More than 4 billion email users exchange 300 billion-plus emails every day. Let that sink in.
Technically, you have a bigger audience than Facebook to connect with, provided you can learn to write good cold emails.
Whether you are a startup founder looking to raise venture capital (VC) money or a student looking for great career opportunities, you need to communicate with others.
Likely, those people won't be your family or buddies.
Learning to write and send effective cold emails is one of the best routes available to you to talk to such people and get desired results.
After reading this in-depth guide, you will have a well-researched process to write compelling cold emails that get responses.
Let us get started.
First, let us offer you a refresher on a cold email.
An email is termed a "cold email" if sent to someone who didn't ask for it or wasn't expecting one from you.
Feel free to check out our detailed guide on cold email marketing for more details.
Anyone who needs to talk to a person with whom they have no prior interaction can write a cold email to establish a communication line.
Here are some potential use cases for a cold email campaign:
As you would have expected, sales reps often have to write cold emails to potential clients to get new business. Cold emailing is a part of a sales organization's overall outbound marketing strategy to fill their revenue pipelines.
One of the critical jobs of a startup founder in the initial days is to raise funding for their business idea. Raising money through formal channels becomes difficult as an unestablished business.
Often, an entrepreneur will spend time crafting the perfect cold email to send to a VC partner in the hope of getting their attention and raising money.
Like startup founders, young students do not have the luxury of getting hiring calls all the time. They need to reach out through cold networking on LinkedIn or cold emailing to land a satisfying job or internship opportunity.
We have broken down the entire process of writing effective cold emails into logical sections and explained them in more detail below. Let us go through them one by one.
When sending out a cold email, you must know who you're targeting before running your outreach.
This step will help you avoid wasting time and effort on people who aren't interested in what you have to offer.
If someone gets 50 emails a day, how can yours stand out? It all depends on how well you know your target audience and what makes them tick.
Knowing your potential customer or cold prospect will help you craft a compelling message that resonates with them emotionally and that they won't be able to ignore, increasing your response rate.
Before we jump to the subject line, let us pay attention to the "Sender name" displayed alongside the email's subject.
By default, your email service provider will set it to your full name, but we recommend changing it to something more personal.
What you choose will depend on what the reader prefers ultimately. Of course, you can always try different sender names to find the most suited one.
Also, as a thumb rule, your sender display names shouldn't be longer than 25 characters to avoid truncation on certain email clients and screen sizes.
33% of recipients decide to open an email based on the email's subject line alone. That means that even if the content or opening line isn't great, you have a good chance of getting some opens if you can write a good subject line.
However, creating good email subject lines that get high open rates and pass spam filters can be hard.
Try including at least one of the above tips when writing your subject lines to make them stand out. But always avoid spam words for a higher chance of hitting the inbox.
If you want to dig deeper into the topic of subject lines, we have written an in-depth article covering subject line best practices with examples.
The opening line is your hook if the subject line is the bait. It covers the first few lines the reader will immediately see after opening the mail.
Like any other type of intro, its purpose is to grab the reader's attention and get them intrigued enough to scroll down and read our email body.
Also, suppose you are not using email marketing software to add explicit preheader text into your emails. In that case, your opening words will be shown to the recipient after the subject line, giving you one more reason to optimize it.
The truth is that there's no one-size-fits-all answer for how to write an appealing cold email introduction.
If you succeed in getting the reader interested in your intro, they will want to get more details about what you have to offer.
This is your chance to present your solution in the most specific and relevant way possible.
You can't expect the reader to trust you solely based on a sweet offer. They would need some social proof to be comfortable carrying out the conversation further with you.
Our advice is to establish trust with the reader using social proof elements.
See what all you would be able to sneak into your email copy. The more impactful, the better. But make sure your points are legit and verifiable.
Ultimately, the prospect will want to do some digging to believe in your claims.
Personalization is at the core of everything you write in your cold email.
It gives the reader confidence that you have done your homework in learning about them and their needs and may actually be able to offer value to them.
You can double your email response rates by applying some advanced personalization techniques.
Advanced personalization means adding specific content beyond the standard Hello {first name}.
If you did your audience research well, you should be able to add advanced personalization to your emails.
Now that you have numerous personalizable elements make the most of this opportunity. It is much easier to talk to someone like a colleague than a stranger.
You must avoid using overly complicated language and jargon when you send a cold email.
This is because the person reading it may not have the same level of understanding as someone who works in your industry. So if they don't understand what you're saying, they'll often just ignore it without reading further.
How short? As per a Constant Contact study of over 2.1 million emails, emails with around 20 lines of text get the highest click-through rates.
Your key takeaway should be that simple, short, and concise cold emails perform much better than longer convoluted messages.
However, you can always test the ideal email length for your campaigns to learn what works best for you.
You want people to take the action you want them to, so clearly communicating what that action is will help them do so.
It may seem obvious, but too many people forget this simple fact when writing cold emails.
That means including a call-to-action (CTA) in every email you send.
Your email closing should have a sign-off message like "Best regards" and your signature.
A simple and clean signature helps let your potential client know who you are, what you do, and how they can get in touch with you.
Please be careful not to overshadow your CTA with your signature. You can use extra spaces to separate them.
Cold emails can be enhanced using several sales copywriting frameworks. They make it easy for you to start with a logical structure and develop a well-written first draft.
Pro Tip: You can utilize all of the above copywriting frameworks with CopyAI's suite of AI-powered copywriting tools. When writing your cold email copies at scale, this will be a game-changer for you.
For those still wondering how to start and what to write in your cold email, you can draw some inspiration from real-world cold email examples that have got even the toughest of prospects to respond.
To make it easy for you to refer to such emails, we have curated the best cold email examples.
While you should never just copy a cold email template, you can benefit from them if you use them wisely.
Templates are a great way to document the best of what has worked for someone and make it accessible to others.
You can build your collection of frequently used templates and personalize them to every prospect.
We have created a vast list of cold email templates you can copy and edit to meet your specific goals.
In an ideal world, your cold email should get you the desired response in the first attempt, but unfortunately, it doesn't usually work that way.
70% of senders give up after the first unanswered mail.
But if you want to get traction with your cold email strategy, follow-ups are a must. Research shows you have a 21% chance of getting a reply to your first follow-up email alone.
You should follow up at least twice on every unanswered cold email, no matter how frustrating it may feel.
Whatever results you may be getting from your cold email campaigns, you should monitor them closely. Without a proper analysis workflow in place, you would have no way to improve your outreach.
So, you must give time for retrospection based on data and make improvements along the way.
It is time for us to sign off from this blog, but you are just getting started.
Cold emails are one of the most cost-effective and direct ways to connect with your potential audience but not the easiest to execute.
However, you don't seem like someone who gives up quickly. That is why you spent valuable time reading this guide to learn more about the art and science of writing effective cold emails.
With the right attitude, patience, strategy, and a few follow-ups, you should be able to hit some home runs.
Happy cold emailing!
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