launching a new product or service, hiring employees, reaching out to influencers, and, most importantly, growing the customer base.

Cold email marketing can bring about brand awareness, qualified leads, and build relationships with leads unaware of your company. However, to achieve high returns with cold email marketing, you need to plan a strategic approach, reach out to the right target audience and send out targeted email messages.

A well-planned cold email campaign can aid you in building connections with clients on a personal level. In this blog, we will cover what cold email marketing is, its types, and its strategies. Let’s dive right into it!

What Is A Cold Email?

A cold email is an email sent out to prospects that do not yet know about your company or brand in hopes of them generating interest in your product or service. This method is mainly used by B2B sales and marketing teams to bring in qualified leads, networking, link building, and recruiting, among others. The goal is to initiate a conversation with them and spread awareness about your brand or its products and service.

Remember, while cold emailing, there has to be a genuine reason to reach out to them. Therefore, you can start by setting the objectives of your campaign. But ‘why choose cold emailing,’ you ask? Cold email marketing is professional, cost-effective, easily scalable, and not as intrusive as unsolicited phone calls. A study by Barilliance—an omnichannel personalization platform—indicated that cold email outreach can help you achieve an overall ROI of 3800% when executed properly.

Recipients may mistakenly assume these cold emails as spam. To avoid this, it is imperative to plan an effective cold email that is eye-catching and interesting. For instance, start by initiating a business conversation instead of promoting a product to everyone simultaneously. Conquering this technique requires you to collect relevant data about B2B leads and personalize outreach to get the desired results.

Types of Cold Marketing Emails

The four main types of cold emails that be used for B2B marketing are:

1. Sales Emails

Sales emails are sent to make a sales pitch and promote a product or service to a prospective customer. These emails can sometimes be interpreted as spam since the recipient may not be familiar with the brand or company. Therefore, marketers need to design an email to provide a value proposition to the prospects. This email can aid you in sending product information or maintaining a customer relationship with the leads.

2. Content Promotion Email

These emails are sent to promote specific pieces of content, such as a blogs, eBooks, whitepapers, or case studies. This is an excellent tactic to boost traffic and increase the visibility of your landing pages. Many B2B bloggers also use this tactic to acquire backlinks for SEO. Make sure that these emails bring a sense of curiosity so they can download your resource.

3. Networking Emails

Marketers choose networking emails to build relationships with the decision-makers of a particular industry. These emails have a strong opening line, an attractive subject line, and relevant links to engage with prospects. When you use cold emails for networking, ensure that you send the email to the right C-level executives.

4. Public Relations/Media Emails

Public relations or media emails are sent to professionals such as journalists, bloggers, or influencers to get coverage for the business or its products. This email can help you attract more leads and reach a much larger audience. For this to work, it should include a clear goal or have a good enough reason for them to promote your brand.

DataCaptive will be delving into a topic that every B2B professional will find beneficial in the upcoming month. To get the latest updates on more such to detain and researched B2B marketing topics.

5 Steps to Effective Cold Email Strategy

1. Register to Right Domain

The first step to creating a cold email strategy is to find the right email service provider and register your domain. Therefore, finding the right domain is your answer if you have ever wondered how to start cold email marketing. This step is crucial to preventing your company’s domain or email addresses from getting blacklisted. While choosing a domain, ensure it resonates with your company’s name or its products and services. Once you buy the domain, link the email address associated with that domain in the cold email marketing tool.

Warm up your domain before sending out campaigns immediately, which will help you improve your deliverability rate. To warm up the domain, you must use it manually until it is ready to send automated emails. Choose the right email service provider (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, among others). Sending emails with your corporate domain can aid you in building trust among your target audience.

2. Set SPF and DKIM Keys

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) keys are email signatures used to prevent spoofing, phishing scams, and fraud that might happen to your domain while sending cold email campaigns. SPF is necessary to specify the servers and domains authorized to send cold emails on behalf of your company.

DKIM, on the other side, is a digital signature included in every outgoing message while allowing the servers to authenticate whether the emails were sent from your company. This is beneficial to eliminate phishing scams, increase your email deliverability, and ramp up your open and click-through rates. These are vital technical email signatures to indicate the ownership of the email sent from an organization.

3. Build Your Email List

Before you plan your cold email campaign, build an email contact database based on the ideal customer profile (ICP). Building an email list through google and social platform like LinkedIn can get strenuous and time-consuming. The company can purchase customizable contact email lists from the right database provider to make this process easier. Companies such as DataCaptive allow B2B companies to customize their email databases on a target audience, geographic location, job title, particular industry, etc.

Such databases can help you gather qualified B2B leads that will most likely convert into loyal customers. With a contact database, you can begin planning your cold email campaigns. However, if you plan to build your list, remember to collect data from credible and trustworthy sources and save the email addresses in a .csv file. Use the email verification tool to validate the emails before adding them to your email list.

4. Create Your Email Content and Plan Follow-up

Once you have an email contact list, start segmenting your audience, as it will aid in writing curated email content. Prepare a professional yet enticing sales pitch in your cold email that will resonate with your recipients. The email should be short, clear, and contain personalized elements. Craft an email with a solid call-to-action and eye-catching subject lines. A well-constructed cold email upholding the company’s values can go a long way.

While writing the copy, you can include images and videos and ensure the message is clear, as it can otherwise end up in the spam box. Use ready-made email templates to keep consistency and efficiency. Finding a suitable industry-based email template can aid you in improving your reply rate. We recommend you send up to only three follow-up emails timed one or two weeks apart. How you begin your cold email is also vital to the recipient’s action; remember to have a strong intro line.;

5. A/B Test Everything and Launch Your Campaign

A/B test is essential to creating a cold email campaign since you instantly get insights and analyze its performance after experimenting with two or more variants. Start by testing out the subject lines—the most vital part of the cold email. It is the first thing a recipient sees when they open their inbox, and with competition increasing, it is vital to stand out with an eye-catching subject line.

It is essential to test out everything from the email body to the email signature to improve the performance of your campaign. Check for errors in spelling, grammar, spam trigger words, clickable links, clear calls to action, and a professional email signature. The insights collected from the A/B test aid in analyzing and optimizing the campaign’s performance. Once the campaign is launched, invest in a powerful analytical tool such as ReachEngine that will allow you to analyze your campaigns more quickly and accurately.

Top Cold Email Marketing Strategies for 2022

1. Plan Follow-up Emails

Follow-up emails are sent to a recipient you have contacted before. The main aim of sending follow emails is to build relationships with prospective customers. Since you are trying to reach out to B2B professionals, they might occasionally check their emails due to time constraints. First emails may get lost in the inbox due to prospects’ busy schedules or tough competition in the inbox. Only a few prospects feel convinced to reach out to you after the first email, and this is where you send a follow-up email with more information about your products or services.

According to Yesware—a sales productivity platform—over 70% of marketers stop nurturing their leads when they do not receive responses to their first email. However, follow-up emails will help build a solid connection with prospects, improve conversion rates, and drive more revenue. Follow-up emails can seem strenuous. Hence, optimization tools can be used to schedule emails based on triggers or actions of the prospects. The minimum number of follow-up emails that can be sent to get a response from a recipient is three.

The general schedule of follow-up emails are:

Business day 1: First cold email
Business day 4: Follow-up email 1 – Informative resource on the product or service, such as case studies or ebooks.
Business day 8: Follow-up email 2 – A demo on how your products or services can solve their pain point
Business day 12: Follow-up email 3 – The last call-to-action.

2. Do In-depth Research on Your Target Audience

Before you develop your cold email campaigns, do in-detail research on your target audience and whether or not your product will solve their pain points. Understanding prospects’ likes, dislikes, expectations, and challenges will help you build a better campaign and a connection with them. Gather the firmographics and demographics for the target audience and create a sales pitch based on the data you collect.

Understand your prospect’s situation and use it to develop relevant content to pique their interest in your offerings. There are two ways to determine if a contact belongs to your target audience:

Ideal customer profile: ICP helps you outline your prospective client's basic and essential criteria for their needs and expectations. This usually differs depending on the industry, niche, or product the company offers.
Buyer persona: Buyer's persona is beneficial to identify particular attributes that define your target audience. This can include factors such as age, job title, industry, company, experience, etc.

3. Choose Befitting Tools for Your Campaign

Numerous tools can aid in creating and tracking a cold email marketing campaign. Choosing the right cold email tools depends on your specific needs and the budget allocated. Nowadays, email marketing software and tool have several features making it easier to build cold email campaigns, browser extensions, and complete CRM systems. Email software such as Outlook and Zoho Mail makes email campaigns much more accessible for your sales team to respond directly to the prospects from their email address. Some features that can be used in quality email marketing are:

Email list optimization: These features allow marketers to import, manage, and verify the email addresses they collect.
Automation: Automation features are designed to send ideally timed follow-up emails. All you have to do is schedule your emails, and once they are sent, it will detect any reply or bounce you receive.
Personalization features: Most email marketing software and tools come with features that help create curated cold emails for targeted prospects.
Collaboration: This feature allows the sales and marketing team or even other teams of an organization to work in sync with each other. It gives the teams a level of access and workflow.
Analytics: Analytics is a common feature available on most email marketing tools that give you real-time statistics and actionable insights.

An example of an email marketing platform that combines all these features under a single platform is ReachEngine. This platform is designed to create, manage, and track cold email campaigns. You can create custom email templates, nurture your leads, and automate your campaigns.

4. Track Right Cold Email Marketing Campaign Metrics

To ensure a cold marketing campaign achieves the set objectives and goals, choose the right metric to track your campaign. By monitoring the metrics given below, a marketer can understand the performance of different subject lines, email content, and calls-to-action and will help choose what works the best with your cold email. This way, you can create successful and responsive cold emails. The email marketing metrics that must be taken into consideration for cold emails are:

Deliverability rate: This metric defines the rate at which the email is successfully sent to the target audience.
Bounce rate: This metric refers to the percentage of recipients that did not receive your emails because of their mail servers. Based on GetResponse's email marketing benchmarks, the average email bounce rate is 2.76%.
Open rate: This metric shows the number of people that have opened the cold email. This way, you can get an idea of your subject line's effectiveness. The same study proved that the reasonable open rate for cold emails is 19.66%. However, this can differ depending on the industry.
Click-through rate: This metric signifies the recipient has clicked on the call-to-action (CTA) or links added inside the cold emails. The average email click-through rate is 2.02%.
Response rate: This metric accounts for the number of recipients that responds to your cold emails. At the same time, the average cold email response rate is around 8%, according to GetResponse.
Spam rate: This metric showcases the number of recipients that add your emails to the spam folder. The study also noted that the average email spam rate is 0.01%.

5. Craft Interesting Subject Lines

The subject lines are the first thing your contact sees when opening their inbox. Therefore, it calls for more time and effort to create an eye-catching subject line. You can personalize your subject line with the recipient’s activity, name, company, job title, or even the pain points they face.

According to CampaignMonitor, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened than standard subject lines. Include a sense of urgency and mystery in the subject line to increase your open rates significantly. Some tips that can be implemented while creating a cold email subject line are:

Do not give away the critical information in your subject line; only add the key points of interest.
It is also vital to keep the subject line within 50 characters, with a maximum word count of 6–10 words.
Avoid using misleading or clickbait subject lines. Make them credible and show some value.
The subject line must be enticing and appealing to the target audience.
Add offers, sales, or discounts tailored to the recipient to increase your open rates.
Ensure there are no grammatical errors, and proofread your subject line.
Avoid extra punctuation and all-caps writing; include only the right emojis in the subject line.

6. Include Social Proof

Social proof is one marketing strategy that showcases to your recipients that you can find value in a product or service by a business. This assures that buying a company offering is the right decision. It can also aid you in developing customer trust enough that they feel reassured. One way you can achieve this is by highlighting genuine customer reviews. A study done by Brightlocal found that 94% of consumers purchase from businesses with positive thoughts.

Another tactic is to quantify your popularity by specifying a percentage claimed or saying that only a certain number of products are available. Some top B2B companies also showcase expert endorsements as a part of their social proof. If there are any awards that your brand has won, make sure to include that as well. This tactic is beneficial to establish credibility, increasing engagement rates, and building a positive impression. Social proof found in most emails includes:

Customer testimonials
Number of customers
Product or service reviews

User-generated content
Press mentions
Awards

7. Implement Call-to-action (CTA)

Adding the CTAs in the right spots of the cold emails can dramatically increase recipient engagement. A single CTA in your email can amp up your marketing efforts and bring more visitors to your website. The main goal of adding a CTA is to specify the upcoming steps to your recipient. Now, this can either be to schedule a meeting, sign up for your newsletter, or explore more about your offerings.

Remember to make your CTAs guide the recipients so that they can have a smoother experience. Do not pressure your prospects to respond to your emails; instead, seek their permission to continue the conversation. Only then add the CTA so they can quickly respond to your emails or visit a particular landing page. Some CTA questions that marketers ask are:

How many CTAs do I add in the cold email?
We suggest adding only one or two CTAs in the email.
Where should the CTA be placed?
CTAs are usually added towards the end of the email just above your email signature and social media handles.
How should the CTA be designed?
Design the CTA like a button, hyperlink it to the page, and make sure it is evident.

End Note

Cold emailing is an excellent tactic to approach prospecting customers and build a connection with them. However cold email marketing can be quite challenging to execute, but once the right strategies are implemented, there will be a visible shift in your sales performance. Today, hyper-personalized cold emails can help B2B marketers attract and retain customers. Now that you know all the basics of cold email marketing, you will soon be able to increase traffic and generate more qualified B2B sales.

FAQs

1. What is a cold email marketing strategy?

A cold email marketing strategy is a set of procedures that a marketer takes to achieve a certain marketing goal or to communicate with their prospects for brand promotion.

2. What is the success rate of cold emails?

The average response rate of a cold email is around 1–5%. This means a marketer can reach 5 out of every 100 people they send the email to.

3. How to boost your cold email marketing strategy?

You can boost your cold email marketing strategy by sending follow-up emails. They help build a solid connection with prospects, improve conversion rates, and drive more revenue.

4. How do you grab attention in a cold email?

Crafting an attractive subject line is one cold email marketing strategy that will help grab your prospects’ attention. They are the first thing your contact sees when you open their inbox, which is why you need to put in more time and effort to create an eye-catching subject line.

5. Does cold email still work in 2022?

Yes, cold email does work even in 2022. If your company is not using it yet, there’s a lot of untapped conversion potential in your future. They are a great way to reach out to prospects who may be interested in what you have to offer.

6. How many cold emails should you send per week?

Our sales experts say an average of three cold emails can be sent over a week. If you send more emails, then it will seem like spam to your recipient.

7. What makes cold emails successful?

A cold email is only successful if it reaches the set objectives and goals that are set by your team. The open rates, CTR, and response rate you receive for your campaigns must be above the average percentage.

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