What is Cold email Marketing and how Does it Work?

What is Cold email Marketing and how Does it Work
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In this article, you’re going to learn exactly what “cold email marketing” is. How does it work? And how can you use it?

Cold email marketing is one of the most underrated but efficient ways to build business relationships with high-level decision-makers to sell your products and services.

Now, what exactly is cold email marketing? And the definition is that we use an email sent to someone without prior permission or contact.

What is cold email marketing?

Cold email marketing means that when you’re sending an email to someone who doesn’t know who you are, you didn’t tell them ahead of time.

You didn’t meet them in person, and you’re sending them an email to try to build a business relationship.

Now, this is going to be very different from spam, where spam is more like you’re just trying to get something out of the person without actually providing any value.

A cold email comes from a place of good intentions where you’re genuinely trying to build a legit business relationship. You’re not trying to scam anybody or anything like that.

So an example of when someone would send a cold email is, let’s say, you are starting as a salesperson working at a software company.

Well, if you’re someone who doesn’t have any business connections and you’re just getting started in your career, well, how do you sell your product?

And how you do that is you make a list of all the people you want to work with and you send them a cold email.

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They don’t know who you are, they don’t know what you do, but if you offer some kind of value and you give a reason for why someone should take a meeting with you, you can build a business relationship even if you had no prior connection.

And cold email marketing, if you think about it, is a form of marketing in general.

So, for example, let’s say you have a Facebook ad. You’re scrolling through Facebook when you see an advertisement. It sounds interesting. You may click on the ad, go to the website, and buy a product or service.

Now, when it comes to cold email. It’s a little different in that you’re not on Facebook, but instead, you’re sending an email to someone’s inbox, and you take up that real estate space. If it’s in their inbox, they’re, of course, going to see it.

They may not open it, but some people will open it, some people will read it, and some people will respond by taking a meeting with you and trying to build a business relationship if you are offering some sort of value.

To succeed with cold email, the first thing you have got to understand is to define what your goals are.

It depends on your situation. You may be using cold email for different situations. So if you are, let’s say, a salesperson, obviously you want to generate B2B sales.

Or if you are working in business development and it’s your job to generate strategic partnerships with other businesses, that’s also another use case for using cold email.

For other people, you might want to be featured in Forbes or different magazines, write a blog post, or be interviewed. Cold email is another way to build relationships with these platforms.

So, no matter what your goal is, cold email might be a method you can use to get an appointment or a meeting with someone you want to talk to.

How does cold email marketing work?

The rule of thumb is that cold email works extremely well when it comes to business-to-business relationships, right? Meaning when one business or entity or a person wants to build a relationship with another business or another entity, and they have to have some kind of relationship before there’s any, transaction or money exchanging hands happening, cold email is one of the best ways to do it.

Now cold email does not work so well when it comes to trying to sell, let’s say sneakers or, doing E-commerce or something like that because if you send someone a cold email asking them to buy, you haven’t built any trust and it’s kind of weird to get an email like that and that’s spam.

However, if you come in with the perspective of, hey, I admire what you do and I want to build a relationship with you to see if it makes sense for us to work together one day,

Well, that’s where cold email is going to shine.

Now that you defined your goal when it comes to cold email. The next step is actually to build your hit list.

This is one of the most overlooked strategies when it comes to succeeding with cold email.

So make sure you pay attention to this one.

So when it comes to cold emailing, you want to define who you are trying to target, right?

That’s also going to determine how many companies are going to be on your hit list. A hit list is just a list, it could be an Excel, a CRM, or software.

It doesn’t matter where the list exists, but you make a list of people that you want to work with.

How can you use cold email marketing?

So, for example, if you wanted to, let’s say, work with the Fortune 500.

Well, there are only 500 companies on the Fortune 500.

So your list is 500 different companies and all the decision makers working at that company. However, you are selling something more of a commodity and you don’t care who you sell it to,

You may be selling it to every yoga studio in America. There might be thousands of yoga studios.
Your list may contain thousands of yoga studios and all the business owners of these studios.

So, depending on your strategy, your sale, and who you are trying to target, you might have a huge list of people that you can potentially work with.

Or, you might have a small list of people that you can work with, right?

And which one is better?

Well, it just depends on what you’re selling and to whom you are selling it.

The more high-end expensive products and services, you’re going to go for larger companies, and for things that are more on the lower price and can be more applicable to more businesses in your target market.

You might have a larger list, and try to reach out to as many people as possible. But the most important thing is to find out who you are going after and make sure that these people can potentially buy your product or service.

so that your response rate can be higher and you don’t seem like someone who is just spamming everybody they find.

Now the next step of the process, once you define who you are trying to target, is you need to understand what the key ingredients of a cold email are.

So there are many different ingredients and it can be very nuanced, but the main ones you’ve got to focus on, especially if you’re just getting started.

These are three key ingredients.

-Number one is your subject line
-Number two, your body
-Number three, a call to action

So let’s go ahead and break these down.

When you’re sending a cold email, the first thing that people are going to see is the subject line.
What is your email actually about? Are you inspiring curiosity, or are you giving a reason or demonstrating value enough, so that someone will click on your cold email and open it, okay?

So a lot of cold emails that people send don’t even get opened because they look like spam or something that they don’t want to read.

However, if you’re able to write the right message, then they’ll open it. The next step once someone opens your email is that you want them to read it, right?

Because if they open it and they don’t read it, it doesn’t do you any good. So that’s where the body comes in? So what are you writing in that email?

How are you demonstrating value?
Are you talking about somebody’s pain points or their challenges?
Are you showing that you can solve these problems?

So these are the things that you want to emphasize when it comes to writing the body of a cold email.

Now, as I said before, depending on your situation, whether you’re doing B2B sales or business development. Your body’s going to slightly change. You might use different templates, but essentially, the goal is the same. It’s to get the person to read the entire email, right?

Because once they read line by line, the first line, the second line, the third line, the fourth line, and they start getting an idea of who you are and what you’re about, the last key phase of a cold email is your call to action.

At the end of the email, what do you want people to do?

Do you want them to book a meeting or a time to talk on your calendar?
Do you want them to tell you what time they’re available and you can schedule that later on?
Or do you just need a quick reply to the email and that’s it? Maybe that’s all you’re looking for, right?

No matter what the case is, at the end of the email you want to have some type of call to action. So the whole purpose of the subject line, the body, and all the things that you’re writing is to get them to take an action at the end.

Read also here:

How Can Email Marketing Fuel Your Overall Inbound Strategy?

So you have to be crystal clear on what you want to happen at the end of that email or when they finish reading that email, so that, you will know whether or not a cold email works.

If you don’t have a call to action, don’t expect anything to come from an email because you didn’t give them direction on what they should do next.

And so, with that said, that is going to be cold email marketing in a nutshell.

 

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