Cold email is one of the best and most undervalued B2B lead generation methods out there. While it’s powerful, it can also be challenging to pin down.

Cold email has a bunch of extra hurdles you might not really be concerned about with opt-in campaigns. That’s okay – we’re here to show you how to get the most out of it.

Here are some quick, easily-implemented hacks you can use to take your campaigns to a new level.

Check Your List

The most important factor in your email campaigns isn’t your subject line, CTAs, body copy, or landing page. It’s the contacts you send to. If your contact list isn’t awesome, your results won’t be either – no matter how slick your campaigns look.

First question you should ask yourself: where’d you get your list? If it wasn’t from a reputable data provider that aggregates their lists, you should cut your losses and replace it with a high-quality list.

The reason is that many list vendors sell scraped data. That’s lists full of addresses that they scraped off the internet using a bot. These lists are full of bad data, nonexistent addresses, spam traps, honeypots, and other problematic items. Plus, chances are that even the real people that might be on the list aren’t the right audience for your marketing.

In short, scraped lists just don’t get the job done. In fact, they hurt you more than they help, because sending to them is a great way to torpedo your sender score and get yourself blacklisted.

If you need a good list, but you aren’t sure where to find one, get in touch with us. We partner with a number of reputable providers and can happily refer you.

Personalization and Punch

Email personalization isn’t exactly new. People know when they see their name in an email, it’s often because it’s a token, not because the email was written just for them.

The thing is, even knowing that, it still works.

Everyone knows that using first name tokens is good practice. A less commonly-used trick is to use the contact’s company name. It makes sense, though. When you’re looking at B2B lead generation, the most effective way to catch someone’s interest is by appealing to their professional challenges.

This goes double if you’re reaching out to the executive suite, incidentally. They’re the ones who’re most tightly tied to the company as an entity. The company’s success is their own success, and that makes for a powerful angle.

Another thing to consider is how punchy your email content is. If your email copy is a little waffly or doesn’t get straight to the point – or communicate that point clearly and concisely – you’ll lose people’s interest rapidly.

Use the Right Software

One of the biggest pitfalls in cold email is deliverability, which is the percentage of emails that you send that actually land in inboxes instead of junk folders. Spam filters are hyper-vigilant, always on the lookout for any red flags that might tell them to send your emails to junk.

The problem is that some of those red flags can also crop up with totally legitimate B2B cold campaigns. There’s only so much you can do on your end to handle that – to really capitalize on cold email marketing and generate leads with it, you’ll need to send your campaigns with a platform that can manage the technical heavy lifting for you.

Clickback is designed to do exactly that. It cleans your lists for you on import (which is usually a paid third-party service), and is packed with cutting-edge features all designed to get your campaign deliverability as high as it can possibly go.

Use Landing Pages

If you’re linking to your homepage or product page in your campaigns, you’re missing out on a key factor.

Think about it like this: you’ve spent time and effort creating an email campaign that’s designed to appeal to a specific group of people by addressing a particular problem. When you then just link them to your product page or homepage, you’re taking away a bunch of the momentum you’ve built by getting them to click.

When you design a landing page for every individual campaign, you can tailor the landing page’s content to reinforce and expand on your email content. Instead of taking the wind out of their sails, you provide them with even more momentum towards a conversion – especially with a form clearly visible above the fold.

Even though they’re not actually part of the email, landing pages are a crucial step in email lead generation campaigns. They serve to give your contacts an easy way to take the conversion action you want them to take, and give them the information they need to make that decision.