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How to Make Cold Email Marketing Effective

Cold outreach can be an effective technique to reach prospects with provable intent. When done well, cold emails bolster email deliverability, meaning you show up in your customer’s inbox with a relevant message. But if done poorly, cold email marketing can leave your emails unread and worse — your spam rate sky-high. 

Today’s digital landscape is proving increasingly difficult to reach potential customers. We’re going to show you how you can make cold email marketing into an effective strategy that increases your email deliverability rate and allows you to reach prospects who have a vested interest in your solution.

Cold emails allow you to approach prospects who are interested in your solution with highly targeted messaging. No matter how critical your message to your prospect, it has to make it into their inbox and be opened to be effective. Don’t let your cold email get marked as spam or filtered out by email service providers.

Here are a few ways you can make sure your cold email marketing is effective.

Reach the right people 

When you cold email prospects, you need to know who you want to reach and why you want to reach them. Although you can reach a wider audience with a cold email, you can also fine-tune it to ensure you’re reaching relevant people. Prepare a list of your in-market accounts using intent data to ensure you’re reaching accounts actively signaling interest in your solution

Employ a mix of competitive signals and adjacent signals to ensure your targets are looking at your competitors and spiking relevant signals related to your industry niche. Once you’ve compiled your in-market accounts, enrich your contacts list to uncover key details about your buyers such as job title and skills to guarantee your cold outreach feels warm. Before you begin outreach, check that your email registry is up to date so you reach the right audience and keep your bounce rates low. 

Start slow and be organized

At first, slowly implement your cold email campaign. This affords you the ability to warm up your reputation with smaller batches of accounts to build trust. Then, keep distribution steady. Remember, you are new to these contacts. Taking it slow builds familiarity and momentum with your desirable prospective customers. 

Staying organized also allows you to guide the relationship slowly, which is important to effectively keep the course across your cold outreach campaign.

Personalize your messaging

Before you hit send, ensure your email campaign is filled with relevant information and transparency. Let them know why they were selected to be a part of the campaign from the beginning. Higher relevance increases the likelihood of engagement and moving further on the buyer’s journey — despite your initial introduction as a cold contact. This attention to detail serves to personalize your messaging, meaning you’ll begin building credibility and warming up your cold prospects. You’ll keep your prospects happy, and future emails will be less likely to be lost in the mix. 

Propensity can help you get a head start identifying in-market buyers and instantly creating personalized messaging, so you can reach the right people at the right time. For example, our AI copy generator creates personalized messaging for you to use in each campaign. This way, you’ll generate unique emails that tell a compelling story, exclusive to each of your ABM campaigns.

Allow prospects to opt-out

Customers are not familiar with you yet. By giving them the opportunity to opt-out of your cold email, you are offering a common courtesy across their personal buyer’s journey. Allowing prospects the chance to opt-out empowers them while they are making key product purchasing decisions. This will also decrease your likelihood of being marked as spam, so you can continue to build on your deliverability rate with customers that are interested in your solution.

Follow parameters set by GDPR

Let’s face it. Nobody likes spam. Don’t make your cold email marketing spammy. Do it thoughtfully and ethically. This is just another reason it’s crucial to follow the parameters set by GDPR. Cold email outreach may be sent to potential customers without receiving consent, so long as customers are able to object to processing for marketing purposes

Moreover, the cleaner your cold email strategy, the more likely you’ll be able to capture measurable results. Track the success of your campaigns from click-through rate, open rates and reply rates as well as other key metrics to determine which campaigns are working and which ones aren’t. Aim to achieve an open rate of 25%, and if you hit over 37%, consider your campaign extremely successful. 

Don’t worry about the impact on your domain authority

Even if you do not receive express permission from your contacts in adding them to your email marketing campaign, your domain authority will not be impacted. In addition, your SEO and other website functions also remain safe. However, garnering a poor email reputation can lead your emails to be marked as spam.

In conclusion…

Cold emails can be an effective way to reach prospects who are in-market for your solution. By targeting prospects who have shown an interest in your product, you can increase the likelihood of engagement, new opportunities created, and win rates. The road to provable, repeatable ROI is within reach. Get a head start on making your cold email outreach more effective with Propensity.