The Cold Email Playbook
The series devoted to actionable guidance and best practices for successful cold email
The series devoted to actionable guidance and best practices for successful cold email
The right cold email system can generate a consistent supply of qualified conversations and outbound sales for your business. In the past, cold email was easier to ramp up, more sustainable to do at volume, and the right email templates could generate substantial engagement, even without personalization. Today, there’s a much higher barrier to entry for those trying to generate results with cold email marketing.
A recent report by technology market research firm The Radicati Group expects the global number of daily emails handled by consumers and professionals to exceed 293 billion in 2019. Compared to the number found in their 2014 Email Statistics Report, daily email volume has grown nearly 1.5x in the last five years. Email users are more overwhelmed than ever. With limited time and a growing inbox, recipients stay focused on relevant conversations and expect more from unsolicited email outreach.
If you want to stand out in the inbox, your approach needs to be targeted, personalized, and dedicated. However, you’re limited by time, resources, and the prospects available to you. How do you build, ramp up, and sustain a cold email campaign that can consistently drive outbound sales for your business?
To help better understand the modern approaches and best practices for cold email, we interviewed seven experts on the key elements of making outbound email successful for your business.
(CEO of Predictable Revenue)
Outbound Sales: Before You Start Many marketers tend to do cold email by the book with tactics, templates, and data
(Customer Success at LimeLeads)
Targeting Sales Leads: Before You Start Not all customers are the same. With customer success growing prevalent, modern sales teams
(Co-Founder & CRO at RevenueZen)
Email Personalization: Before You Start There is no fixed answer to personalization for email. The best approach is unique to
(Chief Pilot & Founder at PilotNow)
Personalizing Cold Messaging: Before You Start Before getting started, it’s important to understand that personalization is a balancing game between
(Founder at Quickmail.io)
Cold Email Follow Up: Before You Start You’ll likely send cold emails to buyers that are not currently looking for
(Founder at LinkedIn Conversions)
Using LinkedIn for Sales: Before You Start It’s important to understand where Microsoft is going before using LinkedIn with your
(Executive Director of Global Strategy)
(Enterprise Success Manager)
Filtering Spam Email: Before You Start Today’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are very sophisticated. The job of ISPs is to
Marc is a serial entrepreneur, nationally-recognized sales coach, and a best-selling author with his books Game Plan Selling, Breaking All Barriers and The High-Velocity Sales Organization.
After founding an event marketing company in the wake of the dot-com market crash, Marc spent years and tens of thousands of cold calls learning the data and science behind selling.
From his experience, he founded the Game Plan Selling System and has helped train thousands of sales teams.
Marketers getting started with cold email tend to think it’s as easy as finding email templates and blasting a lead list. However, this approach isn’t enough to bring the consistent, predictable results you need with sales prospecting.
Cold email is a system for generating outbound sales conversations, so it takes time to ramp up the campaign and see the outcomes you’ve produced in your pipeline.
With outbound sales, you connect with buyers at various stages of their buying process. Your cold emails and outbound sales process should accommodate each stage.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
There are more than 30 million businesses potentially available to target in the US.
Since outbound marketing gives you the advantage of choosing who to target, you want to be able to identify the most qualified sales leads for your business.
However, there are more bad fits than good fits for your business, and most prospects won’t be in-market when you connect.
To target the right people and avoid wasting time on the wrong conversations, you need to identify the attributes, behaviors, and use cases that best fit your ideal customer.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Cracking the cold email puzzle can be challenging because you have limited time to research prospects, improve your targeting capabilities, and personalize your outreach.
The more people you email each day, the less time you have to personalize each message. Conversely, the more time you spend personalizing, the fewer emails you can send for potential conversions.
This balance between volume and personalization in outbound sales is unique to each company and changes as new competitors, strategies, and behaviors emerge in the market.
Many factors impact your personalization strategy for cold email, which are unique to your specific situation.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Buyers are rapidly evolving their behavior towards outbound outreach because they are constantly overwhelmed with information.
After your email is opened, you still have to maintain curiosity, capture mindshare for your brand, and motivate action.
What separates your emails from the thousands of others buyers receive is how well you use information about your buyers to personalize your messaging and add value.
However, it can be difficult to personalize cold email outreach at scale without spending too much time, team resources, and money to make it work.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Buyers receive more daily emails than they can usually process, which is why it takes multiple touches to connect with outbound sales leads for the first time.
It takes differentiation to get their attention, relevance to stay on their radar, and perseverance with follow-up emails to generate opportunities at the right time.
Your cold email campaign should add value and build authority in your field of expertise, no matter where a buyer is in their buying journey.
To maximize the conversations you generate, you need to send multiple cold emails in an organized sequence with the right timing, frequency, and duration to stay relevant.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Cold email is not the only channel you should use to engage with qualified sales leads.
Even with precise targeting and great messaging, it’s still an uphill battle to win mindshare and stand out with only one outbound channel because buyers receive so many messages every day.
By combining your cold emailing with social selling on a channel like LinkedIn, you can build trust, add value, and be more memorable to prospects throughout your cold email campaign.
However, Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016 has changed the game and made it harder than ever to use automation tools on the platform.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
It used to be easy to maintain email deliverability and reach a huge scale with cold email, as long as you avoided obvious bad practices and warmed up your infrastructure before hitting higher volumes.
However, modern spam filters now use advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to spot spammers by analyzing billions of emails in real-time.
This level of sophistication has made it harder than ever to set up, warm up, and sustain a modern cold email campaign for outbound sales without running into deliverability issues.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
As buyers take more control over the buying process and spam filters grow more sophisticated, cold outreach will continue to become harder to make successful for outbound sales.
Every brand, market, solution, and target buyer impacts your results differently, so there is no magic bullet to cold email for any situation.
Instead, the key to success involves careful planning, continuous research, and regular testing to identify the most effective way to do cold email outreach for your organization.
With the right system for growing your sales pipeline, you’ll be able to generate better outcomes and replicate success with cold email as new situations, opportunities, and markets arise.
