3 Questions To Ask Yourself If Your Cold Emails Fail

Oleg Campbell
4 min readDec 8, 2015

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Harvard Business Review declares that every day an average businessman receives over two hundred emails, lots of messages in Facebook or Twitter and other correspondence. No one has time to even take a look at all of them, not to mention writing a response.

#1: Is your prospect list a failure?

It’s surprising how many people pay attention to emails themselves underestimating the importance of targeted and high-quality lead generation. Some purchase email lists that are poorly tailored and will result in tons of bounces during your campaign.You can either outsource your prospecting and lead generation or accomplish it yourself. All you need is to find those who correspond with your perfect customer profile and locate their business emails. Feel free to refer to this 6-step guide on finding anyone’s email.

#2: What’s your subject line?

Now you see that your cold emails should be better that average to get opened. While in terms of your sender info that shows up it’s enough to use real data, the king of Open Rate land is the subject line. It should strongly relate to your email body, engaging and clear. Unfortunately, most of subject lines used among sales and marketers are neither obvious nor convincing.

To make your prospective letters be read it might be useful to mention top three widespread reasons why your sales emails to potential customers get deleted.

Your subject lines contain a question mark

Remember: all emails to your potential clients in form of a question are deleted immediately. Even if a question in your email subject line should be used you must do your best to avoid it. Try to specify your business offer in the affirmative form.

Way out: Never use questions. Instead of them use more directive statements and active words. Every subject line should contain a tribute as, for examples:

– Powerful subject line: “Five reasons why Microsoft works with us”;

– Referral subject line: “Bill Gates told we should meet”;

– A subject line based on statement: “The worst mistakes in milk production”.

#3: What is your email copy?

When you’re done with your subject line, it’s high time you think about your email body. In this case there are a couple of possible “can-go-wrong” factors:

a) your emails are too long

Remember: the shorter, the better. An extended email makes your client’s brain work harder. Unlimited lines do not work well on mobile devices as now over sixty percent of electronic mails are opened with gadgets. Thus, try to use as less characters as possible to compose your message.

Way out: your emails to potential customers must be extra short. Use such a formula: 3 to 6 sentences.

b) your emails are too cold

Remember: Compose neither impersonal nor general emails. When you try to contact a hard-to-reach CEO a breakdown to connect will at once send both you and your business offer directly to the garbage. Each seller always tries connecting with the maximum value prospects in the industry. Such executives are flooded with numerous appointment requests. Thus, using tasteless, cold and general emails will never let your break this ice.

Way out: Always try to connect your message to any problem your potential client faces at the moment. You should also compliment a prospect on a recent hot triumph or somewhat that you know makes your potential customer feel extremely proud. For instance, if you want a prominent artist to become your client, in the subject line you should write just three words: Liked Your Painting!

The truth is that all people are self-absorbed. They always focus on their own problems, activities, success and unlimited personal ego. So, use all your chances and compose an email about your probable client. Just use any search engine and try to get to know everything about a valuable person which might soon become your client.

Resume

The vicious reality shows that there is no secret formula to create the perfect email that will always give you positive results. What is totally okay in one case may fail in another. A practical recommendation that perfectly works in one business may not be appropriate for your potential client`s field of interest. Thus, only constant testing and checking will definitely help you to get a triumph with the most profitable outreach strategy.

Currently, there are many incredible instruments accessible to make checking email answer rates unbelievably reasonable and simple, Reply is one of them and provides you with reply rate as well.

This information will surely help you to narrow down and sharpen the exact number of really working templates and subjects that gather most replies. Therefore, knowing all this your emails will show up and get answered whereas letters of your opponents are immediately moved to “Delete” folder.

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Oleg Campbell
Oleg Campbell

Written by Oleg Campbell

Founder of reply.io. Changing the game for B2B sales. Send automated cold emails that feel warm.

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