When it comes to cold emailing, it can be a struggle. Ensuring your campaign gets to the inbox with these cold email best practices. Engage your contacts by getting people to click and interact with your messages is challenging. Luckily, there are certain tools you can put in place to give yourself a boost.
The first element to cold email best practices is to eliminate bad data from your cold email list. Once you’ve weeded out the poor-quality contacts from your list, focusing on how to get your recipients to open your email is the next step. Some may argue it’s the most difficult aspect. Convincing those who have never heard about you previously to open your email and read it is just the first step to being on your way to a successful cold emailing campaign.
The next step is getting them to read through your content. This is where your cold email best practices are critical. You need to make sure your content is relevant. It needs to grasp your reader’s attention and keep it. If you’ve done well at executing on these critical content creation elements of the cold email best practices then not only will you generate conversions, but your campaign ROI will increase as well.
Cold emailing can be tough. It requires (lots of) patience. But mostly, it needs finesse. Here are some key cold email best practices to help you succeed.
Cold Email Best Practices: Get Results and Avoid Spam Filters
Since your relationship to this contact is cold, you need to provide valuable information in every email. Content that engages and convinces them to keep opening, to keep clicking until eventually they convert. There is no reason for them to put time into reading your message unless you’re able to provide value early. There has been no previous touch point historically. Therefore, there’s no reason to invest time in reading an email unless…it reels them in.
As tough as it is to generate engagement from a cold list of potential leads, it can be very easy to draw a prospect in. How? The cold email best practices that you need to focus on are the subject line and then the first few sentences. Fail at these two areas of your content, and you run the risk of losing your audience. And if they opt-out of future emails, then your potential revenue generator becomes lost dollars.
Deliverability is Key
Before you start crafting that stellar piece of content, you first need to ensure your emails make it to the inbox and get delivered. When comparing cold emailing to a traditional, opted-in lists, consider that it’s much easier to engage as a relationship has already been built. With cold contacts, it takes a bit more investment before you start to see an ROI. Getting your email in front of your targeted recipient is often one of the most difficult parts of cold emailing. There are a number of factors that may hinder your delivery success.
Reach the Inbox
The first stage of cold email best practices rely heavily on how targeted your list of contacts are, and the quality of each contact on your list. Contrary to what some marketers may believe, using a purchased list and sending cold emails is a great lead generation tactic. Just as you would do paid marketing on social media connecting with cold contacts who’ve never heard from you historically, emailing is no different. However, you need to ensure you obtain a quality list from a reputable data provider to start off on the right foot. Otherwise, you risk wasting your marketing budget and may not get the results you want.
When you purchase a list from a less reputable source, you may likely find it’s loaded with bad data and spam traps. These lower-quality lists may be much cheaper as these lists are full of information that is collected through scraping tools. This is software that collects data from across the internet and places them in your list.
Data providers that scrape their contacts’ info invariably will result in poor data – email addresses that don’t exist, spam traps, moles, and so on. This will ultimately set your email campaign but for failure before you even hit send. Sending to these types of lists will quickly get you on a blacklist and is against cold email best practices.
An email list verifier and hygiene checker will identify and weed out the bad contacts.
Avoid Those Pesky Spam Filters
An obvious cold email best practice is to not send spam. But what does that mean?
On a technical level, spam filters look for the telltale signs that an email that’s been sent is spammy. They do this by calculating your domain’s sender score (which we’ll get to in a minute). This accounts for things such as:
- A sudden spike in the volume of emails sent at once from your domain or IP
- Poor engagement rates (i.e. low opens and click rates)
- If your domain or IP are on a blacklist
- Whether your email content contains ‘spammy’ words like “FREE” or “Buy Now”. Or, if your email template looks spammy. Is it heavily text-based or contain too many images? (to name a few examples).
- Your campaign has a high bounce rate (i.e. emails hitting non-existent email addresses)
- If your recipients are flagging your emails as spam by clicking the ‘this is spam’ button.
Checking off even one of these items above could put your sending variables in jeopardy of getting on a blacklist. It’s these types of negative elements that will reduce your sender score. These are not part of cold email best practices. And it will undoubtedly push your email message to the junk folder.
Create Messages That Convert
When writing copy for a cold prospect, ask yourself: Would you open this email? Would you read this message? Would you take action and click, reply or fill in a form?
It’s important to always keep these key questions in mind as you’re asking your recipient to take time out of their day to read your message. So, be respectful of the reader’s time. That means making the value of your message crystal-clear at the start of your email. The quicker you can get to the action you want them to take and why it would benefit them, the higher your conversion rate will likely be.
For a deep dive into how to write exceptional, effective cold email copy, check out this guide.
Executable Takeaways for Cold Email Best Practices
There’s been a lot of technical jargon discussed above. Hopefully you’ve been able to extract the critical elements needed to build a successful campaign. At the end of it all, to ensure you’re adhering to cold email best practices, it’s critical you use a platform that handles the technical side for you.
There is a company called Clickback that specializes in Email Lead Generation, and it handles those key technical aspects for you in a simplified software. And they’ve been doing cold emailing for 20+ years, pioneering lead generation from the sending of cold campaigns.
Clickback offers a built-in email verification and hygiene checker to remove bad contacts such as spam traps, invalid email addresses and more on list import. They use proprietary sending to deliver emails and each customer has their own IPs and domains for optimal campaign sends.
And that’s just scratching the surface. If you have a list in hand, are serious about generating leads from your cold contacts then we encourage you to book a 1:1 demo with one of our sales representatives today.
