Marketers, SEOs, businessmen, and consumers have heard multiple times of “cold email outreach right”. Yeah, this strategy is a widely occurring in every niche of business. It is simple and straightforward in use but not so resultative in practice.
Nevertheless, this particular kind of outreach still stays firmly in our daily marketing routine.
Why so?
To answer this question, I would like to give a definition of “cold emailing” first.
Cold email is simply sending an email to your customer who knows nothing (and never heard) about you.
Basically, your main purpose is to sell your product; other things keep away from you. Only this fact becomes a huge cornerstone on the way to a successful “cold” outreach.
Likely, everything isn’t so bad with a “cold email” outreach! And I am going to share 10 tips on how to perform this cold email outreach right (and resultative).
Let’s begin.
SIDENOTE: if you would like to know how to do a blogger outreach correctly, please, check out this guide.
10 Tips On How To Do Cold Email Outreach Right
1. No Right Targets to Hit, No Need in Sending Emails
I won’t reinvent the wheel claiming that business must be always transparent and related to a particular niche. I believe you would agree with me that offering music instruments to a businessman who is interested in automobiles is ridiculous.
In order to get right customers, you need to do an in-depth research first. What does it mean?
It literary means you should possess a soul in patience and stick to the process of searching your potential customers. Here I would suggest you follow a few simple steps:
1. Ask Google first. As far as the best way to get new customers is to “borrow” them from your main competitors, you should use a target keyword to see what opportunities Google will offer you. Let’s say, you are an owner of some local SEO company somewhere in the UK and you would like to find new customers via the Internet. Put a query in Google like “SEO UK” and see what you’ll get:
Ha, a few solid competitors’ resources have been detected. What’s next?
2. Ahrefs Content Explorer tool. The next is to see the backlinks each web resource has. Here Ahrefs Content Explorer tool helps you. Just put your target website in a search bar and reap the benefits of backlinks.
3.1K backlinks – an impressive result. Well, having backlinks your next step is to check each and every backlink one by one. This manual search will help you get the names of potential customers you will reach out to. Don’t be afraid of a number of backlinks because I huge amount of them will be useless.
Afterward, I highly recommend you to create a list of potential customers with all personal contact data. Hence, you will have to find customers’ personal email address to make your outreach more professional.
2. Where Is an Email Address?
You might wonder why I am persisting on finding customer’s personal email because there are lots of other ways to reach him or her out. Yes, you can use social media accounts to get in touch with your customer but it will look weird to this person. You see, social media has more routine topics for discussion, while an old-school email outreach has all business attributes in it. In other words, reaching out your customers via their social media accounts will look ignorantly. Chatting with friends about last night football match on Facebook excludes any business messages from random people.
In order to stay business crystal clear, you should use users’ private email addresses. But how can you find them?
There are two ways of searching one’s personal email address:
- Skim through the information on person’s social media accounts.
- Use tools for email address hunt.
The first way is very tedious and time-consuming. I, personally, spent hours sifting data on LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook. Must say, sometimes all my tries were in vain because I found nothing at all. But, I insist on starting with researching the information on social media accounts due to a single reason – people tend to update it regularly. It means that the previous email address of the user might be invalid:
As you can see, this person changed her job position 4 months ago and, as the result, her email address has been changed as well. Please, pay attention to such details.
Using special tools like ContactOut or Voilanorbert will make the process of searching email addresses faster, easier and more resultative. All you will have to need are person’s full name and a web address of the company he or she works for.
Voila, you have personal email addresses. Don’t forget to add them to your list of contacts and go ahead to our next step.
3. Do I Know You? Show Yourself
People have always dreamt to coming in contact with the representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations. Unfortunately, all tries were in vain. In contrast to this, there is nothing hard to come in contact with other people at all. Nevertheless, there is still one problem – we don’t like to change our habits and fit ourselves into something new (in most cases). The same happens with building personal relationships.
No wonder why we tend to go to work using the same route or visit the same restaurant to have a dinner. We feel ourselves in save being adjusted to the things we are already familiar with.
Likely, in a digital world, you can make yourself known in advance. Social media is a great way to do this. Follow the person on Twitter, send him or her your “congrats” with B-day or with getting a new job. The one you want to reach out to will keep in mind your personality. As the result, your message won’t be like a bolt from the blue and the recipient will know who is contacting him or her.
4. Don’t Neglect of Discovering Recipient’s Background Info
You might think that this step is not important because who cares what hobbies or interests the customers have. Yes, it seems ridiculous to get into details but wait a minute. If you want to attract a client, you should show your interest in him or her.
The reason why it is so important is simple. It will help you create a more personalized email and impress the recipient with it. The best way to get the information on one’s background is to review all possible social media accounts. Usually, people point out their interests, hobbies, and preferences. Just filter the information and collect the data you need. How this data could be used I will show you in the next step.
5. Put Your Business Offer Aside, Make Your First Contact More Informal
What do you want to see in the very first email from a stranger? I believe you should reply to this question by yourself first. As far as I want to teach you some useful tactics, I will give you the answer to this question from my perspective.
Besides all attributes of a business message like your name, name of the company you work for, you should always pay attention to the first passage of the email. If it starts with some generic compliments and then goes straight to the point, you can be sure this message is from a mass mail. This way of reaching customers out is inadmissible.
Try to avoid offering your service or production in the first message. I highly recommend you to build your message on discussing customer personal achievements or interests. Let’s consider two situations:
- Professional user. You know for sure that this person has a website with a blog where he or she posts some publications. Great! You need nothing more over here. Please, read a few articles the person wrote and try to share your thoughts or impressions about it in the first message. People love fair complements (or thoughts) about the things they have created by themselves. It is gonna be a wonderful starting point in building business relationships in the future.
- Random user. Here is you will have to work thoroughly with the interests this person has (if he or she has no publications at all). But, anyway, you can catch up some social media activity this person did. For example, your potential customer shared his thoughts on some article – it is a great opportunity for you to reach him out to discuss this topic, why not?
Ah, haven’t just forgotten about a subject line of a well-crafted personalized email. It should reflect the main purpose of your message. Don’t misinform the recipient with your subject line. Otherwise, your message might be sent to a trash bin.
6. Emotions Move the World
Why do people use emojis chatting and sending messages? Right, to make the conversation more colorful. Yeah, emotions make your life brighter. You should not neglect of adding “emotions” in your cold emails, thus your customers will see that you tried to make a splash.
Nevertheless, don’t overdo with using emojis! A huge amount of these “signs” might distract the recipient from the actual aim of your message.
7. Short or Long Email, Let’s Think About It
Well, lots of experts state that the ideal cold email pitch should be short and to the point. You should focus on the main idea of the message and never make it complicated with lots of information.
I agree with this point of view.
BUT
As I’ve already mentioned above, the aim of a cold email should be not pitching your service but trying to attract a customer. Thus, it might require from you writing a more expanded message. Again, even though you must hit the target with every sentence.
I can advise you to consider each case individually and take it from there.
8. Remember, Your Customer Is the Main Subject of the Conversation
Let’s face the truth – we are obsessed with our own needs and desires. Especially, we push our own agenda in business relationships. I believe it is one of the cornerstones of why it is hard to “conquer” a new customer.
Source
Instead of endless pitching your offers, you should make your customer a main subject of the conversation. Teach yourself to listen to customer’s needs. This way of interaction will help you pleased a client, find out his fair opinion about your service, and improve it. Take into consideration that if the customer notices you focusing only on selling your product, he or she won’t consider your proposal seriously. Your cold email will succeed if it is relevant to your client. That’s all.
9. Rumors About the Time For Email Blast
Every Monday your mailbox is overcrowded with dozens of messages. You don’t know which message to review first. You start with skimming through subject lines and open only those that have higher priority for you. By the end of Tuesday, you check the majority messages while some of them tend to miss.
The same happens with your customers. They get lots of messages as well. And the chances that your cold email might be unread or missed are pretty high.
However, you need a solution how to reach customers out successfully.
Always pay attention to a time zone where a particular customer lives. The best day for sending email is Tuesday but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try doing email blast on other days. I, personally, send emails starting from Wednesday to Friday. The reasons why I do so are the following:
- Since Monday and a half of Tuesday are always full of messages, there is no sense to do an outreach during these days. Your messages might be lost or unnoticed.
- Days from Wednesday to Friday are less overloaded with an endless stream of messages. Yes, the recipient gets messages but little by little.
- I don’t know about you but I check my mailbox on Saturdays. I believe lots of people do the same, thus there is a chance your message will be noticed and read.
The best part of the day to do an outreach is afternoon. People end up with a dinner time and get back to work. The first thing they do is checking their inbox.
10. Follow-up Email
Some of you follow-up emails might seem too bothering. But did you know that follow-up emails get 30% higher response rate in contrast to the first message you send? Tricky, isn’t?
Let me provide you with my personal examples:
From the screenshot above you can see that my first email was sent 30 of September 2016. I got nothing in return. Nevertheless, I dared to send a follow-up message in 13 days after. This follow-up message brought me a positive result in the same day.
I can state that this tactic works great. Just make sure you waited for a few days before reaching out and don’t send overcomplicated massages. The only thing you need is to remind the recipient of yourself. That’s all.
Over to You
Cold email outreach is like a lottery. Chances your messages will be reviewed and replied are very low…but they are still real. You should not rely on a miracle or a lucky day. No. You just must do it right and the quality of this outreach will become better.
These 10 email outreach right tips I introduced you in this post will help you certainly. I won’t say that each message sent by you will be successful but the result won’t be slow in coming.
If you have anything to add, feel free to share your thought in a comment section.
Don’t forget to share it via social media channels!
See also: How to Use Email Marketing to Drive SEO Results
