I read this post on Reddit r/entrepreneur and felt like it could be useful for people here. I also think people experience with cold emailing could provide some feedback related to this template, which I find quite interesting.
credit (I'm not affiliated with them): I have got 81% Open rate and 59% Reply Rate on my cold emails. [Templates included] Here's How. I have explained everything here. : Entrepreneur
The content below is not written by me.
-----------
I have got 81% Open rate and 59% Reply Rate on my cold emails. [Templates included] Here's How. I have explained everything here.
I have sent lots and lots of cold emails. It's a thing that startup entrepreneurs must do to acquire customers.
In the earlier stage, you need to go to your customers rather than waiting for the customers to come to you. And, there's nothing easier which is free and provides a better return over time spent than cold emails and cold calls. This is why you still receive lots of cold calls from insurance companies and banks.
I used to suck at cold email till a few months ago. I am still not best at it, but I am sure that I am better than most of you. Here's the proof.
My latest cold email campaign to 100 people got me 59% replies and 29% clicked on the links that I provided in the email. Out of that 59% reply, 21% converted. There were 1 email + 4 follow up emails. And yes, the open rate was whopping 81%.
Proof - Imgur: The magic of the Internet
I had spent a lot of time thinking that what was I doing wrong because I was not getting a good response to my emails. Out of 100 emails that I sent, I receive a reply on only 5-6 of them, and conversion rate was either 0 or 1.
Then I figured out that I was writing the emails from my perspective. I was describing the things that are adding value to my business, not the recipient's.
So, I changed the way of writing emails and started to write it from the recipient's perspective. I started to what would recipient get 95-97% of time. Rest of thetime, I wrote what would I get.
This is what I did.
You need to automate your cold emails for better performance
Yes, you're right. You and I are human. If you keep on sending the cold emails manually then you'll forget to follow up sometimes. In some cases, if the optimal time for follow up is 2:15 PM, let's say, and you're not free at that time then you'll miss the follow-up. This is why it should be automated.
I used Saleshandy to automate cold emails. It uses my own email account to send emails. I just upload the recipients email and it will start firing the emails based on the template that I provide. The best thing is that it can follow up to the people who do not reply to email. So, if someone does not reply to my first email, Saleshandy will send the follow-up mail. If someone does reply to my first email, Saleshandy will automatically stop the follow-up email.
Get the recipient first name, company name, and email address ready
Gathering the email IDs of the recipients is a pain. I use Norbert for this. Just write the name and company's website URL, and it will do its best to fetch the email address.
Per my experience, it has given my correct email address around 75% of the time.
The subject that makes the recipient open the email
Subject line matters. If your recipients get lots of emails, be pretty much sure that he will read or delete the email based on the subject line.
Your eamil won't be opened if the subject is
The best subject line is the one that summarizes the motive of the cold email.
In my campaign, the recipients were coworking spaces owners and I was offering a month of a free magazine subscription to all of their members.
My subject line was
First Name, are you interested in talking about a free offer for your member?
Adding the name in the subject line makes a lot of difference. I have not seen anyone in my entire life who does not love his name. Your recipients are busy and they have more than 50 unread emails. Just by seeing the one's name in the subject line, attention directly goes to that email. You are already ahead of rest of 49 emails that ended up in your recipients inbox without his first name in the subject line.
Just as a proof, my email open rate was 81% which is very-very good number. The average is somewhere around 20-30%.
Apart from the first word i.e. recipient's name, the rest of my email was describing exactly what I was offering.
The body of the first email
The first two paragraphs and the last paragraph matters the most. This is what everyone reads. if the first two paras are not convincing, your recipient will not bother to read any further.
Before I get into the body of the email, I would like to write out what your recipient will think after receiving your email.
Step 1 - The first thing he'll notice is the subject name. We have already figured out what to write in the subject.
Step 2 - He will start to think who are you. This is why you need to answer this question at the very beginning of your email
Step 3 - As soon as he knows you, he will start to know more about the offer and what does he need to do get that offer. This is where you need to write what will recipient get and what does he need to do to get that offer.
Step 4 - The last thing he will think is how much money does he need to pay for that offer. If your recipient is a part of a company which is making millions that he wouldn't bother about the cost much. If you're providing good value to him i.e. solving one or more of his company's problems, he would buy your product. So, the value is getting priority over cost. If he belongs to a company which does not make enough money, the cost gets priority over the value. If you're providing an offer to someone from a small company, make sure that you write the cost at the end of the email because this is what your recipient wants to see. On the other hand, don't bother to write the cost if the recipient belongs to a big company.
Based on that, here's the first email.
[1] Put the salutation based on the culture in recipient's company. "Hey" is very casual. Use it for someone who belongs to casual culture i.e. someone from a small company. For big companies, go for "Hello" instead. If you want to be super formal, go for "Dear Mr. Last Name".
[2] I introduced myself
[3] I very briefly wrote what I want to offer. No need to be super-duper explanatory
[4] I provided one more offer. But the tone is set as I am giving a thank you present
[5] Always put a call to action at the end and the answer of the call to action should be as small as "yes" or "no".
[6] My signature was to the point. It had all the things that a recipient would like to see. It had my designation, my website, and my LinkedIn profile.
I received 29 replies on this email and 19 agreed to schedule a call. Rest wanted to me give more info over email. 2 got converted. That's 6% conversion rate. Not bad but not at all satisfactory. Rest 19 people converted after follow-up emails.
The Timing of the email
This is a very important thing that you must consider. You cannot expect someone to reply to your emails that you sent at 1 AM in the morning.
Although, I don't have any concrete time but sending business cold emails tend to work best at around 8-11 AM. Because this is the time when business people read their emails. But this is also the time when they are loaded with all the tasks that they need to complete within that day. So, they may skip your email.
The next best time as per my experience is around 4-5 PM. This is the time when they wrapping up and they may reply to your email right away. I also scheduled my cold email campaign for 4:15 PM.
One thing I would like to mention is that sending cold emails early in the morning (5-6 AM) also worked out for some people I know, but it never worked out for me.
Day of the email
People say that Tuesday works best for cold emails. but all weekday will work for you. I have tested sending cold emails every day of a week and all the weekdays performed similarly. Yes, the open and reply rate were a lot lesser on weekends which was obvious.
I got almost all of the conversion in follow-ups
I sent 3 follow up emails + 1 closure email. I'll tell you what's closure email after writing the template of three follow-ups.
The first email was sweet and to the point. But it did not give enough info about the offer. The obvious questions in the recipients head were what do I need to do to avail this, what are the hidden charges, what's the background of I Innovate magazine, what else will I receive apart from this, and what would I Innovate get from this offer.
My next few follow-ups answered every single question.
Follow up 1
This follow up was automated with Saleshandy. This means that it would be sent only to those recipients who did not reply to my first email. I saved a lot of time by not manually following up.
Here's the template:
[1], [2], and [3] provided the benefits of the features. I see that lots of people write this thing incorrectly. They simply write features.
I received 3 replies after this follow up and all of them converted. Yay!
Don't simply write features. Tell them how will this feature solve the problem they're having. Show the solution, not the feature. You may also want to optimize the landing page on your website after reading this paragraph.
Follow up 2
[1] Here I have taken the biggest pain of executing something from the recipient's shoulder and put it on my shoulder. I have taken one of the biggest burdens from the recipient's which executing a project. Yes, executing this partnership was also a kind of project. This gave relief to the recipients.
6 people replied and 5 got converted.
Follow Up 3
People forget things that don't matter to them very easily, So, I wanted to summarize everything here.
19 people replied after this follow-up. 9 got converted.
Last email
No offer was made in this email. The only purpose of this email was to give respect to the recipient. If he didn't reply to your email, it did not mean that he's a bad person. It just meant that his priorities were different and did not align with my offering. So, I paid a little respect and moved on.
I know that many people hate cold emails and they say that it's a spam. A cold email could be a spam for person A, but could not be a spam for person B. I had 59% reply rate and none of them asked me to stop sending emails because they were spams. It all boils down to the priority. So, my emails aren't adding any value to you, this is why you'd mark them as a spam. But let's say that you're a business owner and I come to you with a tool related to your industry that can greatly reduce your business cost, and all of your competitors are already using that tool. Plus if I offer you 50% discount in that tool, would you still mark that as spam? If your answer is "yes", you need to figure out that generalizing every cold email as a spam is not doing good to your business.
Another point is that cold email is a must for a startup. Some people here are saying that we should not be cold emailing and should be using legitimate ways to acquire new B2B customers. I agree with that. But there's no cheaper way present to acquire customers this fastly. Unicorn startups like Uber, Flipkart did this when they were new. Many of you might have heard of canva.com. Even that site uses cold emailing to grow its customers. I received a cold email from someone in Canva. So, if you don't like cold emails then you can simply delete the mail. There's no need to get frustrated over them.
credit (I'm not affiliated with them): I have got 81% Open rate and 59% Reply Rate on my cold emails. [Templates included] Here's How. I have explained everything here. : Entrepreneur
The content below is not written by me.
-----------
I have got 81% Open rate and 59% Reply Rate on my cold emails. [Templates included] Here's How. I have explained everything here.
I have sent lots and lots of cold emails. It's a thing that startup entrepreneurs must do to acquire customers.
In the earlier stage, you need to go to your customers rather than waiting for the customers to come to you. And, there's nothing easier which is free and provides a better return over time spent than cold emails and cold calls. This is why you still receive lots of cold calls from insurance companies and banks.
I used to suck at cold email till a few months ago. I am still not best at it, but I am sure that I am better than most of you. Here's the proof.
My latest cold email campaign to 100 people got me 59% replies and 29% clicked on the links that I provided in the email. Out of that 59% reply, 21% converted. There were 1 email + 4 follow up emails. And yes, the open rate was whopping 81%.
Proof - Imgur: The magic of the Internet
I had spent a lot of time thinking that what was I doing wrong because I was not getting a good response to my emails. Out of 100 emails that I sent, I receive a reply on only 5-6 of them, and conversion rate was either 0 or 1.
Then I figured out that I was writing the emails from my perspective. I was describing the things that are adding value to my business, not the recipient's.
So, I changed the way of writing emails and started to write it from the recipient's perspective. I started to what would recipient get 95-97% of time. Rest of thetime, I wrote what would I get.
This is what I did.
You need to automate your cold emails for better performance
Yes, you're right. You and I are human. If you keep on sending the cold emails manually then you'll forget to follow up sometimes. In some cases, if the optimal time for follow up is 2:15 PM, let's say, and you're not free at that time then you'll miss the follow-up. This is why it should be automated.
I used Saleshandy to automate cold emails. It uses my own email account to send emails. I just upload the recipients email and it will start firing the emails based on the template that I provide. The best thing is that it can follow up to the people who do not reply to email. So, if someone does not reply to my first email, Saleshandy will send the follow-up mail. If someone does reply to my first email, Saleshandy will automatically stop the follow-up email.
Get the recipient first name, company name, and email address ready
Gathering the email IDs of the recipients is a pain. I use Norbert for this. Just write the name and company's website URL, and it will do its best to fetch the email address.
Per my experience, it has given my correct email address around 75% of the time.
The subject that makes the recipient open the email
Subject line matters. If your recipients get lots of emails, be pretty much sure that he will read or delete the email based on the subject line.
Your eamil won't be opened if the subject is
- too much salesy "I HAVE THIS FOR YOU. BUY NOW"
- very generic like "An offer you"
- looks spammy like "Buy now within 24 hours or the offer will go away". However, this subject line works with the newsletters because people know the company which sent the newsletter. If I receive two emails with this subject line, one from Amazon and another from an unknown person, I may open the Amazon email and make the purchase but I wouldn't even bother to open the unknown person's email
- The IP from which you send the emails is blacklisted. Your emails would end up in the junk folder. What a waste.
The best subject line is the one that summarizes the motive of the cold email.
In my campaign, the recipients were coworking spaces owners and I was offering a month of a free magazine subscription to all of their members.
My subject line was
First Name, are you interested in talking about a free offer for your member?
Adding the name in the subject line makes a lot of difference. I have not seen anyone in my entire life who does not love his name. Your recipients are busy and they have more than 50 unread emails. Just by seeing the one's name in the subject line, attention directly goes to that email. You are already ahead of rest of 49 emails that ended up in your recipients inbox without his first name in the subject line.
Just as a proof, my email open rate was 81% which is very-very good number. The average is somewhere around 20-30%.
Apart from the first word i.e. recipient's name, the rest of my email was describing exactly what I was offering.
The body of the first email
The first two paragraphs and the last paragraph matters the most. This is what everyone reads. if the first two paras are not convincing, your recipient will not bother to read any further.
Before I get into the body of the email, I would like to write out what your recipient will think after receiving your email.
Step 1 - The first thing he'll notice is the subject name. We have already figured out what to write in the subject.
Step 2 - He will start to think who are you. This is why you need to answer this question at the very beginning of your email
Step 3 - As soon as he knows you, he will start to know more about the offer and what does he need to do get that offer. This is where you need to write what will recipient get and what does he need to do to get that offer.
Step 4 - The last thing he will think is how much money does he need to pay for that offer. If your recipient is a part of a company which is making millions that he wouldn't bother about the cost much. If you're providing good value to him i.e. solving one or more of his company's problems, he would buy your product. So, the value is getting priority over cost. If he belongs to a company which does not make enough money, the cost gets priority over the value. If you're providing an offer to someone from a small company, make sure that you write the cost at the end of the email because this is what your recipient wants to see. On the other hand, don't bother to write the cost if the recipient belongs to a big company.
Based on that, here's the first email.
[1] Put the salutation based on the culture in recipient's company. "Hey" is very casual. Use it for someone who belongs to casual culture i.e. someone from a small company. For big companies, go for "Hello" instead. If you want to be super formal, go for "Dear Mr. Last Name".
[2] I introduced myself
[3] I very briefly wrote what I want to offer. No need to be super-duper explanatory
[4] I provided one more offer. But the tone is set as I am giving a thank you present
[5] Always put a call to action at the end and the answer of the call to action should be as small as "yes" or "no".
[6] My signature was to the point. It had all the things that a recipient would like to see. It had my designation, my website, and my LinkedIn profile.
I received 29 replies on this email and 19 agreed to schedule a call. Rest wanted to me give more info over email. 2 got converted. That's 6% conversion rate. Not bad but not at all satisfactory. Rest 19 people converted after follow-up emails.
The Timing of the email
This is a very important thing that you must consider. You cannot expect someone to reply to your emails that you sent at 1 AM in the morning.
Although, I don't have any concrete time but sending business cold emails tend to work best at around 8-11 AM. Because this is the time when business people read their emails. But this is also the time when they are loaded with all the tasks that they need to complete within that day. So, they may skip your email.
The next best time as per my experience is around 4-5 PM. This is the time when they wrapping up and they may reply to your email right away. I also scheduled my cold email campaign for 4:15 PM.
One thing I would like to mention is that sending cold emails early in the morning (5-6 AM) also worked out for some people I know, but it never worked out for me.
Day of the email
People say that Tuesday works best for cold emails. but all weekday will work for you. I have tested sending cold emails every day of a week and all the weekdays performed similarly. Yes, the open and reply rate were a lot lesser on weekends which was obvious.
I got almost all of the conversion in follow-ups
I sent 3 follow up emails + 1 closure email. I'll tell you what's closure email after writing the template of three follow-ups.
The first email was sweet and to the point. But it did not give enough info about the offer. The obvious questions in the recipients head were what do I need to do to avail this, what are the hidden charges, what's the background of I Innovate magazine, what else will I receive apart from this, and what would I Innovate get from this offer.
My next few follow-ups answered every single question.
Follow up 1
This follow up was automated with Saleshandy. This means that it would be sent only to those recipients who did not reply to my first email. I saved a lot of time by not manually following up.
Here's the template:
[1], [2], and [3] provided the benefits of the features. I see that lots of people write this thing incorrectly. They simply write features.
I received 3 replies after this follow up and all of them converted. Yay!
Don't simply write features. Tell them how will this feature solve the problem they're having. Show the solution, not the feature. You may also want to optimize the landing page on your website after reading this paragraph.
Follow up 2
[1] Here I have taken the biggest pain of executing something from the recipient's shoulder and put it on my shoulder. I have taken one of the biggest burdens from the recipient's which executing a project. Yes, executing this partnership was also a kind of project. This gave relief to the recipients.
6 people replied and 5 got converted.
Follow Up 3
People forget things that don't matter to them very easily, So, I wanted to summarize everything here.
19 people replied after this follow-up. 9 got converted.
Last email
No offer was made in this email. The only purpose of this email was to give respect to the recipient. If he didn't reply to your email, it did not mean that he's a bad person. It just meant that his priorities were different and did not align with my offering. So, I paid a little respect and moved on.
This is all.
I know that many people hate cold emails and they say that it's a spam. A cold email could be a spam for person A, but could not be a spam for person B. I had 59% reply rate and none of them asked me to stop sending emails because they were spams. It all boils down to the priority. So, my emails aren't adding any value to you, this is why you'd mark them as a spam. But let's say that you're a business owner and I come to you with a tool related to your industry that can greatly reduce your business cost, and all of your competitors are already using that tool. Plus if I offer you 50% discount in that tool, would you still mark that as spam? If your answer is "yes", you need to figure out that generalizing every cold email as a spam is not doing good to your business.
Another point is that cold email is a must for a startup. Some people here are saying that we should not be cold emailing and should be using legitimate ways to acquire new B2B customers. I agree with that. But there's no cheaper way present to acquire customers this fastly. Unicorn startups like Uber, Flipkart did this when they were new. Many of you might have heard of canva.com. Even that site uses cold emailing to grow its customers. I received a cold email from someone in Canva. So, if you don't like cold emails then you can simply delete the mail. There's no need to get frustrated over them.
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