We all have those emails in our inboxes that we’ll just never open, those emails that we’re never curious enough to go beyond their subject line, so they either end up in our spam, or they’re simply ‘marked as read’. Reaching out or engaging people through emails is surely not an easy task today; people are more suspicious and skeptical than anything else in front of a computer. Yet, emails remain a crucial tool for business ever since the introduction of the Internet to the world; checking our emails has become part our morning phone routine, and our constant ‘checking my phone’ reflex.

We all know why cold emailing is called ‘cold’. (Wow strong wordplay game here) it is often assumed to be unable to establish a real connection and to convince people to take action. But is that true?

If you believe that you are unable to convince a person to take action through any mean, you might just consider stop doing business. The underlying assumption that we should have in mind before thinking about our email, is that everyone wants your product or service, they just don’t know it yet.

Ask a question, don’t ask for money.

The buyer goes through a simple process before getting to your product, which is crucial to be aware of before writing your first cold email. A common mistake that some people make is hitting their audiences with offers in the very first email, while their customers are still trying to figure out the issue; it is more likely to get a response to your email if you ask your audience how they handle cleaning at their offices rather than offering a vacuum cleaner for sale. The first awareness email is important in helping you define your target’s position in the buyer journey, once you know in what stage your client is positioned you can then send your cold emails accordingly. Here are briefly the three stages that every buyer goes through

Awareness

First come the awareness stage, at this point, our potential buyer is starting to consciously experience an issue, and start their research to better understand the problem.

Consideration

The next stage in the buyer’s journey is the consideration stage, by this time, our customer had labeled his issue and has researched potential solutions.

Decision

Finally, comes the decision stage, and this is where the buyer has decided on the solution approach and strategy, and is ready to make a final purchase decision.

What makes an effective cold email ?

A cold emailing campaign can sometimes be the only efficient strategy for salespeople to conclude sales, and advance their company’s business. Drafting, writing, then sending few hundred emails, yet getting a very tiny percentage of opened emails and even a tinier percentage of responses, this is the typical scenario that crosses minds whenever “cold emailing” is mentioned, while in fact, this is nothing but the outcome of the perpetuation of the same mistakes made when writing cold emails. The process can indeed be very frustrating, and challenging yet by following these few simple steps, you are guaranteed a more effective initial reaching our process. First, identifying the company and the specific person you need to contact. Then starting the email hunt operation using LinkedIn, Email Hunter, or Reportive. And finally, making sure you have the right emails, we suggest using Bounceless as an email verification tool to avoid any deliverability issues

Besides those very basic pre drafting steps, we’ve prepared for you today the 5 ultimate tips to make your cold emails as personal and engaging as a handshake.

Quality over Quantity

Before talking about the content of the email we should consider discussing the amount of emails we’re sending first. The trick here is to be as concise and specific as possible when thinking about our recipient; pressing send to 10,000 emails at once might feel so satisfying at first, yet, the satisfaction turns into disappointment after not receiving one single response to those 10,000 emails. The issue with a standard email written for a large audience is that we make our individual recipient feel unimportant and insignificant. Yes, he/she can feel it. Make your recipient feel that it is a one to one conversation.

The subject line

The second and most important part of our email is our subject. Before wanting our recipient to be convinced of the content of our email, we want them to open our email, duh! And the subject line is what determines their decision of what to do with that email. Steli Efti from Close.io assert that 80% of our focus should be on the subject line, and the other 20% on the content. We want our subject to be so smart and appealing that it would be impossible to just ignore. Yet don’t misguide your audience or lie in your subject, they will get mad, and that it the worst thing you can wish for.

Keep it Simple

Now after getting our brilliant subject we need to think about the content of our email. The first thing to keep in mind is that your recipient does not have the patience or time to read a three paragraphs email. He doesn’t care that much. Your email should be written in a way that every sentence is a hook that will make your audience keep reading. you can’t risk losing your audience’s interest in unnecessary details. Be concise, clear and to the point.

Sound Human

Nobody wants to engage in a conversation with a machine (except for Siri, always fun to talk with Siri). Write your email in a human way, this might sound obvious and foolish but for real, put some human touch in your email, sometime a typo can do the trick – be careful we’re not encouraging spelling mistakes here- If your email transmits just a tiny feeling of machine generation, you’re on the losing side. Another crucial hook technique for your email is making your audience feel like the email was written just for them. Make them feel that you did some research before writing your email, and that you know exactly why you contacted them specifically.

Follow up

After the satisfaction that comes after hitting send you should be aware that it is not over yet. A critical part of cold emailing is the follow up process. You can’t just send one email and expect people to come running for you right after, -although that can happen if your email is a bomb-. The ideal is to keep reminding people, and keep following up until you get a yes or no. So set a follow up strategy and stick to it for a more efficient cold email operation!

These are some of the tips that we think are valuable and useful for an ideal appealing cold email. Some of them are self-evident and obvious, but most people ignore them, sometimes, we just need a swift kick in the butt to get back on track. We would be happy to know what you think is most valuable when writing email.

What tools to use ?

Managing the cold emailing process might be complicated and a bit difficult to handle, that’s why we prepared for you a list of the most useful tools to facilitate the tracking, schedule and follow up tasks, and help you stay up to date with your

Hubspot Sales

Sidekick is the new B2C product from HubSpot, it’s an all-in-one tool, it will help you track and schedule emails, in addition to its sales tools that will provide you with warm prospect, email template, meetings schedule and sales automation with its follow up sequence feature.

Close.io

Designed to solve the problems modern CRMs present, Close.io is an effective platform developed by actual salespeople to help their fellow salespeople make more calls and close more deals and ultimately hit their targets on or before their deadlines.

Outreach.io

Outreach automates and personalizes communication to help sales and recruiting teams touch every prospect, lead, opportunity, and customer with the right content at the right time.  They provide automation that helps you create and optimize a repeatable and predictable sales process which handles the details of the operation, while you focus on crushing your numbers.

PersistIQ

PersistIQ is an outbound sales platform that will help you convert your cold leads to real sales opportunities with its automated sequences of emails. It has also a chrome extension to get information from social profile to fill up your pipeline with ease.

Connector

Connector by contentmarketer.io is powerful tool to close more deals, it has high converting email template that you can schdule, send and followup right from your Gmail.