Have you ever sent a highly personalized email to a potential prospect without even talking to them? Well, it was a cold email. 📬
Today, a professional receives an average of more than 50 emails per day. About ten of them are clearly identified as promotional or advertising...🤯 How can you be different, and write a good cold email?
We'll tell you everything, or almost everything!
Cold email, phoning 2.0?
A cold email is a personalized prospecting technique (versus the mass mailing that was trendy a few years ago). It's very scalable, unlike "cold calling".
It's easier to send 100 emails in a day than it is to make 100 phone calls, right? 😉
However, it is still very tedious. The automation of cold email campaigns can save a considerable amount of time and make you gain efficiency. So, automation must rhyme with adaptation and personalization.
🔥 A perfect cold email strategy should lead to opening rates above 60% and a response rate > 25%. It sounds like a dream.
Start by defining your target
First of all, you have to understand the quality takes precedence over quantity.
Targeting and segmenting is the first thing to do when preparing your prospecting campaigns.
Say goodbye to sending mass emails and crossing your fingers that one of them will fall on the right person. Say hello to targeting, personalization, and efficiency.
We define a target by asking these questions:
- Which sector of activity do I want to address?
- What kind of company? (Startup, SME, large groups, associations...)
- What is the person's title or position? What is his or her responsibility in the company? (CEO, CMO, CTO, Head of sales, HR...)
- Eventually, what career path?
Once you have defined your persona(s), it's a matter of finding them...
Using LinkedIn (well)
LinkedIn is the largest public B2B database, that is up-to-date and legally exploitable.
Once your personas are defined, filter your segments via Sales Navigator and retrieve all the data from a contact's form: at least the combination First name + Last name + Company website (or failing that, the company's name).
Pro tip: narrow your search by excluding, for example, shareholders, trainees, or profiles without a photo, which are generally less relevant.
Many tools allow you to create workflows to retrieve information from the Linkedin records of your target automatically:
Recovering data is good. Being able to exploit it is better. Once your lead base is established and segmented, it is crucial to enrich it to personalize your communications.
Enrich and qualify your contact base
You have a targeted base but it may be incomplete. The road to the success of your campaign is not over ⛰.
Two possibilities:
Your contacts to be enriched are in a file (Excel, CSV or, txt)
- It is then possible to enrich this base thanks to Dropcontact directly via a drag and drop in the application in order to retrieve a new file that is all clean and enriched ;
- Or, you can directly enrich your leads by customizing an automatic workflow according to your use case. Of course, we'll tell you how to enrich your data with Dropcontact and Zapier or Integromat.
You have directly imported these new leads into your CRM
- Dropcontact is directly integrated into Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Hubspot. One click is enough to connect the two applications. With this integration, all the contacts in your CRM are automatically enriched, cleaned up, standardized...
The personalization of your emails is the key to the success of your campaigns.
Whatever the method used, Dropcontact enriches all your leads from [last name + first name + website (or company)]: add civility, normalize the first name, remove "toxic" characters, add and verify the professional email address, add company information (website, sector, number of employees, etc.).
Personalize your e-mails
Even if your campaigns are automated, don't forget that you are a person talking to another person. 😉
Don't follow the "textbook methods" that everyone knows. Be original, relevant, and personalize objects and content.
Using the experience of the Sales and Marketing teams is an effective method to find the most convincing objects and content. Brainstorm with your teams to share the different successes (and failures) of past campaigns, test, iterate... and your campaigns will perform :)
In general, forget what you have learned or all the email templates you see passing by. Differentiate yourself.
Another important point: timing is everything when sending a cold email...
We will not advise you to send your campaigns on a particular day at a specific time. We are talking about the most opportune time to reach your prospects at the exact moment they are available and need your offer. Only your experience will be able to advise you 😉.
Again, test, test and re-test in order to improve your mailings as you go along, according to your target.
Automation and sequencing of cold emails
Don't worry. Some SaaS softwares are excellent to automate your cold email workflows like:
Thanks to these tools, you will be able to program, test and analyze each of your campaigns, and thus become the king of cold email.
GDPR
💚 Dropcontact is the only SaaS solution that does not have databases to enrich your lead databases, thus guaranteeing 100% GDPR compliant data.
It would be a shame to stop in this completely compliant approach GDPR.
It is essential to add a discreet unsubscribe link in your email or your signature. It is mandatory to leave the possibility for your contact to ask you to stop the communication.
👉🏻 Continue on the dedicated article: GDPR: can we still send prospecting emails?
In conclusion, qualify and enrich your email addresses, personalize, test your emails, and do not remain frozen. Adapt! Now, you will only have to close these "warmed up" and ultra-qualified prospects. For that, we'll leave you to it, it's your job ;)
That was about the marketing part. Don't set aside the technical configuration. Think about configuring your Custom Domain and your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
We'll tell you everything here 👉🏻 How to have an opening rate higher than 70% thanks to the configuration of your domain name
