There are a surprising amount of factors that go into a successful cold email campaign. In addition to all the usual concerns inherent in email marketing, you need to worry about actually getting your campaigns into inboxes.

It can seem challenging to create a campaign that covers all the technical requirements for high deliverability and can generate clicks and conversions. So what’s the best approach to cold email?

Here’s a step by step guide to follow that will help you check all those boxes.

The Best Cold Email Approach for Generating Leads

Step 0: Make Sure Your List is Good

While not related to your campaign, your contact list is directly related to your ability to get results. You need to ensure you’ve got a well-targeted list sourced from a reputable data provider. If your list is full of bad data, or badly-targeted contacts, your campaigns can’t succeed.

Step 1: Determine Your Angle

Make a list of your product’s biggest selling points. What problem does it solve? What’s particularly awesome about it and makes it stand apart from the competition?

Once you’ve got that, pick the one that’s most relevant to your target audience, and the second-most relevant point as well. Those will be the ones you talk about in your email.

Don’t worry – you’ll use the others as well. Set them aside for now. Take the points you’ve got and open up a new campaign, because it’s time to write.

Step 2: Craft the Subject Line

Your subject line should get just as much care as your email body. It’s your first impression and the factor that will determine whether or not anyone opens your campaign, so it’s worth putting the work in.

Your subject line should clearly communicate the value that’s inside your email. In other words, it should tell the contact exactly what benefit they’re going to get.

For a more detailed look at crafting subject lines and excellent email content in general, check out our guide to cold email copywriting.

Step 3: Impactful Body Content

Here we are – the main event. You’ve got a great contact list and a subject line that people can’t help but open. It’s time to write your email.

Take the main selling point you identified earlier. What problem does it solve? Make that your opening line, so you’re immediately telling the reader that you’re familiar with the challenge their facing – and you can help them solve it.

Then introduce your product and how it solves that problem – namely, via that selling point you chose. Back it up with your secondary point as well.

At this point, you should have three or four sentences, all of which are aimed at introducing your product and hammering home that it solves the problem at hand and offers even more value.

Now, if you want to, you can include a bit of social proof. Something like “Company X was able to achieve a 242% revenue boost with [product], and I think we could get similar results for [their company]. Here’s the case study.” Link to the case study, of course.

Now you’ve got a strong selling point and some proof to back it up. If you’ve done a good job of identifying your audience’s problem and convincingly solving it, they’re ready to learn more.

This is where you come in with a strong call-to-action. If your campaign goal is to get people to sign up for a product trial, for example, hit them with “Don’t take my word for it – try it for yourself” and a nice prominent CTA button with the text “Get Your Demo”.

Link that CTA to your landing page (which we’ll talk more about in a moment).

Step 4: Seal the Deal with a Great Landing Page

In general, you should have a dedicated landing page for each campaign. This enables you to focus solely on backing up your email campaign with your page content.

Remember those other awesome selling points you didn’t use earlier? Now’s the time to break those out. Include them on your landing page for added persuasiveness.

It’s critical that your conversion method (in most cases, a form the contact should fill out) is immediately visible on page load, without scrolling. This is called being “above the fold”, a phrase that comes from physical newspapers, where the most important content was at the top of the front page, where it’s visible even when the paper is folded up.

Your “above-the-fold” section, or hero section, should have your form, a single main headline, and some brief content designed to reinforce the message in your email.

Your additional points can be below the fold – the idea is to provide just enough content to convince people to convert, without bogging down your page’s load speed or overloading your contact with information.

Load speed in particular is important. Many people check their emails on mobile devices these days, so it needs to be optimized for mobile as well as desktop – which means the less content and media you pack onto the page, the better.

Your landing pages are a crucial step in your email campaigns, even though they happen after the email’s work is done.