Cold email campaigns can seem like a lot to wrap your head around. Beyond the usual roadblocks in email marketing, you need to be thinking of list hygiene, email open rates, filter-friendly content, and being engaging enough to avoid high bounce rates.

Fortunately, we’re here to help you maximize the value of your cold email marketing campaigns. Follow these five simple steps to create the best cold email for your business.

Step 1: Check Your List Quality

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

If you use a service like Clickback, email verification and list hygiene are included.

Step 2: Show Off Your Product or Service

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

Pick the benefits that are most relevant to your target audience. Those will be the key selling points you communicate in your email.

Step 3: Create an Eye-Catching Subject Line

Your subject line should get just as much care as your email’s body content. It’s your first impression and will determine whether anyone opens your campaign, so it’s worth putting the work in.

Be sure to 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, check out our guide to cold email copywriting.

Step 4: Showcase Persuasive 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. Introduce your product and its selling points you identified earlier.

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.

Here’s where 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 offering your solution, 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 like “Get Your Demo”.

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

Step 5: Seal the Deal with a Great Landing Page

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 awesome selling points you identified earlier? 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.

And that does it. As outlined, if you stick to these five steps, you’re well on your way to growing your reach and expanding your customer base with the best cold email campaigns. Check back on our blog for more email marketing tips or have them delivered to your inbox.