We’ve sent tens of thousands of cold emails to potential prospects and have 5 tips on how to create an email to make the recipient not only (probably) not hate you and your company, but possibly could even lead to a meeting!
5 Tips To Writing A Cold Email That People Will Respond To
- Be honest that you are trying to pitch to them. First and foremost, we are right to the point about why we are writing an email to the recipient – it’s a sales pitch. This technique usually disarms the recipient because it’s self-aware. You can even be so bold as to invite them to delete the email if they aren’t interested.
- Immediately present the pain point your company solves. In our case, it’s helping companies with their sales. The only way the conversation is going to continue is if you are offering them a solution to a problem they have. If you start off talking about your company, how great you are, what you do – this is wasting their time. They don’t care about YOU they care about THEM.
- Say in less than 1 sentence why you are qualified to help them. Again, they don’t care about you, but they do want to know enough to know why they should trust you enough to keep reading, let alone respond.
- Don’t tell them how to schedule a meeting. No one who is being pitched to wants to be told in a cold email that they now have to take another step to schedule a consultation. It’s insulting. Instead, end with an invitation to continue the conversation, such as “Let’s chat”.
- Don’t send a follow-up email if they don’t respond to the first one. I’m talking about sequencing. If in 6 months or a year you want to reach out again because you think they are a really relevant lead, fine go for it. But those email sequences where you send out a 2 or more follow up emails even though each previous email was ignored – that’s a good way for your domain to end up being marked as spam.
How do I know if I wrote a good cold outreach email?
It’s very easy – you get responses. I don’t just mean leads entering the sales funnel, I mean any (not angry) response. We’ve gotten emails declining our services that were almost apologetic because we did such a good job of identifying their pain point, explaining our solution, and targeting the right person in a company (which is an art and a science in itself).
Here are some of the responses we’ve received on our latest batch of cold emails (that are resulting in 2-5 follow up conversations every day):
- That was a good message.
- I don’t have a mandate to implement your services at the moment, but when I do I’ll be in touch
- We can’t use your services, but I recommended you to XXXX and told him to be in touch.
If you are not getting any responses to your messages [other than ‘remove me from this list’], even if the response is no, then you are not writing a good email.
Not everyone has the training or experience to write emails that lead to clients. If you’d like some help in that area, we’re waiting to hear from you.
