The 9 Most Important Cold Emailing Tips You Need to Know

Have you tried sending cold emails to people and found that no one responds to them?

We’ve all been there. It sucks!

You spend hours targeting your cold emails and crafting email copy. You spend a lot of time racking your brains for a good subject line.

Then you finally hit send with a feeling that you’ve killed it and in a few hours your inbox will be filled with replies. But after a few hours when you check your inbox for the replies, you realize that you weren’t right. You wait for a few more hours without batting your eyelashes for responses. But when you didn’t get the replies you were hoping for you look at our email stats, you notice that the opens aren’t up to the mark, and the response rates are even more dismissal. You feel depressed.

Does it feel like getting results from cold emails is a big challenge?

It doesn’t really need to be so hard. Here are 9 tips that work, even if you don’t know how to craft a cold email:

1. Be smart with your subject lines but quit cleverness

Simple and to the point subject lines outperform clever alternatives every time.

Why?

Because of clarity rules. People will only take a glance at your subject lines before deciding whether to open your email or ignore it — so the clearer and more succinct your subject line are, the better. But merely being clear will not help you capture the attention of your recipients. To capture attention, you need to make sure that it’s enigmatic. Now the question is how to do that? Well, it’s very simple; Google the term “Cold email subject lines” or “Good cold email subject lines” and check the articles. This way you can learn from the masters. Steal their approach first – then innovate.

The role of your subject line is to capture attention it is the role of your email copy to hold it.

2. Brevity is the key

Keep your subject lines under 50 characters. Why? Because 66% of all emails are now opened and read on mobile devices – your subject lines will get truncated if they are longer than 50 characters. If people can’t read them, they will not open your emails.

3. A/B test the subject lines

Use A/B testing — not your guesswork — to pick the right subject lines. Why? According to stats, A/B testing your subject line can increase open rates by 49%.

If you are not clear what should you A/B test? Here’re a few suggestions:

• First name personalization

• Location of the recipient

• The industry of the recipient

You should test how adding these things in your subject lines affect your open rates.

Remember, the more optimized your subject lines, the better the chances that recipients will open the email and vice versa.

4. Use personalization

This is a no-brainer, but many email marketers still miss it. Using personalization is an excellent way to make your subject lines stand out. Personalized subject lines will undoubtedly outperform the non-personalized ones. At MarketJoy, we conducted a study: We sent over 5000 cold emails, half with the personalized subject line and another half with a non-personalized one. The personalized one had a 21% higher open rate. But, by personalization, I don’t just mean adding someone first name in the subject line – though it does work. But, if you don’t want to use subscriber’s first name in the subject line, you can use conversational words (like you, your) to make it sound personal. Also, you can use the name of their company or any other data you have about them to personalize the subject line.

Given below are few examples (have picked these from the web):

“Special savings for [first name]”
“Did you enjoy [recent event]?”
“[Mutual Connection Name] said I should get in touch”
“We met at the Growth Marketing Conference”
“A new HR strategy for [company name].”
“A savings of $25k for [company name]”

5. Embrace segmentation

No matter how good and well timed your messages are if they’re not relevant they aren’t valuable. Different people want different things what may be valuable for Tom may not be valuable for Jerry.

Segmenting your customers is the key to relevant messaging. But when it comes to cold emailing marketers often overlook segmentation, as figuring out the best way to compartmentalizing the contacts is tough. To make it a little easier for you, given below are a few ways to segment your email database:

• Industry

• The geographic area or Zip code
• Seniority level

• Persona

Segmenting your email database takes time, but it Pays Off.

6. Be intelligent with cold emailing

Cold emails are a great way to generate leads. But they’re a great responsibility. If you send irrelevant messages, people will get annoyed. If you want results from cold emails – add value first. Also, if you send the same message to everyone, it can hurt your business badly. So, it’s important to be smart with your cold emailing and send only targeted messages.

In an era of marketing overload, cold emails only work if they’re relevant.

7. Keep it concise

Write your messages with rigor. People get turned off by wordy messages; your copy should be concise and to the point. When writing your email copy keep the emphasis on being brief and clear – make it action-oriented too.
The copy is the most crucial element of your emails — once written, you should edit it and try to cut your text as much as possible.

When writing your cold email copy remember; being crisp is more important than being clever.

8. Clean your data to maximize deliverability

Cold emailing works but only when it reaches to contacts. Most businesses don’t clean their email database. They forget that it’s vital to run hygiene checks to their email lists as its non-permission-based list. If you are sending emails to a purchased list, it’s important to scrub the data to prevent your emails from landing into the spam folder.

9. Send at the right time

This one is a bit tricky; you don’t have data about your recipients like e-commerce companies do. So, optimizing your send time for each recipient isn’t possible. But what you can do is optimize your send time according to the time zone of your recipients.

Why?

Because all your email recipients may not be in the same time zones as you are.

Sending right messages at wrong timings won’t help you get good results from your cold email campaigns. To get good results do consider when your recipients want to hear from you. Here are some specific questions to ask yourself before deciding the send time:

• Does a particular time of day make sense to reach out to people?
• What time zone my recipients are located in?

Customize your delivery time for better conversions (especially if your email database is huge); segment your users by time zone to avoid 4am message mishaps.

Time it right; timing can make or break your cold email campaign success.

The tips in this article can have a huge impact on your cold emails open and response rates, but you need to use them incessantly.

What are your thoughts? Are you using these tips?