At a time of rapidly growing number of advertisers, hundreds (if not thousands!) of different types of advertising messages reach consumers every day. One way to draw their attention precisely to your message is... personalization. You can achieve it with the valuable tool of cold e-mail marketing.
Personalization does not at all mean that I advise you to write a different e-mail to each person and send it manually. On the contrary! Cold e-mail marketing allows you to automate this process. It is important to design the content of the message properly and use special tools.
Cold mailing - what is it and what results does it give?
Cold mailing is a sequence of several short, extremely valuable emails for the recipient. Keep in mind that it makes sense to send and run such a campaign only if our goal is to attract a B2B customer - a partner, corporate client or entrepreneur. Why should you be interested in this?
We account for the effects of cold e-mail marketing with the client using a jointly determined KPI and an indicator that is most important to us - reply rate, calculated based on the number of recipients who responded. A well-chosen email base and carefully designed email content result in a reply rate as high as 30%. This means that if we send a sequence of emails to 200 companies, as many as 60 will respond and potentially express interest in cooperation.
How to plan cold email marketing well?
Learn 5 key tips that will help you realize effective cold mailing. We have tested them all in practice!
- How to create a good base for cold mailing?
Once the cold marketing plan has been designed, the campaign objective has been set, a workshop has been held with the client and the entire work schedule has been laid out, it's time for the next key element of the service - building the email base.
The base can, of course, be purchased for little money on sites such as www.bnf.pl. However, when testing this type of ready-made mail sets after several campaigns, we were not able to exceed a response rate of 5%. Although this is the fastest way to acquire the base, it is therefore not entirely effective. Records are often outdated, decision makers no longer hold current positions, company names may have changed and email addresses can be wrong. So how to build an effective base for cold e-mail marketing?
The most effective way to build a base of cold emails is to create one MANUAL. Even considering that finding 250-300 companies can consume up to 25-30 hours of work - it's worth it. Why? The base that succeeds in this way is the most qualitative one we can think of.
We use two tools to create a qualitative base, depending on the path we take.
- The first is LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which we use when searching for specific companies on LinkedIn.
For the example below, we would like to reach decision makers in accounting offices with more than 10 employees:
Sales navigator is able to pull us all the contact information for specifically segmented people and create a database out of them, consisting of a post
in a particular company, an e-mail address, the company's website and much more.
The second tool is Find That Lead, which is useful when we search for companies on Google business cards instead of LinkedIn. The change in approach comes from
of the fact that there are segments of companies where decision-makers do not have up-to-date and extensive accounts on LinkedIn. For example, let's take beauty salons here
in Warsaw:
The plug-in helps filter all source content on a prospect's website to search for company and personal emails to connect them with a decision maker.
- How to create a good structure of emails and define their purpose?
The content of the emails themselves must be very short and concise - no one will want to read a long story, especially when targeting entrepreneurs, who generally have severely limited time. The content of the email must carry as much value as possible for the recipient and, above all, capture his attention from the first sentence.
This is what the design is for individual distinction, based on personalization. Determining it for all records generates the most time, but at the same time it is so effective that it is worth doing.
The screen shot above is from a campaign for a client that organizes Live Cooking shows for corporations and is looking for event agency partners to sell its services. The differentiator here was who the company had carried out the last implementation for. To do this, we had to analyze the offerings of each of the 200 agencies! By including this information in the email, each recipient felt that the message was addressed solely to them.
Devoting many hours to specific analysis here resulted in an above-average reply rate of as much as 24%.
In addition to the differentiator, the main part of the email must contain a specific offer/service proposal for the customer, which also includes an element of encouragement and is backed by authority, evidence that builds trust with the audience.
The final element (crucial to any campaign) is our call to action.
ALWAYS the call to action is only one - we want to set up a meeting/phone call to talk more broadly about the potential for cooperation. This element is the most important for the reason that the response rate is, after all, our main KPI and the indicator that we account for with the customer.
(PRO TIP) - Avoid any links and redirects in emails, every clickable element increases the chance that our recipient will click and lose attention while reading and never come back to the sent email again, and we will lose the chance to respond and meet.
- How to plan the workflow of a cold mailing sequence?
Earlier I mentioned that cold e-mail marketing consists of a sequence of short e-mails. This means that there is always more than one. What are the rest of the messages sent about in the entire mailing schedule?
The whole clue of cold mailing activities is that the person who replies to us drops out of the sequence and no longer gets any notifications from us. So it's very important to set up exclusions - if we get a response, no further email goes out.
However, if we send the first email and do not receive a response - we do not give up and keep trying. We may not receive a response for various reasons - the recipient may not like the content, is not interested or has not seen the first email at all.
For this very purpose, we are creating entire cold mailing workflow.
When we don't have a response to the first message within 3-4 days - we resend it unchanged due to the fact that our open rate does not indicate that all recipients have opened it.
When we don't have a response to a second, same email, we need to work on the content and title here, assuming that most recipients have already seen the message in their inbox.
The next 3-4 emails contain all sorts of changes in them. We test new, catchier titles, increase our authority by talking about our successful implementations or quoting our customers' feedback. There are really a lot of editing possibilities but it is important to know moderation here.
If none of our emails received a response, we end the sequence and send emails to all recipients. If none of our messages convinced potential customers to respond - nothing more will change that.
The entire shipment-from the first to the last message-takes 2 to 3 weeks.
- Tested cold mailing tools
The cold e-mail marketing tool that works best for us is. SNOV.IO. It's a CRM that's ideal for drop shipments (Drip campaign). In it, we can design the entire structure and funnel of the mailing, choose the right triggers, warm up our domain or schedule the entire mailing in an intelligent way.
To avoid the risk of our messages falling into spam, snov.io sends emails, imitating a regular mail user - sending messages every few minutes. That's why the whole campaign stretches over a period of up to 3 weeks - this way we avoid email flagging, by which all our messages would go to spam.
Snov.io is also useful for other activities, such as sending automated email sequences. Thus, it can replace other such tools like MailerLite or Mailchimp. Of course, the choice of a tool is an individual decision, as there are quite a few on the market (such as Woodpecker or Lemlist) - it all depends, of course, on what functionalities you need.
- Some important hints
As I mentioned at the beginning - Cold mailing campaigns don't work in every industry or for every customer. Before proposing such a solution, think carefully about the specific segment choice and analyze its potential.
The lack of a differentiator, which is the most time-consuming, can lower our reply rate by as much as 80% - A personalized approach in messages captures the most attention and arouses very positive emotions in recipients. We then give the recipient the impression that we have become heavily involved and analyzed their company before we even wrote the message.
Buying a database in some cases is reasonable, but only on the condition that you carefully check it record by record to reduce the likelihood of errors related to outdated data.
So what, you start planning cold email marketing?
All of the above tips have been tested by us in practice! By putting these tips into practice, you stand a chance of even more effective cold email marketing right from the start.
If you have additional questions - contact me:
Good luck!