Here are the 7 deadly sins of Cold Emailing, or the most recurring errors people do when sending out cold emails.
Bad subject lines
There is nothing worse than sending an email, to show up in the inbox but to be ignored just because you chose a wrong email subject. If your open rate is below 20%, it is mostly because your email subjects are wrong !
In order to know your open rate, it is important to use the right tools (see previous point).
Generally, priority should be given to short and personalized email subjects.
Cold emails that are too cold
You should always use merge tags such as the first name of your prospect and the company name to personalize your email.
However, those two tags are not enough : the content of your cold email should also be personalized by addressing issues specific to the prospect, citing references of similar companies or competitors, citing common relations, etc…
A loooong content
It’s crippling : if your emails are longer than three sentences, they will not be read. Limit yourself to a maximum of 3 sentences.
Here’s a good cold email example structure :
- Introduction
- What you want / what you can bring
- Your request (a question)
You are hard-selling
The main goal of your first cold email should not be too sell something. Your main goal should be to make a first touch with a contact and to receive an answer.
Trying to sell to hard will get you no answer.
No call-to-action
All your emails should end with a specific call-to-action, otherwise your prospect doesn’t clearly know what you’re expecting. There is nothing worse than to receive a prospection email that leaves you wondering what to do.
Generally, this call-to-action is a question : it is much better to say « Would you be available for a quick phone call at 3:00? » than to say « I would like your feedback ».
In the first scenario, the prospect knows exactly what action you expect from him, this action is also very simple : answer « yes » or « no ».
No follow-up emails
If you think that sending only one cold email is enough… you got it all wrong. You should send reminder emails until you receive an answer : you will stand out from 90% of your competition.
You will always have one or two prospect who will not appreciate your insistence but the vast majority will admire your devotion.
To send out regular reminders to your prospects, there is nothing better than using the automated reminders.
You are using the wrong emailing tool
It is essential to use the right emailing software to send out your cold emails.
Here are a few essential features that are essential when choosing an emailing software:
- Mass mailing, because you don’t want to contacts on by one
- Merge tags/variables (name, company, …) to personalize the content of your emails
- Tolerance for bounced emails
- Automated follow-ups with reply detection
The last feature is important because if you want to send regulars cold emails emails with follow-ups, it becomes very difficult and time consuming to know exactly which prospect should receive a follow-up email and which message should be sent to him.
Mailchimp vs Datananas
Classic Email Marketing software such as Mailchimp, Sendinblue, or any other emailing software offer the first two features, allowing to email all you contact base at once.
Datananas is focused primary on cold emails, and this means that emails are not sent from a server, but form your (real) mailbox.
This has several advantages :
- Better deliverability : You will not end up in Spam or Promotion tab of Gmail
- Better tolerance to bounces. Adding a list of non-optin emails to Mailchimp will get you banned, but this is not the case here
- Automated follow-ups with reply detection : this is the killer feature that will increase you reply rate ! Follow-up automatically on contacts who did not reply.
- Better reply rate overall : because people only reply to real humans
The only real disadvantage is it allows less volume to be sent.
Not only Datananas will get you better reply rates, because it is built for that contrary to Mailchimp, Sendinblue or other softwares, but we also designed a feature to help you have the best cold email copy. It’s called Redactor and looks like that (Try it for free during 14 days):
