For B2B marketers, email marketing remains among the most popular and effective forms of marketing. But to really boost the ROI of your email marketing campaign, you have to master the art of the cold email. What are you going to say to a prospect you’ve never met and perhaps someone who has never heard of your company before?
No worries. There are tens, if not hundreds, of cold email templates on the Internet these days, with some of them broken down, point-by-point, to show how they were carefully constructed to achieve a single aim: to get the prospect on the other side to respond. Here are just a few of the ways you can warm up your cold emails:
Drop a big name
Right there in the first paragraph of the email, include a name of some company or industry influencer that’s bound to get the attention of the prospect. Your goal is to convince the prospect that this is an important email worth reading.
Offer value right there in the email
There’s a unique psychological tactic used my master salesmen – and that’s the inherent willingness of people to reciprocate actions. That’s why charity organizations will solicit funding from you and send along some free postcards or other goodies in the mail at the same time – it’s a way of getting the recipient to reciprocate by providing value-for-value.
That’s why some master B2B marketers will try to offer value right there in the email. They may include a mockup of a product for you, or they might offer the first examples of a case analysis for you. The idea is to get the prospect to reciprocate by picking up the phone and calling you.
End with a question
An example of a question you might include at the end of the cold email is something along the lines of, “When would be a good time to give you a call?” or “Could I send along a sample of the product to you?” This tells the prospect exactly what’s expected and exactly what the next step is going to be.
Sometimes an email is so chock-full of data, information, figures and facts that the next step is not clear. By ending in a question, you are simplifying matters.
Customize as much as possible
The obvious way to customize the cold email is with a first sentence or two that explains how and why you know this person. Another easy way to customize is by including the person’s name within the email, or by citing a specific event or trade show that you know the person has attended, or by mentioning a recent action the person took on your website.
If given a choice between responding to a generic email or to a customized email, the winner is always the customized email. Vendors such as Customer.io can help you to personalize just about any email or online correspondence.
And there’s one more way you can create a great cold email. Inject a little humor into the email. This is albeit a bit trickier, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to someone else. But humor helps to break down any walls and show the prospect that you are a human being on the other side of the email!
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.