2 Cold email marketing tips to get replies

Have you ever wondered why most people hate receiving cold emails? We often say we hate them, but can we say why? I believe that if we understand why we hate receiving cold emails, we will be able to write and send emails that our recipients won’t hate so much

2 reasons why we hate receiving cold emails

My first thought is that it’s because so many of them look like mass emails that someone didn’t bother to personalize. They just bought a list of contacts, drafted a message that could be sent to anyone and sent it to us, without taking into account that we would actually be interested or respond.

In short, I think we hate getting cold emails because there are two major shocks in the process:

Reason #1: Someone creates a generic generic message and sends it to our personal business inbox, where we usually receive inbox, where we usually receive personal messages.
Reason #2: By sending us this message, someone is showing us that they don’t value us at all, while assuming that we will be interested in them..

And I think that’s why we resent getting another cold email.

2 rules that we can deduce from the above

From the above, we can deduce two rules to improve our cold emails:

Rule 1: compose a personal message, since you will be sending it to a personal business inbox, where personal messages usually arrive.
Rule 2: when sending the message, show interest in the recipient before assuming that they will be interested in you.

What's in it for you?

How to apply these rules in practice?

Know who your prospect really is

To send a personal message, it is essential to to know the person to whom we are sending it.. Obviously, we won’t meet them in person, but there are several ways to recognize them as members of our potential ideal client group.

Once we establish our ideal customer profile, we should research where our ideal customers converse and share their opinions.. It is also a good idea to review some of their profiles on social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and/or Facebook. In this way we can discover their interests, problems and the language they use to communicate with each other. This is how we can get to know them.

Contact a real person, not a company

A personal message must be addressed to a real person. Getting a mailing to a real person in a company takes more time and effort, but remember rule number 2? “Show your recipient that you really care…”, and if you care, you’ll be willing to go out of your way to find their mailing addresses.

If you are able to identify a chosen person in a company, you can contact the decision-maker directly. This way you can find out if they are interested or not much faster. You will avoid the “maybes” that slowly kill your start-up.

Customize at a high level

We can conclude that to personalize at a high level, it is necessary to do more than just put the recipient’s name in the subject line of the email. If we want to show that we really care about the prospect, we should look for more relevant information about them.

In addition, it is important to remember that, even if we are sending the same message to several people, we must write to each of them individually.

Use a natural and conversational tone

“Good afternoon, we take care of designing websites, implement digital marketing strategies and perform maintenance to any type of CMS. Please let me know if you need help on any of your projects. Thanks.”

Yes, this is an example of a message I received in my inbox a few days ago. This is how emails should not be written. There are a lot of misguided people on the subject of cold emails.

It is important to have a conversational tone in email, and being polite is critical. However, when writing a personal e-mail, we must use the language that we speak or that our recipients speak. A loud or formal tone does not make the mail more professional, but rather makes it uninteresting, heavy and totally impersonal. Remember rule number 1: “Create a personal message, since you are sending it to a personal business mailbox”.

Don't try to make it too pretty

Personal emails and newsletters are completely different. While there are some newsletters that seem really personal and that’s great, it doesn’t work the other way around. That is, don’t make a cold email you send to someone’s personal business inbox look like a newsletter. Never.

If you think that emails with attractive designs and eye-catching graphic elements work only because they are visually appealing, you should reconsider that idea. Newsletters are sent to a large number of people, while personal e-mails are sent to a specific, small group of people. Cold emails should be personal and therefore should not look or feel like newsletters.

Newsletters include an unsubscribe link, while personal 1-to-1 messages do not. Cold emails should be personal and, therefore, should not include an unsubscribe link. However, there are other ways to allow your recipients to drop additional correspondence.