Running a cold outreach email campaign can make a dramatic difference to your business’s pipeline, sales, and growth. If you have yet to run a campaign then you can be forgiven for wondering how you would start. The step in this article is for us to reassure you, that this isn’t a difficult process. It will require effort and an investment of time, but once you have created your first campaign the following campaigns are quicker and far more straightforward to launch.
Why Cold Outreach Campaigns Work
The overall aim of a cold outreach campaign can be generalized as connecting your business to more people. The definition of these people is that they have, currently, no intention of working with you, they are a cold prospect. By reaching out, sharing your brand and your services, and specifically how you can help them, you could turn them from strangers into customers.
Be The Expert in Your Field: Deliver genuine value and useful information in the content of your emails. If your emails are seen as purely sales or lacking substance, you’re unlikely to convert them into sales.
Find The Right Person: When sending cold emails ensure that you are sending them to someone who can act on the content that you’re sending. That means getting to know them, what their pain points are, and establishing a positive relationship with them.
Enjoy The New Leads: Cold email outreach campaigns do deliver results. The best results come from campaigns that are built on relationships, personalization, and an understanding of what it is the customer genuinely wants.
Building Your Brand: By definition, the people being contacted in this campaign are unlikely to have heard of your brand, or if they have they have yet to interact with you. These campaigns expand your sphere of influence and build brand awareness.
Traffic to Your Site: The majority of cold outreach campaigns will, at some point, include a link to your website. It might be a sales page or a resource, but eventually, you’ll begin to see traffic filtering through to your website as a result of the campaign.
Tips For Running A Cold Email Outreach Campaign
A great deal of the work for a campaign begins at the start, in the planning. Once the button is pressed, thanks to modern automations, the main thing for you to do is analyze the results and act on incoming communication. That said, before then, the planning stage:
Set A Goal
Evaluate what the purpose of the campaign is and then set a measurable goal for it. It might be as simple as building traffic towards a specific blog post with an attached call to action. It could be that you’re looking to book more meetings. Whatever the goal is, be sure to set it from the start and measure it as the campaign progresses.
Use Email Warm-Up
Email warm-up is a necessity for cold outreach campaigns. Without it, all of your planning and hard work will be for nothing as your emails hit spam filters and end up unread, unopened, and trashed. Thankfully, there are tools such as Instantly that can warm up your account to ensure that your emails past spam filters. The process is essentially emailing a small number of already known accounts and then slowly building the number of accounts that you’re emailing. A dramatic and sudden spike (such as sending a thousand emails in one day at the start of a campaign) is likely to trigger warning sirens.
Identify Your Ideal Prospects
It’s tempting to send out a cold email to everyone who might have the slightest interest in your services. The numbers might look good at the start, but you’ll notice that your engagement rates and actual leads aren’t where you’d hope they should be. Identifying people who are genuinely going to receive value from your email is a far better option.
Write Some Killer Email Copy
You have an incredibly small window of opportunity to grab a reader’s attention. It all starts with the subject line. A tiny selection of words aiming to pique their interest. Get this right and you have a reader. Then within the actual email, your copy needs to be compelling, interesting, and encourage the reader to complete your desired action. Your copy is your chance to communicate. Don’t miss that opportunity. Talk to the person behind the screen on a personal level, and where possible include personalization to strike the right chord.
Validate Emails
Email verification is a necessity in email outreach. The process removes emails that are delivered to the right place, and not to a spam folder. Several tools offer an email verification service. Validating emails is a great way to increase deliverability metrics.
Divide And Conquer
An email campaign that works for one part of your audience might not work for another. Segmenting your email lists into smaller groups can increase your engagement rate and naturally forces you to personalize more. A great way to trial this is to run A/B testing on campaigns, change one variable and send the email to prospects that are alike. Measure the results and adapt accordingly.
Key Takeaways
Launching a cold outreach email campaign should be an exciting moment for you and your brand. There’s a huge amount of potential for new connections, networking, leads, sales, and growth. The detail is in the prep work, spend time there and results will follow.
- Personalization is king when it comes to increasing engagement in a cold outreach campaign.
- Ensure that you have a clear goal and linked call to action for each email.
- Testing, evaluating, and adapting the emails sent will yield results in the long term.
