The Complete Guide to Cold Email Outreach Best Practices

Cold email outreach is a very underutilized method to generate leads. Most people shy away from it, because they think it’s spam (it isn’t and here’s why).

Some have tried and failed. Believe me, I did too when I first started out. In fact, I made almost every single mistake there is to make. When I first started in 2008 with my agency, I didn’t do a single one of these things I’m going to outline below.

I gradually tweaked my approach until I figured out what works time and again. It helped me build my first company into a seven figure marketing agency.

I’ve since left my agency days behind me to launch LeadFuze, which does this exact thing (cold emailing) for B2B. I thought I’d share some of the techniques that we apply to cold email outreach for our customers.

Put Yourself in Their Shoes

Imagine the emails your targeted customers receive. Picture them receiving an email from a competitor right before yours. How will you stand out?

Write Like You Talk

Try to read it out loud before you send it, just to see how it sounds. You might even want to act like you are face to face with them. If it sounds strange, make some tweaks.

Forget the Introduction

Don’t dedicate any of your message to introducing yourself or your company. They don’t know you and they don’t care.

If they want to learn more, they’ll see your name and URL in your signature and they’ll look into it.

Understand that many of the people you email will see their email on their phone or glance at their preview pane. If you start talking about yourself and who you’re with, you’re going to be easily ignored.

Get to the Point

Get right to the point and focus on THEM, not your offer. What I mean by this is, if you offer a project management software you might want to say:

“It’s a proven way to squeeze more work out of your team which will help increase your bottom line.”

They aren’t going to care yet about your features, integrations, etc.

Don’t put your whole email into one paragraph. This isn’t a high school essay. Two sentences at most per paragraph.

Here’s an example of a cold email I recently started sending to accountants:

Keep it Short

Keep it two to four sentences and 5 sentences at the MOST.

Anything beyond 4 sentences and you’re going to start seeing your response rates decline.

Personalize What You Can

It’s great if you’re spending a lot of time researching specific contacts. You’ll need to do this for higher end sales and more enterprise level sales. Your time investment will be well worth it.

However, if you want to do cold email outreach at scale, then this isn’t really an option. So you’ll have to make do with what you can.

Referencing a company name is decent, but even just referencing their industry will typically be enough if you’re providing something of value.

Put All Contact Info in Your Signature

Your email signature needs to include your business address. It can be a PO Box, but legally you need to include your business address. I’d recommend a phone number as well since that helps build trust and credibility with the person you’re emailing.

Avoid Images

Some images are okay (like your face in your signature or social media icons), while most other images you want to avoid.

Don’t use call to action buttons or any images at the top of your email. This just makes it obvious that the email is not personal.

Include a P.S.

Which asks if you should speak to someone else. This also serves as a way to fulfill the opt-out responsibility in your email and still keeping it personal.

A lot of people will read the P.S. before the read your closing question so it might be a good idea to try adding a P.P.S. with something else of value. Try using a call to action for a white paper.

Close with a Question

I always recommend closing it with a question, so they’ll respond and then from there it will start the dialogue.

Here’s the closing question from our example above:

The question leads to a logical next step in the sales process. I’m also not asking them to commit anything. I see a lot of people recommend trying to ask for a 15 minute meeting. Don’t jump the gun.

Ending with a question like the above will usually get them to respond with their targeted industry and a request for more information. Now you can get them on the phone.

Follow Up, then Follow Up Again!

Just because they don’t respond, doesn’t mean you should move on. In fact, nearly 85% of the hot leads we generate come AFTER the initial email send.

Create a series of follow-up messages that go out to people who don’t respond right away. Every 3 to 7 days you should send another.

Test Your Messages

Don’t just use the same email message time and again if it isn’t working. You need to measure three things to determine the success of an email:

1. Open Rate?—?This will tell you if your subject line is working
2. Response Rate?—?This will tell you if your message is hitting the mark
3. Sales Generated?—?This will typically be higher the higher your open rate and response rates are. However, that isn’t always the case. If you’ve tweaked the first two and seen increases there, but it isn’t moving the needle towards sales, then chances are your messaging isn’t really aligned with your sale.

Don’t test too early though. Looking at these numbers when you’ve only sent 50 to 100 emails won’t give you measureable data. Ideally you’ll want to send at least 200 to 300 before you start making major adjustments.

Consistency

This is the most important thing.

Do some level of outreach every single day. This keeps your pipeline humming. Failing to do this will lead to a dried up pipeline.

Even when you are slammed, you need to find the time to continue doing your outreach.

Conclusion

Cold email outreach is a great method for generating leads. I built a seven figure marketing agency using this approach, and now I’m doing it withLeadFuze.

Any other advice you’d recommend?