Are you giving up on email marketing because you think it is dead?
Hold your horses!
Email marketing is still one of the most essential tools for gaining and retaining customers.
Despite the fact that many new marketing methods have emerged in the field of social media, email marketing is still significant for all types of businesses. With statistics estimating that the number of email users will go up to 3.8 billion by the end of 2018, it would not be wrong to assume that email marketing is here to stay.
To say that people do not like to receive emails is an over-simplified statement. What people “do not like” is receiving spam cold emails. Unfortunately, many businesses buy email lists and start sending marketing emails to people who may not even be interested in their products or services. This is email marketing at its worst and gives a bad name to the practice of cold emailing.
If done the right way, cold emailing plays a huge role in generating leads and sales opportunities. At its best, email marketing and cold emailing helps businesses to develop and maintain relationships with potential and existing customers.
Like all other marketing practices, the ultimate goal of cold emailing is to promote a business and increase its sales. However, landing new clients with cold emails is not as easy as it may sound.
As opposed to regular email marketing campaigns that involve sending the same message to hundreds or thousands of people, effective cold emailing starts with making your own email list of targeted audience. It is then followed by drafting personalized messages for each person or company on the list.
Numerous mindless cold emails land in everyone’s inbox, every day, and let’s face the truth – most of such emails get deleted without even being opened.
If you don’t want your emails to suffer the same fate, then you have to put in real effort in planning and preparing for the cold email campaign before reaching out to people.
How Cold Emails Can Help You Get New Clients?
According to research, an average person receives around 147 emails per day out of which 71 are deleted in less than 5 minutes.
Do you know what does this mean?
On an average, the receiver spends around 3 seconds on each email to decide whether or not it should be opened. This is all the time that business owners or marketers have to gain the attention of a prospect, make them understand their message and encourage them to take the action that they want.
Here are a few ways to help you draft cold emails that get opened and receive responses:
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Determine the Lifetime Value of Your Customer
There is no denying the fact that sending personalized emails to your existing and potential customers is the key to a successful cold email campaign. But, how much time should you spend on drafting emails?
The answer lies in the lifetime value of your customer –the greater the average lifetime value of a customer, the more time and effort you should put in drafting personalized cold emails. For example, if a customer’s average lifetime value is $20,000 or more, they should not be on your email blast list. Instead, spend time to create personalized emails for them and focus more on quality than quantity.
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Speak Your Customers’ Language
In order to increase the chances of getting responses to cold emails, you should be able to speak your customers’ language. Messages that tell existing or potential customers that you know about their industries, priorities, and roles they are performing, have higher chances of getting replies. Therefore, do some research about your customers before drafting cold emails.
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Craft Compelling Subject Lines
As discussed earlier, recipients take only a few seconds to decide whether an email is worth opening or not.
How do they make this decision?
By taking a quick look at the subject line.
In order to grab the attention of your target audience and make them open your cold emails, draft subject lines that are relatable and pique the customers’ curiosity to find out what you are talking about or are offering. Keep it punchy and short. However, make sure it does not look too salesy and won’t get your email flagged as spam.
Using words like ‘you’ and ‘your’ and asking a question, in the subject line of a cold email are some of the ways to grab the attention of your customers.
Remember, your chance to sell a product or service depends upon the action of the recipients – you cannot sell them anything if they do not open the email. Therefore, the first goal of your cold email campaign is to make the target audience open your emails.
So, get your creative juices flowing.
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Make a Killer Sales Pitch
With a strong subject line, you got the recipient to open your cold email, now what?
Now is your chance to influence the reader’s decision making. Whether the prospect just takes quick look and deletes or ignores the email or takes an action that you want depends upon the strength of the pitch.
While the ultimate goal of cold emails is to increase sales, you have to adopt a smart approach. Rather than simply advertising your product(s) or service(s) and asking people to buy them, present them as solutions to the problems of your target audience. Alternatively, you can identify the gaps in a company or industry and then tell how your products or services will fill them.
The main focus of your email should be the prospect, not you or what you are selling. This is because no matter how amazing your product or service is, if it does not addresses audience’s issues or needs, it won’t sell.
Making the perfect pitch is definitely not an easy task. The key is to present realistic solutions, but in a creative manner so that your cold email stands out from numerous others that land in everyone’s inbox, daily.
Keeping in view the complexity of the task, many businesses outsource the task and get effective cold emails drafted by professionals. At Content Development Pros, we have an experienced team comprised of writers and salespersons. They work together to write customized and strong cold emails that help businesses gain new clients as well as retain the older ones.
Follow-Up is Important
A large number of cold email campaigns fail because people do not follow up. According to statistics, 80% of sales are made after five follow-ups, but only 8% of salespersons follow-up five times. Others give up before that.[1]
To make your cold email campaign successful, make sure to be consistent and follow-up. Experts advise to add something extra in follow-up emails in addition to reminding the recipients about your initial email. It could be the link to a new blog post, a company event, some big industry news. Furthermore, make it a little urgent or timely in order to prompt a reply or action.
However, be careful – there’s a thin line between being assertive and desperate!
Cold email marketing is risky and tricky; it can either turn out to be a waste of time and effort or it can give your business the boost that you wanted since forever. It all comes down to the text of the emails. To get high-quality customized cold emails written by experienced professionals, get in touch with Content Development Pros.
