Cold Emailing Works! Especially with these 9 Effective Tips

When you receive a cold call, how does it make you feel? If the thought of attending a cold call or message fills you with dread, that’s not your problem. It’s the ineffectiveness of the marketer or salesperson who approached you.

Cold messaging can still work in 2020, but you need to be effective with your approach. If you send out a barrage of emails to anyone and everyone, the chances are, you won’t get many responses. However, if you’re smart and tactical about it, you could still see positive results.

In this article, we’ll discuss 9 tips on how you can make your cold emails more effective. But before we get into that, it’s important that you get this one thing right…

Get a branded and meaningful email address

When it comes to the world of business, your reputation precedes you. Creating a professional, well-established, credible and expert image for yourself is crucial. An important step towards building that desired professional reputation—but one that’s often overlooked—is setting up a professional email address.

When you send important emails to your customers or clients, you want them to take you seriously. It might be hard for them to do that though if your email address is [email protected] or [email protected].

Your professional email address should be related to your company or brand name. This allows people to easily relate your communication to an established entity making your emails seem more authentic. The ideal way to go about it is to register your company’s domain name and then use that to create your email address.

Finding the right domain name for your company (and your email address) can be tricky. Fortunately, there are several new domain extensions available nowadays that not only increase the likelihood of you finding a name of your choice but also make your web address more relevant and memorable.

For instance, if you are a company that makes mobile applications (called Mobile Ops) your domain name could be mobileops.tech. With this, you can create an email address such as [email protected] or [email protected] for all your business-related communication. Other examples of new industry-specific domain extensions include .STORE (for eCommerce and retail), .ONLINE, .SITE, .SPACE and .UNO and more that can help you get a meaningful domain name and a branded email address.

Getting a professional email address, even if you are a small business or a freelancer, is like an investment in the goodwill you aspire to create in your industry. It is a small yet meaningful effort towards carving your niche in the online world and coming across as credible.

9 ways to make your cold email effective

1. Prospect and track

Before you start writing a cold email, you need to decide who your target prospects are. Not everyone needs your product or service. As every cold email should be crafted for the recipient and their company, quality is the name of the game here, not quantity.

Create a list of potential clients and customers that could benefit from your service. You can break this list down into segments, too, based on attributes such as industry, niche, business size, and region.

When you’ve sent off your email, don’t forget about the client. Keep track of who you’ve sent a cold email to and whether or not they responded. If they did respond, how did it go and what’s the next course of action.

2. Write a great opening line to break the ice

Cold messaging needs a good introduction. The prospects haven’t requested that you contact them, and if you start badly, your goodwill will be at stake.

According to a recent survey, the worst email introductions start with:

• No greeting at all
• To whom it may concern
• Hey

Don’t use these.

Instead, when you’re deciding how to start a cold email, go with something personal and snappy. If you can add a dash of humor, even better. You can:

1. Use their first name
2. Offer a solution to a problem that they’re having
3. Open with a question
4. Compliment recent work of theirs
5. Show them an interesting and relevant statistic

It would be best if you captured their attention before you move onto the sales pitch.

3. Be brief with your pitch

No one wants to receive an essay as part of a cold messaging approach. Respect your recipient’s time and keep your sales pitch brief.

Get straight to the point of the email without wasting their time. However, keep it respectful.

Greet them, establish a connection or spark interest, and pitch them. You can include a link to your website that they can peruse at their leisure, and that will also drive traffic to your site.

4. Sweat the small stuff: grammar and spelling

Grammar and spelling are crucial parts of messaging. Messing up with either of them can make you look unprofessional.

No one expects you to have a mastery of when to use the subjunctive mood or whether you use the past participle. Yet this doesn’t mean that these aspects of a cold email don’t matter. Some tools can help you, such as Grammarly, which can correct most of the grammatical errors you make.

It’s also worth using the active voice in your emails. These give your pitches punch and pep. Too much passive voice makes your emails sound weak.

5. End on a call to action

The cold email is not a sale in and of itself. You need to include a call to action for your recipient. This could be anything from booking a consultation with you on Zoom to emailing back to take a look at your company’s catalog.

Whatever your call to action is, your email must have one.

6. Add an email signature

Your email signature is like your business card. It should show that you are a professional and tell the recipient who you are, whom you work for, and your contact details.

Keep your email signature simple. A photo of you is a nice addition to the information we listed above, but don’t go overboard.

Some email signatures see fit to include quotes from Oprah and the like: these take up space and impede your professionalism.

Craft a signature that highlights your personality and character in a compact space.

7. Don’t telegraph a sales pitch

If you telegraph that a hard sales pitch will be coming in the next email, very few people will reply to you. People don’t like to be sold to in general, and you need to be skillful with your sales pitches.

Keep it casual and friendly. Don’t try and drive a hard sell too soon, or you’ll decimate any chance that you have of receiving a reply.

8. Follow up on your emails

People are busy. If someone doesn’t reply to your emails, don’t take that as a slight or assume that they’re not interested. Follow up with a short email to try and get a response.

The worst that will happen is that you won’t get a reply. If you do get a response, it could lead to a sale. Keep it direct and short. As mentioned earlier, don’t waste their time.

The bottom line: Master the art of cold messaging

Cold messaging should lead recipients to a good company website that acts as your business’s catalog. If you don’t have a website, you’re not giving them everything that they need to gauge your offerings.

Besides sales, cold messaging can help you in fostering relationships with prospects and customers. Try adding value in their lives by sending out relevant, informative cold emails before pitching your business proposition.

Alisha is a Senior Content Marketing & Communication Specialist at Radix, the registry behind some of the most successful new domain extensions, including .ONLINE and .TECH. You can connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.