6 Tips to Make Your Automated Emails Look 100% Manually Typed

Eveyone in the Sales 2.0 world seems to be aware of huge benefits sales automation could bring. However, some marketers and sales people still doubt whether it is good for using in terms of both sounding and looking personal enough.

In this article I want to share 6 tips on to how to make your cold emails look 100% manually typed that will automatically improve your reply rate with a single email by minimum 250%. Just imagine that now you will be able to spend much more time on your warm leads without leaving your cold contacts a feeling you don’t really care for them enough to spend another 10 minutes on re-typing the sales copy just for them.

Send emails directly from your email account

Emails should be sent directly from your personal corporate email address, opposed to some third party email marketing services.

Those emails automatically go to Promotions or Updates tab and have ugly evidences that they were sent automatically. Like “via getresponse.com” suffix, custom HTML email template, standard address, unsubscribe footer, etc.

Make sure you send emails directly from your email account. Email marketing or sales automation solution allows you to connect directly to your inbox and you can set it up accordinly. By default many systems will send emails from their email servers, making your email skip Primary tab.

Make sure your emails end up in Primary folder

A perfect email ends up in your Primary tab in GMail opposed to Update or Promotional tabs. People rarely read emails that end up in on of those folders.

Make sure your emails end up in Primary folder. You can do this by creating a test GMail account and sending your email to it.

Here is an example how my Promotions tab usually looks like:

Disable open tracking pixel

Depending on your email domain name reputation, GMail and other email clients will decide if they are or are not going to show images in your email by default. In many cases, images are hidden and your recipient will see “Images are not displayed.” message which makes your email less genuine.

Also, removing any images from email could significantly improve your email delivery rate. I am not really sure why this happens and how differently mail servers treat cold emails with or without images, but we have seen 10–15% larger reply rate on email campaigns with open tracking pixel off.

Depending on outreach system you use, you can have different options for disabling tracking pixels for your emails. Here is how it looks in Reply:

Use plain text in your email body

Plain text is the best to be used in email body. Custom HTML templates make emails look like automated.

While this text is nicely styled, we instantly get a feeling that this is an automated marketing email even if indeed it is manual. Simply because a regular person would rather send emails in plain text via their email client than use all fancy HTML emails treats as marketers do.

Setup your avatar for emails

GMail, Outlook and other email clients support showing avatar next to your email address. Make sure you have it.

Keep your email short and personal

Consider including information about how you found the prospect (for example, I was looking for companies in a [certain field] and stumbled upon your LinkedIn profile). Briefly explain why are you reaching out.

Keep your email short and end it with a simple question or call-to-action. It should be super easy for the prospect to click the link or hit the reply button to answer your quick question.

Check out our Twittable Cold Emails article for more tips on writing short and personal emails.