How to Improve your Cold Email Content in 10 steps

You’ve arrived into your work on a Monday morning and the first thing you do is check your emails. The email either seems too dull or sales orientated- so you move on or delete it.

However- how do we stop our prospects from doing the same?

These 10 steps below might just be the key tools to use, that make a massive difference to your email response rate.

1. Know Your Audience

The single most important thing is researching the people to whom you are sending these cold emails. If you don’t know the recipient, how can you possibly judge if they will react positively. People react differently, one email may be perfect to send to one recipient but a complete disaster to another. This is why it is key to know the person you are attempting to engage and to be able to craft your email from the point of view of your target recipient.

Once you have properly researched your target, you can use many different techniques to encourage engagement, but without this understanding you are shooting in the dark.

Research from the journal of business strategy (Frank K. Sonnenberg) speaks about the many segments that you can place your client into including their demographic, psychographic, behavioural, demographic or geographical location. Having more information about your audience lets you know what is appropriate for the specific type of person and through this, can even allow you to add comedy in your emails to entice your viewers more.

2. Make it Stand Out!

The email needs to engage with the reader.

It can’t look the same as every other email. You need to use eye-catching words and phrases.

Personalising your emails is another great way to distinguish yourself from other competitors; it will make them feel special (even though they might know that software can do this easily). For example, adding their name and occupation. This will definitely have a positive impact on them.

3. Don’t be Caught Selling

You need to send an email to which someone will want to respond. If they think they are being sold something they will instantly move past it. It makes people feel uncomfortable and could appear to them that they are being hassled into buying something they don’t want.

To prevent this, be subtle with the words you use and stress benefits on how your product or service can help the recipient rather than going straight for a close.

4. To the Point.

Keep to the point. Set yourself sentence 140 characters or less (the format of Twitter) this will force you to shorten your sentences and make them more concise. Then set a maximum amount of words-something like 200.

Not just this but having a short subject line as well, will persuade someone to click on the email and read further.

By doing this, it will make the email more intriguing to read.

5. Make it Polite

It may be obvious… but being polite will give the reader more of a reason to reply as they sense a warmth from the recipient. Rudeness or indeed anything which may offend your reader- will be counterproductive.

6. A/B Testing

Learning from previous attempts is always useful. One example is the A/B statistical analysis where you determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.

It is particularly useful for email campaign testing and comparison, often something many people forget. Here, you have two different customer types with both a different ‘call to action’. It clearly shows you what works for both emails and what doesn’t, so you can be more efficient with your cold emailing in the future.

 7. Use Multiple Touchpoints

This is another proven key tool to use. Marketing Evolution states that ‘Multi-touch attribution is a method of marketing measurement that evaluates the impact of each touchpoint in driving a conversion, thereby determining the value of that specific touchpoint’.

For instance- connecting with a person on a platform like Linked in before sending an email, will allow a potential customer to put a face to a name and feel more familiar and trusting of their emails.

8. Pick your Timing Wisely

Otherwise people won’t read your emails. Monday morning is probably not the best time to contact, as the prospect is likely to have a lot of other emails. A good time to send an email is Friday afternoon where the reader has the whole weekend to look. It is also helpful to try and set a daily sending limit, which will help prevent email overload.

9. Clean Your Data

Make sure your data is clean! Typically, when we grab our data from different sources it can be formatted differently.

Dear DAVE BENNETT, we would like to speak to you at Applyby Ltd.

Looks unprofessional right? Your emails have to be looking good and this can make all the difference to someone responding- as they will take you more seriously.

10. Make it Readable on All Devices

The format of an email appears different on a mobile phone than it does on a computer/laptop. A report from Statista states 43% of people in the UK open emails via their mobile. Therefore, making emails readable and presentable on all devices is crucial and can make a massive difference to your email response rate.

So, now you have read and understood these points- time to start making changes!