How is your strategy to acquire new prospects coming together?
Have you considered trying cold emailing?
Did your strategy for the cold-emailing workout?
Wondering how to make it work? Then keep reading…….
Many consider cold emailing is risky because there are high chances that your emails may end up in the spam folder or not opened at all. Cold emailing is direct, you’re putting yourself in front of your prospects for an email that may get ignored. It is a gamble or chance you have to take to bring the new prospects to your business.
If you play your cards right, a cold-emailing strategy may actually work. The market has become highly competitive and if you want to sustain then you must put your best foot forward. The first and main step for any business is acquiring new customers. You can’t wait for your prospects to find you, so take the first step and tell them that you exist and build a relationship with them.
Cold-email marketing
Cold emailing is the perfect strategy if you want to gain new prospects. Wrong are all those people who said days are over for cold-emailing. It is not dead, cold emailing is just changing with time to become more adaptable for businesses.
For those wondering what cold-email marketing is?
It is a subset of email marketing and is an email sent to people who your business have no prior contact or connection with. This is slighting different from traditional email marketing, but it is not spam. You could say this is more like a one-to-one, personalized message targeted towards a specific individual to get them into a business conversation rather than selling or promoting the products.
But the biggest risk in going through this idea is that most people just ignore such emails, so your biggest challenge is to get them interested in what you’re offering. Cold-emailing is hard because you are communicating with people you don’t know and there is no feedback, so it becomes complex to understand where and what you did wrong. All you need is a cold email guide that will help you in making your strategy work.
Here are a few tips that will work for your business.
Make it about them- not you
While writing an email you would be tempted to talk about your business, products and all your achievements. Keep your excitement in check. One such move can break your strategy. If you talk about your business and achievements the prospect may not be interested.
But instead, if you focus on your customers and talk about what they need or you think they need and how your products will satisfy their need you can grab their attention and keep them interested.
You don’t have to hurry in introducing your company, once they take an interest in your brand they will automatically reach you. Then you can tell them more about your company and its products. Remember though cold-emailing you’re trying to build a connection with a prospect you have never contacted. So it is better to be careful.
Personalise your message
If your message sounds like a template that is sent to everybody, sorry to say but you may not get high opening rates or responses. Templates are comfortable and easy. If you’re sending hundreds of emails in a day using a template will reduce errors and help you finish your work on time. But people may not take an interest because you’re not trying to connect with them, right off the bat your making the first move on selling your products. Most people may not like it and they may feel that you have put no effort into understanding them.
However, if you personalise and customise the email, then you can double your reply and opening rate. Statistics show that personalized emails have 17% more reply rate, whereas emails with no personalization have only 7 reply rate. You must be wondering is it necessary to go through all this trouble for cold-emailing. It is worth your time and effort. You don’t have to go the extra mile to make it happen all you have to do is sound more humane and address them by their first name. These little things can make your strategy work.
Address their needs/problems
Find a commonality with the person you’re sending the email. If you show them that there is something common between you and them, then there are high chances of them taking an interest in the email. This way it becomes easy for you to build a rapport with and get them hooked till the end of the email.
Or you can connect with them by addressing their pain points. People rarely take an action, but if you address their pain points you may become successful. You can offer them a way to get out of their problem. All you need to do is simply provide all the information, explain the solution or tips to overcome that problem.
Clear purpose
Remember when a person is taking the time to read your email you must respect it their time. So, make sure you have a clear purpose for sending the email. There is no point in wasting both your and their time by sending messages without any clear purpose. If you’re sending messages regularly without any purpose, your emails may end up going into the spam folder.
So to avoid that situation just simply make your purpose clear right at the beginning of your email. Be it following up on an action they have taken, sharing a blog post, offering a live demo, providing free audit, the preview of your new guide or report etc.
The subject line is important
The subject line of your email is as important as the body of your email. It has the power to make a prospect read your email. Simply put, it has the power to improve the open rate of your emails. The subject line is the first thing that catches the attention of a prospect. Make sure that your subject line is personal, interesting and unique. Your competition here is not your competitors, remember you fighting for the time of your prospect with other emails in their inbox. Keep your subject line 50 characters or less. This makes you persistent and creative to come up with good subject lines that will grab your prospect’s interest.
Give them value
Your prospects are not interested to know the achievements of your company, but they will be always interested if you offer them a solution to their problem. So give them a reason to read your email. Once you have caught their attention with a great opening line. Then it is time for you to get to the point and talk about why you have sent them an email. Create a win-win situation for both you and them. Talk about their problem and explain to them how you can solve that problem.
If you can’t add value or demonstrate how you can help them, your prospects may not be interested in a possible meeting or partnership. You can talk about how building a business relationship with you can benefit them. If you want to grab their attention, then you must show them, what is wrong in their system and why they should change it. But remember in this struggle to get their attention, don’t oversell.
Call-to-action
What do you want your prospects to do after reading your emails? You must provide them with the next step or an action to perform right. There are so many things you can make them do after your email such as schedule a meeting, reply to your email, signup for the solution, etc. Whatever action you want them to take, keep it simple and straightforward. And make sure you only add one call-to-action. Adding more than one can confuse your audience on which action to perform. Don’t ask for too much in your first email. Keep it basic and interesting and all you want from your prospects is a reply and then you can keep it going from there.
Follow up
You should not stop sending messages to your prospects when you don’t receive a reply. Did you know? More than 80% of leads are generated after that initial message. You can always connect with people by sending them follow-up messages. These messages can be directed to those people who don’t respond immediately. Don’t overbear them with your messages but send them messages at least once a week.
Signature
Don’t forget to add all your details in the signature. It helps you in introducing yourself to the prospects. As you’re planning to build credibility and trust with your prospects, providing your complete information is the first step towards it. Add your business address, phone number etc in your signature. Give them all the information that would prove the legitimacy of your organisation.
Test your messages
Don’t send the same email again and again to people. This strategy may not work. There are three things that will tell you whether your cold-emailing strategy has been successful or not i.e., open rate, response rate and sales generated. Test your emails to determine the success of your campaign. Just by sending around 50 to 100 mails you will not get any measurable data. If you want to see the results then you must send across 200 to 300 emails to understand how your strategy is working. If you think it is not working or giving you the adequate results then change your approach.
Conclusion
It is important for any business to bring prospects. And cold emailing is one such method that can help. It can be a hit or miss as your targeting new prospects who you have no prior contact with. Not always you will get replies, so you must put your efforts going and continue with what you’re doing. Follow these tips to make your cold emailing a success.
