Do you want to increase email open rates? Start cold-calling this way

Everyone has been talking about the death of the cold call. This is a constant debate now. I can’t agree or disagree with any side of the argument. Depending on what data you look at, using the phone might be looking worse, or better than 10 years ago to set up meetings with prospective clients.

However, one thing is true. If you’ve never cold-called and you don’t understand the art of persuasion over the phone, or the tools in the market available for cold-calling, you will probably not be successful here.

On the other hand, your email open and reply rates are tanking. With today’s technology of marketing and sales automation, everyone is getting 2-10x as many emails. We all spend 1-10 hours on email every day and we use that limited amount of time to only open and respond to a certain amount of emails.

For instance, every morning I get to the office, and delete 20-50 emails I have gotten in the past 12 hours. Then I proceed to open 3-8 emails that really matter to me (the majority, if not all, from people I work with) and I reply to 30-50% of those.

My inbox in G-mail is set to ‘priority inbox’, and I recommend everyone else do the same to be more productive.

The next emerging trend is personalization, because if the subject sounds relevant and the email content is personalized, your reply rates will beat industry averages. Many of us have heard the 3x3. Many SDR managers, tell their employees to spend 3 minutes finding 3 pieces of information they can sue to customize the emails they send. Nonetheless, since the industry averages keep going down due to automation, this is just a short-term fix. The 3 minutes of research and 5 minutes of writing the email, limit your scalability.

The immediate next step, lies in companies like Nova.ai, which auto-magically customizes emails using AI. This allows you to customize emails at scale.

As you see, email is now just a hamster wheel, you get ahead of everyone else, only until the rest catches up and you are irrelevant again.

So what’s the long term strategy? Doing something that no one else can easily learn how to do. Here is where I believe you have a sustained competitive advantage, and you can now create predictable revenue at scale.

I have mentioned the 5 steps to the call I teach every company building an outbound engine. These are hard to implement unless you have someone like me in your office teaching you exactly how to do it, so I know that 99.99% of you reading that blog will take no action. Therefore, let me at least give you one reason to cold call people.

Cold-call people to have them open and reply your email. Use this script if you get to voicemail:

• Hi {{First Name}}, this is {{YOU!}} with {{company}}. I sent you an email yesterday about {{subject of email or topic covered}} but I have not heard back from you. Can you give it a quick glance and reply back? Again it’s {{YOU!}} with {{company}}. Thanks!

Note: I do not leave a call back number. 99% of businesses have caller ID technology and they can just call you back if they want to. Instead, I ask for a reply to my email. I re-estate my name and company name at the end of the voicemail so they can search their inbox.  

If you are respectfully persistent with prospects, call them and email them several times and leave voicemails, your likelihood to get your emails read and replied to is so much higher.

I hope this helps. Go ahead and make the calls and check if you get better email response rates. I certainly do.

-----

If you liked this, please comment below and click "follow" next to my name. I'll be posting articles once a week.

If you really liked this, and your network would benefit from it. Please share. I also have a favor to ask you. Go here and send a message with the subject "willing to help". In the next year, I'll send you 1-3 emails to ask you a tiny favor. I'll be forever grateful if you give me a hand. You might also enjoy learning more about how I got started in sales, and built an amazing business.