Ten Ways To Get More Responses From Cold Emailing

Cold emailing is a seriously effective way of generating leads, but most people aren't utilising it well enough.

Here are some tips for how to improve your cold emails...

1. Prospect More

How many hours per day are you spending on prospecting? The most important thing is the list you are contacting. No matter how good your email is, if you send it to the wrong people, it won’t work.

You should be spending hours daily, building up your list of people to contact, and refining it to only contact the right people.

2. Be specific

One of my cold email campaigns was over 300 words. Completely against what people say works. Yet the first 3 I sent out, got 3 responses.

How? I emailed the right person, I knew their industry well, and I was highly specific to them.

I suggest picking something very specific and focusing on it. This could be a local area, or an industry.

3. Don’t sell

This should be obvious, but the purpose of your cold emails should never be to sell. Focus on adding value. Usually, you will offer a free strategy call, lead, or something to hook them.

4. Make it brief

While I’ve had success with longer emails before, they were long because the offer I was making required that. Keep them as brief as you possibly can. Remember people are busy.

5. Use catchy subject lines

“Need more leads?”, and things like that are horrible headlines. It screams spam, and is a quick way of being avoided. Don’t lie in your subject lines, but being slightly misleading is okay.

If you were emailing a cosmetic dentist, you could use “dental implants?”. A more generic one I’ve found works is using their first name.

6. Hook them quick

“Hi, this is Daryl Rosser. I’m a local marketing specialist that..” blah blah blah. I don’t care, what do you want?

“Do you offer dental implants? A couple of people have contacted me in the last few days looking for them, but I’m just a marketer..”

Get them to email you back, qualify them (over a call), make a deal.

7. Make it readable

Look at this paragraph right now and ask yourself how easy it is to read. There is little spacing to break it up. The sentences are long, and the paragraphs are long also. I personally do a maximum of 2 sentences per paragraph in an email, usually 1. And I keep them brief. Make sure to space everything out, otherwise, it’ll be daunting to look at, and they probably won’t even start reading it.

See what I mean?

On this same idea, make sure your email flows. People shouldn’t stop and think. Every time they pause reading, it’s an opportunity to close it. The way to make it flow is to read it aloud a few times.

8. Send more

Before complaining ‘cold emailing doesn’t work’, have a look at how many you sent.

Quality > Quantity, but there is still an element of quantity required.

If you aren’t seeing results from it, keep sending them. If it still doesn’t work, keep sending them. Of course you should do tweaks as you test.

The definition of insane is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

9. Stand out

My parents own a local business. Every day they receive probably 10 cold calls. Every day. It is annoying as hell.

Business owners receive cold emails daily. You think you’re the only SEO agency emailing them? You’re not the first, and you definitely won’t be the last.

Make yourself stand out from others. One example of doing this would be to create a custom video that you include in your email.

10. Focus on results

“We can get you top in Google.” So what?

Nobody buys a drill because they want a drill. They buy a drill to make a hole. They make a hole so they can mount their TV to their wall. And so on.

Why do people really want your services? Focus on that, but remember you’re not selling yet.