Make Cold Emails Work for You

Cold emailing is not as awkward as cold calling, but it still can be a frightening thing to do. A well-written cold email could be the key you need to get into contact with employers, celebrities, speakers, and just about anyone else you want to contact. 

You might be trying to reach out to one particular person you want to partner with or you might be trying to sell your product to two dozen people you met at a conference. Either way, cold emails are a fast and simple way of communication.

Unfortunately, it is often very difficult to find a way to get somebody to notice your email amongst dozens of other messages. Most people have countless spam emails in their inbox that they never read and they might disregard your email in the same way. Here are some tips you can use to make cold emails work for you:

Keep it Short and Sweet

 Busy people don’t have a lot of time and they’re not going to stick around to read an essay when they have 200 other messages to read. Make your headline direct and to the point. Avoid the fluff in your message and stick to the bare bones. You should be passionate, but avoid gloating too much over your love for the recipient’s work. The emails should be easy to read and respond to without the recipient having to dig up extra facts or ponder about what you were saying.

Establish Yourself

 If you met the person before, make sure to indicate that. If they don’t know who you are, you must establish your credibility. Tell them what you do or what organization you are from. You can show them sample of your work, if relevant, but avoid piling on too much detail. A quick and easy way to establish yourself without taking up too much space is by linking to your website or LinkedIn profile. These links will explain everything you need to so that you can save time and space.

Remember that there are certain elements of your personality that you want to shine through: your professionalism, your confidence, and your passion. It’s much easier to decide how to display these things when you are behind a computer screen rather than when you are meeting with someone in real life. Avoid generic messages and let your personality show.

Make it Personal

 You should know something about the person you are reaching out to. Personalize the message so that it meets their needs and expectations. People are far less willing to respond to what looks like a mass email sent to a dozen other people. Take the time to begin the email with the person’s name rather than “to whom it may concern.” If you are sending out a mass email, you can use certain software to automatically add the recipient’s name to the message.

See if you two have anything in common and use that to your leverage. Perhaps you picked them to speak at your conference because of their vast knowledge on biology. Maybe you reached out to them because you both graduated from San Francisco University.

You should also take into account who exactly this person is and why you decided to reach out to them. Let the person understand why you are reaching out to them and not anybody else and how they can benefit from it. Quite obviously, people are far more inclined to perform a favor if they can benefit from it in some sort of way.

Proofread

 Once you click “Send,” the message is gone forever so any mistakes you make will be loud and clear. Sure, you can always send another email with corrections, but that seems unprofessional. Proofreading doesn’t take that long and it always pays to double-check the details. Make sure that your letter to TechCrunch doesn’t say that you are writing to The Verge and make sure that any dates are accurate. You don’t want to send yesterday’s copy-pasted letter if it still has yesterday’s date on it.

Follow Up

 It’s true that the vast majority of cold emails will never receive a response, but it’s always good to follow up if you haven’t heard back from them in a week or so. In fact, the recipient might have just forgotten to get around to answering your email because it got lost in their inbox. Make sure that you mention the first email you sent them so that you don’t come across as a complete stranger.

Conclusion

 Getting someone to read a cold email is always a challenge since most people are natural adverse to opening up anything strange or unfamiliar. However, cold emails can become your business’s top way of reaching out to new clients, customers, and partners. If you want to find out more about how to utilize this, check out my done-for-you system.

6 Ways to Improve Your Email’s Subject Lines

Massive email marketing campaigns are a great way to get more eyes on your newsletter or website since you can reach thousands of people at once. However, your campaign won’t be successful if nobody opens your message. According to Madison Logic, over 122 billion emails are sent an hour, so knowing how to stand out from the crowd is important.

Your email’s headline is arguably the most important part of the message since it’s the part readers will see first and make a split-second decision whether opening the message is worth their time. Headlines that aren’t interesting will quickly be marked as read or deleted. In fact, copywriter coach Chris Marlow claims that studies have proven that headlines are responsible for 50-75% of an ad’s success.

Knowing just how much of your campaign’s success rests on the headline alone, it’s important that you really take the time to examine how effective your headlines are. Here are a few great tips to craft better headlines:

Personalize your subject line.

A study by MailChimp examined about 24 billion emails and found that subject lines with the recipient’s first and/or last name were opened more often than those without. The most effective emails had both the first and last name, though those which only used the last name were strangely more effective than emails that only used the first name.

The power of first name personalization varied based on industries. Personalized emails sent to those in the government were opened 92% more often than usual while there was 45% difference for the creative services/agency industry. There were positive effects in all sorts of industries such as software, art, retail, and entertainment, but proved to be ineffective in the legal industry with a -31% open rate.

Create a sense of urgency.

A headline that compels the user to read right away will surely be opened. Such a headline tells the reader that there is some important information within the email that needs to be read right away and can’t be put off until later.

The aforementioned MailChimp study found that the following words results in a higher open rate:

• Urgent: 79%
• Breaking: 68%
• Important: 55%
• Alert: 31%

Note that Adestra similarly found that “alert” lead to a 61.8% increase in open rates.

You could also give a deadline with phrases like “today only” or “last chance” to make sure that they know they must act now.

Make them feel special. 

Much like how adding a first and last name to a subject line makes the email feel more personal, so too does adding phrases that make the email sound like it’s exclusively for the reader. Headlines such as “An exclusive offer just for you,” “For your eyes only,” or “A message for our dear customers only” makes the reader know that this message is just for them or their group of people.

Keep it short and simple.

Your subject line should ideally be 6-10 words, under 50 characters, and provide a description of what the reader can expect in the message. People are used to receiving an overabundance of emails and won’t want to waste any time on something that doesn’t immediately meet their needs. Subject lines that are too vague or too detailed won’t be opened very often.

Short headlines are especially important when considering that 40% of emails are opened on mobile and that longer headlines will get cut off. You can shorten your headline by using contractions and not spelling out numbers. (i.e. “don’t” instead of “do not” and “45” instead of “forty-five”)

Capitalize each word.

MailChimp found that capitalizing each word in the subject line lead to a 7% increase in open rate while only capitalizing at least one word lead to a -1% open rate. These numbers are small, but they shouldn’t be overlooked. If you have a very large mailing list, the small percentage points can translate to hundreds or thousands of consumers.

Use an A/B test.

You will likely reach a situation where you have multiple headlines you would like to use, but can’t decide which one is best. You should A/B test them by sending them to segments of your mailing list. Collect some data and then send out the winning headline to the rest of your list.

Make sure to keep as many factors as consistent as possible. For example, if you sent Headline A at 2:00 AM and Headline B at 9:00 AM, you shouldn’t be surprised if there’s a stark difference in open rates.

Using the right headline hacks can exponentially improve your marketing success. You should use MailChimp, Constant Contact, or another email marketing service to send out your emails, track statistics, and watch your numbers grow. You can find more useful marketing tips with my done-for-you service.

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