Boost b2b cold email campaigns, Do you want to know the basics of cold emails in marketing and how they can enhance your efforts? Good. Get help with this guide you should read from beginning to end.
Cold emails are messages you send to people who are neither your clients nor your acquaintance. Cold emailing is one of the pillars of email marketing, and if you want to start right with it, make sure that you target the right audience for your business.
It is easy to find the emails of your prospects with the use of email finder tools. After finding these emails, you should construct personalized messages to send to those prospects.
Sign up to a website that offers cold email tools and services in one platform, including:
- Email finder
- Email tracker
- Email verifier
- Send bulk emails tool
Boost b2b cold email campaigns, what is a cold email?
What are cold emails, and how do you write effective messages that make your prospects respond to you and do actions favourable to your business?
Cold emailing is simply connecting with your target audience using emails. The emails are randomly sent, with you hoping that your recipients will read them and later do business with you.
For instance, by using wildcards in your address line, your company can send emails to all people in the world. This way, thousands of recipients with email addresses will receive your message. Usually, that’s how it works.
However, you can have targeted messaging, where your recipients come from a segmented listing, which you will do so that you will have higher open and response rates with your emails. For those who have B2B businesses, segmenting your email listing can help.
It can help you create more personalized messages that resonate with your recipients and save money by not sending emails to those with a zero chance of engaging with you.
Sending emails to uninterested parties will be a waste of your time. Even though you have no prior contact with your audience, segmenting your listing will help you succeed more in getting your audience’s attention, and making them do business with you.
The trick is to know the businesses that are yet unfamiliar with your own business, but who can be potentially interested in the products or services you offer.
Benefits of cold emails for your business
Although it may sound like a bold claim, cold emailing is the platform that can drive the most sales for your business. Also, cold emailing remains relevant no matter the circumstances.
Boost b2b cold email campaigns below are the best advantages of cold emailing for your business:
- Cold emailing is not an intrusive type of marketing – The difference between cold emailing and cold calling is that the latter interrupts the prospect’s schedule, which can annoy the person. On the other hand, cold emailing allows the prospect to get introduced to a business at the pace they want.
Make sure your emails are not intrusive, or you will turn off your potential customers and make them develop an antipathy to your business. You do not want your email marketing campaigns to accomplish the opposite of your aim by being intrusive.
How potential customers see something as intrusive varies from person to person, so ask your audience often about that matter. In return, they will appreciate that you give respect to their privacy.
- The cold emailing platform is immediately scalable – Depending on the situation, you can always opt not to hyper-personalize your targeting too much if you find the approach works for you. Scaling up can be done quickly without putting a lot of effort into it.
Thus, if desirable, you can always increase the number of emails you send at once, and reach more people with your message.
- Increase conversions using the CTAs that work with your audience – Cold emailing drives conversions as long as you use the right CTAs to drive people into action.
- Cold emailing is cost-effective – It is not expensive for your business. You can convert a lot of people in no time with only a minimal investment put into it.
- Cold emailing can be tailored based on your needs – Many cold-emailing templates are available online, so make sure you choose the ones that work for you and not those that don’t. After some time, you will know the best templates to generate results and sales for your business.
- Cold emailing helps you raise brand awareness – Reaching out to several people via email allows you to land in their inbox and linger there for long. It also becomes an opportunity to get your email forwarded by your recipients to their friends and colleagues.
What to avoid when cold emailing
Besides the strict rule not to be too intrusive with your email outreach, ensure you also avoid the other common errors many marketers commit when sending emails.
First, you should avoid having your emails land in your recipients’ spam folders instead of their inbox folders. When that happens, your recipients will not get notified about your emails, and chances are your emails will likely end up unopened and unread.
There are techniques on how to prevent this from happening.
Boost b2b cold email campaigns write, next, you should avoid using your website domain as the sender of the emails. It can happen that if your emails get flagged by email servers, your website domain might get flagged, too. When your website domain gets flagged, you will have difficulties sending regular email communications to your current customers and subscribers.
So, ensure to use another domain dedicated only to sending cold emails. The other website domains you can use for sending cold emails will be taken up later.
Third, do not forget to proofread your cold email for errors every time. Make sure to use grammar checking tools to correct grammar and typing errors.
Lastly, always check that your emails do not contain broken links. Even veteran email marketers occasionally send out defective links. If this happens to you, act fast with a measured response proportionate to the damage done.
Loyal subscribers can easily forgive minor mishaps, such as sending a defective link to your Facebook account in a confirmation email. However, if your Christmas promotional CTA directs recipients to the wrong site, the damage to your business can be severe.
If this happens, immediately send an “oops” email to your recipients or work out a quick solution with your webmaster if they can immediately fix it using a redirect destination.
Optional website domains to use
As previously mentioned, do not use your website domain as the sender of your emails. Your cold emails may get a negative response from recipients and may eventually be flagged by either your own email server or the servers of your recipients.
What you do is use other domains. You have several options, including:
- .com
- .org
- .co
- .net
- .io
Purchase a couple of these domains and use them for your cold outreach. If your main website is named clothesforbabies.com, you can have another website you will use for your email outreach in the .io domain (e.g., email-clothesforbabies.io).
Experiment with many domains, but keep the names similar.
How to prevent cold emails from landing in spam folders
This is an important matter to discuss in this post, so you know how to ensure that the emails you will be sending will land in the inboxes of your recipients and not in their spam folders.
The best way to make sure that you will have high deliverability rates for your emails is to use DMARC, DKIM, and SPF authentication. Set up DNS (domain name system) for all these three protocols.
SPF – Sender policy framework
The SPF protocol will protect your domain from email spoofing, a form of cyber attack where a hacker sends an email that was manipulated to look like it originated from a trusted source.
Plus, the system will let the receiving email server know that you are allowed to send emails from your domain.
(DKIM) Domain Keys Identified Mail
This is another protocol that will prevent email spoofing on your account and show you are authorized to send emails from your domain. Plus, this protocol will help to prove that:
- The header of your email remains unchanged from the time you sent it.
- The email’s content is free from tampering.
(DMARC) Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance
DMARC is another protocol that protects the user’s domain from phishing attacks, email spoofing, and unauthorized use. It also authenticates your incoming emails with the receiving servers.
How to get started with cold email marketing
Following are the basic steps you need to do to get started with your cold email marketing:
Use cold email marketing automation software
Cold email outreach software enables users to carry out email outreach with ease. The software will automate the process for you. It can also facilitate follow-up emails and provide features like preloaded templates, result tracking, and personalization.
Use and set up the automation tool to customize and personalize your messages. If you do not do that, your emails are most likely to end up in spam folders.
By personalization, it means that you put elements such as the recipient’s name or the products they bought or viewed in your emails. Also, personalization will allow you to create more direct relationships with potential and existing customers.
Automated cold email marketing will save you time and effort in creating and sending new emails. This intelligent automation approach has been shown to boost leads and conversions.
Set up a domain for your email outreach
When registering for an email account, you can buy a domain from a seller or register directly with a company such as GoDaddy and pay the renewal fee to maintain ownership.
Choose a domain name for the domain that you will use for your email outreach. This is the name that your target market will type when they want to access your site. This name should be easy to remember and catchy.
Then find a hosting company that provides email hosting services. They will host your website and provide you with an email server.
Register for an email account
Once you purchase a domain name and hosting, you can add an email address in the control panel on the dashboard of your hosting account. Depending on the hosting package you purchased, you can use one or an unlimited number of email addresses.
Thus, if you want to add an email address, you simply access the email section of the control panel and add addresses that you want to appear before the symbol @, and the system will prepare the rest for you.
When registering for an email account, you can customize the items below:
- From “name” – This is what your recipients will see as the sender of your mails. You may use your complete name or have something like “ first + from website”
- Signature – Add a bit of your information here (e.g., your company, job role, etc.)
- Profile – Add a photo if you want. Gmail allows users to add profile photos that go with the emails they send to their recipients.
Protect your email with the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols
So, this subject has been aforementioned and discussed. It is the perfect way you can protect your email and your domain.
However, you can maximize protection for your email account by doing the following:
- Do not use email when sending critical data – If your data is compromised via your email content, you will be vulnerable to phishing attacks. Make sure to delete the copy of your email fast.
- Use strong long passwords for your email accounts. Your passwords should be hacking-proof.
- Make email security your top priority – Hackers will exploit any weakness, so take steps to protect your business from malicious people. Use commercial email hosting. They have security experts who can implement measures like intrusion detection and server firewalls.
Domain warm-up
When automating your email campaigns, you need to ensure that your email server does not discover that it is software and not human participants that create and send emails. Because if it does, your server will block your email account, and your recipients might think you are sending them spam emails.
One of the safest ways to remain safe is by limiting the number of emails you send while your account is still new. This is called warming your domain, which means sending a few emails to friends and colleagues while your account is still new.
The first type of domain warming is the use of friends and colleagues as recipients. Send them a few emails at the start and tell them to reply to you, and if the emails land in their spam folders, tell them to move the emails to their inboxes.
This signals the servers that the exchange of communications is among human participants and not initiated by software.
The second type of domain warming is called automatic warming. To learn more about this, check warming tools, such as Warmbox or Mailwarm. The service is about warming new email accounts or domains automatically. You can reach all your leads via these tools without your emails landing in spam.
Boost b2b cold email campaigns build your email list
Now that you are ready with the tools to start your email marketing campaign, it is time to find your potential customers.
- Build your ICP (ideal customer profile)
Here, you start with an obsession with your prospects’ pain points that you feel you must try to help solve for them. Then proceed to identify the following details about the people you want to serve:
- Age
- Job role
- Location
- Company name and size
These are some of the details you would like to know about your ideal customers. Their annual income, interest, hobbies, or health status might also be important in building your ideal customer profile.
- Use tools that can help generate an email list for you.
Again, there are available tools for this, and they can help you find all email addresses that match your ICP. In other words, you can find all the domains that matter to your business.
One of these tools is Domain Search. With Domain Search, you can have any number of email number addresses from each domain that you want the finder tool to verify. It can also search email addresses of prospects from a particular department or all departments of a particular organization.
Boost b2b cold email campaigns write cold emails effectively
You’re done with all those technical pieces of stuff, so it’s time to use your creativity in writing effective cold emails. The goal is to ensure that your emails resonate with your prospects and make them respond.
- Subject line
The subject lines of your emails are the first thing that your recipients will read, so make sure to create an impact there. First, make sure it is easy to understand. Here, you can utilize a question, a brief introduction of your message, or a phrase saying that you want to connect. Make it short and easy to understand.
Next, the subject line should carry a personalized tone to build rapport with your prospect. Look at these two examples: [Would you want to save 50%?] or [Are you making these 5 mistakes?]
- Body
The body of your email must first begin with an introduction that includes your name and what you and your company do. Then you proceed to explain why you are reaching out. Make sure to emphasize the value you are offering.
- Call to action
All cold emails should end with a CTA or call to action. This part can be a question or a statement that prods the recipient to take the action you want them to take. It can be scheduling a meeting or a demo, downloading an eBook, or calling for a consultation.
Boost b2b cold email campaigns have a follow-up strategy
Not all cold emails get a response, which means you will most likely need to follow up on your initial email and have a follow-up strategy. If you do not get a response within 24 hours, you must start writing a follow-up email.
Your follow-up email should contain the following:
- A recap of the message in your initial email – Do not assume that they have read your initial email. Talk about your proposition again.
- Add more value – Include details of the additional value you are offering your prospect this time around. A discounted product or a free software trial will heighten your prospect’s interest.
- Another CTA – Even follow-up cold emails should end with a CTA. CTAs are designed to tell the recipient what he can do to take advantage of the offer.
More tips for cold emailing
Make your cold emails effective. Effective cold emails do the following:
Tailor your message to your recipients
Personalization means that you know the person very well, their interests, and what they need. That means you have built a “theory of mind” about the person. This will show that you have put work into understanding them.
Boost b2b cold email campaigns validate yourself
Remember that you are a stranger to these people and that they do not know anything about you. Thus, you should show them quickly that you have credibility for them to trust you.
You can do this by showing you are an authority in the field relevant to your recipient and the thing you are requesting of them.
Give them what they want or need
Highlight the pain point of your recipients because they want to know the best solution for it. Because of their pain points, they would care about your message and respond to you.
Remember that your target audience wants a solution to their pain rather than acquiring pleasure. If you have recognized an important pain point with your recipient, highlight that in your email.
Keep it easy, short, and actionable
Best if you remember this: Long emails are less likely to be read than short ones. So, keep it short. If you can explain everything in four to six sentences, then write it in four to six sentences.
Also, emails that request clear and specific actions get higher response rates. So, make your emails easy to understand and able to spur people into action.