You might have heard about the success stories of people who have built their businesses with cold email marketing or you might have seen the dark side of it where marketers turned spam. That is kind of true but won’t be the case for you if you do it in a proper way. Remember, cold email marketing is not just sending a bunch of emails to strangers, it’s a lot more than that. If you are considering cold email marketing then this is the blog for you. Here we will go over the basics of cold email marketing, why it’s so effective and how to avoid making it spammy.
Why cold email marketing?
The internet has changed the way we do business. Today, it’s easier than ever to promote and sell your products, services, or ideas. But it’s also easier than ever to get buried under the sea of information that’s out there. You need to stand out in the crowd, and you need to connect with people who are ready to buy. Cold email marketing is one of the best direct marketing tools available, and it can be used to establish relationships that lead to sales. Cold email marketing is not spam, and it’s not unethical. It’s about making contact with people who have expressed interest in your business, and it’s about following up with those people to turn them into customers.
The step-by-step guide to Cold Email Marketing
Cold email marketing is a great way to get your business known. Many successful companies started with cold email marketing. The majority of people think this is spam, but that is not true. It’s a great way to reach people. With the right strategy and some creativity, you can get results. In this article, we will show you how to do cold email marketing properly with a step-by-step guide.
Step 1: Do the research about your audience
Before doing anything, you must know your audience. You must know people of which category can be your potential customers. This is the most important step that can prevent your emails from turning into spam in the future. For example, you do not want to send an email about your “restaurant management software” to a car repair shop owner. Because probably he/she does not need your restaurant management software and certainly that email will look like spam to him/her. However, if you send the same email to a restaurant owner, probably he would be interested in trying your service.
Step 2: Find the best matching leads for your campaign
This is the most important part of cold email marketing. If you cannot get matching quality leads, then the marketing is not going to work at all. There are a few ways to get quality leads in a short time.
- By Using Ads: Getting leads by using ads is a common method. But this is not cheap and is a very time-consuming process. However, the quality of these leads is usually great.
- From YellowPages: If you are looking for B2B Leads (local business leads), this might be the best option for you. You may already know that the YellowPages are known as the directory of local businesses. Millions of businesses are listed there and they are well categorized. Most of the businesses listed here have contact information (or at least their website). So, this can be a great source of B2B Leads. You can try using our Reoon YellowPages Scraper (B2B Lead Generation Tool) to extract leads from YellowPages in no time. You just need to put the keyword and the location and the tool will do the rest. The software can also scrape the company’s website for the most recent contact info.
- Software: Reoon YellowPages Scraper (B2B Lead Generator)
- Video Demonstration: https://youtu.be/rN7pG0MNrWg
- Get a List From 3rd Party: We do not recommend this anyway. Because in that way you will not be able to verify if the provided list is really as they are promised because they will not tell you the source of the data. You just have to take word for it. Statistics show that 80% of the time the data collected in that way is not labeled correctly, which results in failure most of the time.
Step 3: Run a validity check and filter out all the bad leads
This step is probably the second most important thing to do before starting sending the emails. No matter how you have collected your leads, there will always be some bad leads. And when it comes to the scraped or collected email list, verifying the leads should be the number one priority over anything else. The dead leads can include the following types of email addresses:
- Invalid Email: Invalid syntax, not written correctly.
- Dead Email: Domain expired or does not support email, etc.
- Disposable/Temporary Email: One-time use only and after that no one checks it.
- Disabled Email: The email account is disabled or deleted.
- Inbox full: The email inbox is full and can not receive any more emails.
- Role Email: A few role emails (i.e., support email) are not harmful. But if the percentage is high, this can be harmful to the email’s reputation.
- Catch-All Emails: This type of server accepts email to any address even if the email does not exist. So, it is always recommended not to send email to these addresses.
These are the common type of email addresses, which will cause your email to bounce when you send it to these addresses. You may already know that bounce is not good for email reputation and often this makes your email address marked as a spam mailer. Sending emails to these emails will (but not limited to) cause the following major problems:
- Increased Bounce Rate.
- Reduce Domain Reputation.
- Reduce IP Reputation.
- Email will start going to the spam folder.
- Less response and less success.
So, what is the solution? The salutation is relatively simple in that case. Just verify your email list and filter out all the bad ones. We also provide an Email Verification Service to help you with that. You can easily clean your full email list and filter out all the bad emails with minimal effort. You just need to upload your list and we will do the rest automatically for you with 99% accuracy. You can try it from the link below.
- Service: Reoon Email Verifier (Online).
- Video Demonstration: Coming Soon.
Once you are done with the email cleaning, you are fully ready to go for the next step.
Step 4: Prepare your sending email addresses and warmup them properly
There is a very high chance that your email will get rejected if you send it from a very new email account or if your email account is not properly configured. You should always try to make sure that the configuration of your email server is 100% correct before starting any email campaigns. Also try understanding the difference between personal free email addresses (i.e. Gmail, Outlook etc) and the business addresses and the benefits/limits of one over another.
You also might want to use a good warmup service to warmup your email addresses for about a month. Also when you start sending emails to them, make sure not to send more than 10 emails per day from one email address at the begining. Gradually you can increase that number up to 50 or more depending on the performance of your email campaign.
Step 5: Do not start sending emails like a spammer
Everyone hate spammers. So, please do not be one of them. Only because you were able to get a list of valid email addresses doesn’t mean that you earned the rights to start spamming them.
Step 6: Write the best-personalized email as a person
It is very important to write the email as a personal email, not like a newsletter or poster. Remember, that person has not opted you for that. This is what can differentiate your emails from being spam. Probably this is the first time you are contacting that person and so make it like you are a real human being personally contacting him/her. Do not force him/her to buy anything or do not just jump into selling. Be soft, and friendly and try to explain the benefits he will get from using your service. Focus on his benefits, not on how good your service is. Remember, at this point, he is not looking for your service. So, it is your primary task is to make him/her understand how he can get benefited. And if you can convince of the benefits you are offering, they will ask you for your service. The key rules to remember:
- Rule 1: Write your email like a human.
- Rule 2: Map out your customer touch points.
- Rule 3: Focus on the customer’s benefits, not on your service.
- Rule 4: Do not overwhelm the customer with extra information. Keep everything simple.
- Rule 5: And finally, always be personal, as you truly want to make a difference in your customers lives.
Once you have written the best email by keeping everything above in mind, you are ready to send your first email. Although the email is written in a personal format, you can send it to thousands of potential leads with a single click. There are a lot of services out there. You can google it and find the best one for you.
Step 7: Don’t forget to send follow-up emails
After doing everything mentioned in the above steps, a big percentage of customers can still ignore your email. It’s human nature not to think about much at the first time. Even there will be a lot of customers who will not respond even after reading your email and feeling interested. Most will think they will check it later and eventually forget later. So, here the points are:
- People do not pay much attention to the first read.
- People do not want to try in the first read.
- Some interested people think they will try later, but forget eventually.
- People do not want to think that you are real (even if the email was personal).
So, what is the solution to all these problems? The solution is again really simple. Just send them a follow-up email after a few days. Make sure to make this follow-up email look like a soft reminder and super personal. The email can start like “Hi [Customer Name], I sent you an email a few days ago about something. Did you get any time to check that? I am still waiting for your reply. Thank you.” Statistics show that, if for a particular email, the response rate is 5% in the first email, the response rate jumps to 20% or more at the next follow-up email. You can send a few more follow-ups after that. But if the user still does not respond, you may consider this user is not interested and probably you should stop emailing him at this point and focus on the other potential customers.
Step 8: Continue the conversations with a real human being (No Bot)
This is the most important part where most of the marketers lose their potential customers from being paid customers. Marketers so much focus on automation that they forget the most basic part of this cold email marketing, that is what they promised (indirectly). You have started email marketing pretending like a real human being. So, when someone replies to your email, they expect you to be a real person (not an automated bot). So, this is the time you start respecting that user. When someone writes a reply to your email (manually), you should immediately transfer that user to one of your real agents. The real agent should read the email carefully and understand what that user saying. After that reply again based on the previous reply. Try to make it like a friendly real conversion. Try to respond as fast as you can. Eventually, this will build trust in that user and there is a high probability that eventually he/she will become your paid customer.
Step 9: Analyze the results, update your marketing strategy and continue
You should not ignore the fact that there might be always a better strategy. You can make small changes to your email campaigns, like changing the tone of the email, changing the timing, etc. Try to learn what works best and what works less. Always try increasing the quality of your emails. Remember, the best thing never comes out just with one or two tries. There will be errors and you will have to do it again by fixing these errors.
Final Thoughts
We hope you enjoyed our article on how to get thousands of customers with cold email marketing. We know that this can be a difficult subject to research, and we’re happy to be able to provide you with a guide that has been tested over time and found to be effective. If you have any other questions or concerns about this subject, do not hesitate to contact us Thank you for reading, we are always excited when one of our posts is able to provide useful information on a topic like this!
