Cold emailing is common practice for following up with leads and growing your client base. While the process has gained popularity over the years, it’s still fairly easy to make mistakes when crafting messages to your target audience.
Having a clear-cut strategy for cold emailing is essential to the success of your program. Overlooking simple aspects of the campaign can easily affect your outreach and conversion rate. Here are just a few cold emailing mistakes that could ruin your chances of landing a sale.
1. Sending the email to the wrong person
It’s imperative to make sure that you’re emailing the right person. Have you checked their job title and company on LinkedIn? Are they part of your target audience? If you send your email to the wrong people, there’s a high likelihood that they won’t open the message, or will send your email straight to their trash or junk mail.
To help counter this, craft your email with a few sentences that will help you reach the right person. And that means being able to reach the right person even when you send it to the wrong person. The message should convince the reader to point you in the right direction in order to help reach your intended recipient.
2. Sending long emails
When you send an outreach email, it’s vital to you make sure your message is succinct and to the point. Keep in mind that you’re probably sending an email to someone who doesn’t know about your company, product or services.
With that said, don’t craft a long message. Otherwise, it’ll go left unread. Let your email recipients know who you are, what you or your company can provide for them and include a call to action of some kind. Encourage them to schedule a call, sign up for a demo or get back in touch with you in some way. Overall, just ensure that the reader only spends a couple of seconds reading the entire mail.
3. Not sending follow up emails
Like most marketing strategies, you never know if the first attempt will work. It’s crucial that you create multiple touch points to keep your audience engaged. Some marketers don’t send follow up emails, which greatly affects the rate at which they close successful sales.
Remember, even recipients who are interested in your product are service can forget to get back to you. Sending follow-up emails makes it even easier for them to reach back out, acting as a reminder to once again grab their attention.
4. Relying on inaccurate data
Another mistake that salespeople are likely to make is relying on messy or incomplete data. Most sales companies have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which helps them keep in touch with their clients and track and measure different touch points along the sales cycle.
Sometimes, however, you find little mistakes in the customer information.
A name, for example, could be misspelled or an email address entered incorrectly. Another big cause of inaccurate data comes from purchasing email lists from a third party. Purchasing lists puts you at risk for sending emails that may bounce or be undeliverable. It’s imperative to check whether the data you have is up to date. If not, take a few minutes to clean it up and scrub your email list. Doing so could save you a great deal of trouble!
5. Using a misleading subject line
When you send an email to a potential customer, the first thing they’ll see is your subject line, making it valuable real estate. Don’t try to mislead your readers by making the subject line too flashy.
What you want is to find a balance between appealing without being deceptive about yourself or your products. You want the recipient to open the email, but the contents should not disappoint them. Spend some time coming up with a creative, but short subject for your cold email.
Devanny
Devanny (dev-uh-knee) is a Social Media Marketer based in Las Vegas. She's a dog lover with a propensity for mystery novels, and when she's not at her laptop working on comprehensive marketing campaigns, she can probably be found running around Disneyland or curled up with a good book!