Cold email is one the best way to generate leads for your business.
Successful startups, agencies, freelancers use cold emails everyday to fill their calendar with meetings and close deals or new subscriptions.
Many people think that cold email is similar to email marketing, it's not.
Email marketing refers to inbound, meaning the prospect already subscribed to your product/service.
Cold email is part of sales outreach and thus refers to outbound, meaning prospects never heard about you before.
Mailchimp is not a cold email software
Cold email is not suited for all businesses.
First, you need to act in a B2B environment.
Secondly, only do cold emails if it has a great ROI potential.
If you're selling anything above $500, you're good to go with cold emails.
If you're selling things below $50, you will have to send very large volumes to be successful.
This is why cold emails generally suit the following:
Cold email is not spam. Cold email is spam only when you don't know how to do it.
You cannot blame people who say cold email is spam because they're used to receive many spammy messages.
Cold email is not illegal except in rare countries such as Denmark.
Cold email is RGDP compliant as long as you target B2B businesses and have a 'legitimate interest' to do business with your prospect.
The goal of a cold email is simple: book a call/meeting.
You won't sell something straight away with just a cold email whatever your goal (making money, backlinks, networking).
This part is very important, remember it.
Not working on your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is the main reason why people fail at cold emailing.
If you don't master your ICP, you can have the best deliverability, great open rates but no replies will occur.
Iterate on your ICP, here's how:
If you target anyone, you're targeting nobody.
Be selective about your prospects.
Quick example:
Doing this allow you to add more personalization to your outreach.
Warm cold emails means that you target people who already know about you or are aware of your product/service/industry.
You can't do it on all platforms but Twitter is perfect for that.
Scrapybird tool
I personally use this tool called ScrapyBird.
My favorite features are:
This tool is legendary, it's called Builtwith.
It allows you to target people who are using other technologies (eg: Mailchimp, Intercom, Salesforce).
You can then enrich with the B2B email address using Appollo(dot)io, this is what we do at Breakcold.
Builtwith tool
Here's a quick process to do it properly:
Expose prospects to your content so the first time you send them cold emails, it's not really 'cold' but 'warm'.
Here's a quick process to understand it:
I'd like to emphasize that all these rules are essential and a must-do if you want to have good open rates and reply rates.
The rule is simple: always buy separate domains dedicated to cold emails.
If you get into spam, you'll ruin your domain authority.
This is how you do it:
Except if you are a large enterprise or a big startup with a crazy domain authority, avoid to create more than two email addresses per sending domain.
1 email address is better, especially when you're starting out.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC are settings that certify that you're the sole proprietary of your domain. It's made to prevent email spoofing.
Good to know: you don't have to set-up SPF and DKIM if you buy your domains with Google Domains.
When you use a cold email platform to send cold emails, you basically share an invisible pixel with all the users of the platforms to track the open rates.
You don't want to share this pixel with other users because it can reduce your deliverability a little bit if some users of the platform are spammy people.
This is why you need to set up custom domain tracking.
All these settings are DNS records
Emil warm up is essential to succeed with cold emails.
When you buy a domain dedicated to cold emails, this domain has no authority. To get authority, the domain needs to send emails that get replies, many replies.
Email warm up tools allow you to automate this process, here's how:
At scale, links are things you want to avoid.
Get rid of them in your email copy as much as possible.
Same goes for images.
The goal is to use as little as possible HTML structure in your emails.
If you decide to use links, only use links that can guarantee you a great boost in replies.
This is where people fail the most.
People send too many email with one single domain. We recommend to send maximum 50 emails per sending domain (not including emails from the warm up tool).
Pros who have bigger budget and are even more cautious and send less than 35 emails per sending domain.
You feel confident about cold emailing and want to send 1000 cold emails a day?
Use cold email rotation.
Here's an example:
This is the most important rule when it comes to cold email copywriting: write a cold email that you would open and reply to yourself - it's that simple.
It's common sense, but many people forget about it.
The subject line seems important but not that much.
The thing is, people look at the preview of your email nowadays to decide to open your email or not. So the first line (aka icebreaker) is more important.
Here's a few tips:
Your main goal is to start a conversation, you're not here to sell something straight away.
Sounds cheesy, but your goal is to build a relationship first.
Goal number 1 is to get a reply and then book a call (unless the reply already is enough for your goal with cold emails - ie backlinks, feedback, etc).
The recommended length of a good cold email is 30 to 75 words.
No one wants to read something long right?
You basically have to do the opposite of what you've been taught at school.
Being formal means you will sound like a cold email template.
Do voluntary mistakes in your subject lines:
Why? Because it stands out more in the inbox.
70% of emails are written beyond a 10th grade reading level.
Use a 5th grade email reading level.
Don't use I, me, my, myself etc.
Replace those by you, because it's about the prospect not about yourself.
Don't present yourself.
The algorithms of Google and Outlook spot spam words.
If you use them in your campaigns, especially at scale it can cause you big deliverability problems.
Here's a few words that are labeled as spam words in cold emailing: Buy now; Free gift; Free trial; Call now; Offer.
Most of the time, people don't reply to you because they're busy.
Use follow-up emails to boost reply rates.
Wait between 2 to 7 days between each step.
Take advantage of each new follow-up to add a new information about your product or service.
Personalizing your cold email first lines is essential if you want to get good results.
Personalized first lines improve:
You can write first lines yourself, with a VA (virtual assistant) or with AI like we do at Breakcold.
First lines are generated from a LinkedIn URL or a Website URL.
A good way to do it is to manually take some time to listen to a podcast that the prospect has made (useful if you target C-level executives).
In your cold email sequence, use personalization points in your copy such as {{firstName}}, {{company}} or {{city}}.
PS lines are great ways to add a layer of personalization.
You can use them to make a point about a casual information that you noticed about your prospect.
Example:
Back in the days, people wanted to remove the sent from my iPhone from their messages.
It's now time to use it again!
You're starting with cold emails and need some templates?
Check our templates here
Cold email is spam only if you don't know how to do it properly.
Simply don't send cold emails that you won't open, read or reply too.
Follow the best practices in terms of cold email copywriting and cold email targeting to avoid being spammy.
Cold email is not illegal.
Cold email is legal in most countries throughout the world. A few countries restrict cold emails but there are very few. Denmark is an example of such country.
However, bear in mind that cold email is illegal in B2C environement.
Breakcold obviously, it's a no brainer option.
Long story short, it is.
Basically, as long as you have a legitimate interest to do business with your prospect, it's all good.
Cold emails however are not possible with B2C prospects but only B2B ones.
Best resources to step up your cold email game