An SDRs 5-Minute Guide to Cold Emails (Actionable Cold Emailing Tips)
Are you looking to improve your cold email skills? While the landscape of sales development continues to change, cold emails are still a staple in the outreach process. A few things to keep in mind before you start sending emails:
Get quality data
Not only will poor data waste your time, but bounced emails hurt your deliverability rate. Try to keep your bounce rate under 3%. While tools like ZoomInfo are great for this, they are often too expensive for smaller organizations. Use a data provider like UpLead to get email addresses at a lower cost (full transparency: we get a small percentage for each referral. We only promote products we believe in. This helps pay website costs).
Lock in your ICP
How well do you know your buyer? Your cold emails are worthless if you don’t dial into exactly what type of person is buying your product or service.
For example, don’t email human resources leaders about new marketing software. It’s the quickest way to end up in the spam folder. An easy way to identify your buyer is to look at the current customers. Who is using the product and what problem are they solving with it?
Take a look back in your CRM and see what titles came inbound. Use those titles to build your outbound lists.
Use a template, but don’t make it look like a template
Gone are the days when SDRs could create a generic sales email and blast it out to thousands of prospects. That’s the quickest way to end up in the spam folder.
Instead of creating a templated email that goes out to all of your prospects, create buckets of prospects that you can target with different sequences. Here are a few ways
Prospects who attended a webinar or event
Prospects who performed an action on LinkedIn (liked a specific person’s post)
Prospects who fall in a specific geographic region
Prospects who follow an industry influencer
The list goes on. Every company will have different buckets that prospects fall into, just make sure to find one that’s relevant for your company.
Make sure your prospects know that the email they receive is meant for them. If there’s even a question if it’s a template, it’s not personalized enough.
An easy framework for creating cold emails
Here’s a quick formula for creating cold emails:
Hi {first name},
(something you noticed about them or their company)
(how it relates to what you do)
(how you can help them)
(ask for interest)
Example
Let’s pretend we work for ACME and we’re reaching out to a marketing leader at an eCommerce company that sells shoes:
“Hi Lisa,
Saw you liked Bob Smith’s post on LinkedIn regarding the challenges of increasing pay-per-click costs.
We recently helped another e-commerce company (instead of selling shoes, they sell hats) reduce their pay-per-click costs 15% in 2 months.
ACME takes a unique and more precise approach to data science to lower pay-per-click costs for ecommerce companies.
Any interest in taking a look?”
The email is a template, but it is specific enough that Lisa will know it isn’t a copy/pasted email.
Conclusion
Cold emails are still a key part of sales development. While there’s no magic bullet, there are steps you can take to increase your response rate. Use this formula to start your outreach process and book more meetings. Best of luck!
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