By Steve Garland
Our inboxes are full of emails, and most of those emails are full of crap. When prospects receive a cold email their first instinct is to either ignore it or delete it. Or flag it as spam. Getting flagged is bad. If too many prospects flag your emails as spam, at some point, email filters will start to do it for them. Your deliverability rate will suffer. No opens, no replies, no sales.
Pretty bad, huh?
Here’s the other side to this particular coin. Most sales emails are generic, poorly written, and ignored. Once you learn how to cut through the noise, you’ll instantly leave your competitors far behind. It just takes a bit of work.
1. Pay attention to prospecting
Here’s a shortcut to the spam folder: Email people who don’t know what you’re talking about.
If you need to get more customers, it’s easy to spiral into sending tons of emails to random addresses. That includes people who have left their jobs or people who don’t work in the industry you target. Don’t do that. Instead, take prospecting to heart.
Start with building your own ideal customer profile (ICP). An ICP is shorthand for a list of characteristics you want to see in your prospects. Jot down things like:
- Industry you plan to target
- Type of a company you want to convert
- Size of the targeted company
- Role of the decision maker you want to get in contact with
An ICP will help you achieve more targeted prospecting. Instead of hunting for email addresses, pursue people most likely to respond. This can be achieved with tools like Sales Navigator. Plug your ICP into its Advanced Search and Sales Navigator will generate a list of prospects. (It’s useful for B2B prospecting in a lot of other ways, too.)
2. Personalize (and research prospects before you hit send)
The thing that makes so many people so averse to cold email outreach is how generic it often is. Here’s an example of a typical email template I see in my inbox:
Hi,
I’m [name]. I’m sending you a message about this article: [article title]. Cool read! I really liked the part that said: [random quote from the article]. By the way, I recently published an article on the same topic called How to Write Better Sales Emails (And Never Be Marked as Spam). Maybe include a link if you’re interested?
Regards,
[name]
Do you see the problem with it? It’s such an obvious template that it’s insulting. My first impulse is to add that message to spam. I’ll never be interested in working with somebody who didn’t put time into research.
And most sales emails are even worse. Why? They don’t have a reason for getting in touch with you. It’s all generic filler: “Our product is cool, can I have a minute of your time?”
On the other hand, even something so simple as putting the prospect’s name into the subject line works. Write a cold email template with a lot of room for personalization. Here are some things you can mention in the initial email to build a better relationship with a customer:
- Name of the recipient
- A possible solution to a problem they have
- Reason why you reached out to them in particular
- Your reaction to their projects (blog posts, career changes, etc.)
Offering a solution is the most effective way to personalize your emails. It makes your message valuable in a way that cold emails rarely are. But it does take a bit of research. Look at a prospect’s social media pages or blog to see whether they’re working on something you can help with.
3. Master the cold email subject line
Sixty-nine percent of people who receive cold emails decide whether they are spam by looking at the subject line. For such a huge number, it’s baffling why sales reps often ignore this essential part of an email. Instead, they go with something random like: “Hello, [name].” Or even worse, something more formal: “Can I take a minute of your time?”