Cold Emailing

“Hey, bud!

It looks like you’re looking for a place to stay. I think you might like our apartment, would you like to see it and have a lil tour?” —

Before the world embraced technology, you might have encountered these lines in person. We commonly hear these with salespeople randomly connecting with you as their prospects and trying to sell their products. There was no proper term at that time, but guess we can call it the ‘traditional’ or the ‘person-to-person’ (P2P) cold selling.

Back then, cold selling usually happens when two parties involved are talking in person. Now that we entered the ‘digital age’ as they say, it is relatively easy to do it online. Don’t you agree?

Now, we don’t just have a cold selling cause it has already bifurcated — in the term cold emailing.

Now that we have a sneak peek, gear up, and let’s unwrap more!

What is Cold Emailing?

Cold Emailing is an email usually done and sent by sales reps to their prospects. According to Crunchbase’s blog titled “The Art of a Cold Email to a Venture Capitalist,” it is a sales email that is being sent to an “unknown person” (prospects) which aims to build a connection and strong relationship.

Sales reps typically use this method to send their prospects into the sales funnel. A very relevant and timely example that you might want to personally see is right there sitting in your inbox. When you load it, notice that there are tons of emails from different people/companies that you ‘do not know’ perhaps asking you to book a demo or want to connect with you.

You see, that is cold emailing.

Advertising, SaaS companies, and even salespeople in the IT industry strongly credit the importance of cold email. In fact, companies like Uber, ProductHunt, and Godaddy use it as their primary means of communication.

Cold emailing can be really beneficial but only if it is done correctly, otherwise… it sucks.

Importance of Cold Emailing

It is not even debatable whether unsolicited emails are awful or not – ofc YES! It is even dubbed as “spam”, “atrocious”, “terrible”, and “annoying” — name it, everyone receiving it will definitely have their two cents.

Cold emailing has a bad reputation, however, we might be thinking “why do businesses and/or organizations still continue to use this method?” given those sentiments. Well, prolly because cold emailing helps in:

a. Networking

• Considering that coronavirus is still in attendance, it is most likely impossible to schedule a face-to-face meeting with professionals. However, a good sales rep should know exactly how to capitalize on this situation through networking.
• Of course, cold emailing isn’t established just for clout. In today’s time where networking serves dominance, cold emailing is your trump card. It can serve as a useful tool that can help you easily get in touch with your prospects. You can present yourself and represent your company the same way as you usually would in an in-person meeting. Show your sincere efforts, who knows, you’ll inspire the recipient to take positive action and eventually contact you.
• That’ll definitely help you expand your network, right?

b. Lead Generation

• As we have mentioned earlier, cold emailing is used by sales reps to walk their prospects toward sales. Therefore, it is also a major contributor in leads generation. Initially, you start with building a strong relationship and then eventually convert your prospects into valuable customers.
• Sales reps collect email addresses through online surveys to target companies and prospects that match their ideal customer profile. Therefore, it is safe to say that cold emailing’s most substantial advantage is that it is “highly targeted”. This means that you only target those audiences who are interested in your product/service and you avoid wasting too much time on groups that will not convert.

c. Brand awareness

• Cold emails, by their very nature, help increase brand awareness. They generally target prospects who have never interacted with your product but can possibly find value in it. Cold Emailing is an incredible avenue to exhibit your product’s advantage and how it differs from other offerings. In time, you’ll see that it will help you grow awareness.

d. Scalability

• Cold mail is scalable. You can also send an email to multiple prospects to measure their success. Based on your success, you can strategically plan your next email. With cold email outreach, you can reach thousands of prospects a day.

How to write a cold email?

Oftentimes, we can easily spot the good, just a so-so, and the cold mail that sucks bigtime. If there is a swarm of demo bookings, most probably, you’re nailing it. But if it’s the opposite, might as well check and determine the culprit as soon as possible.

According to Saleshandy’s data, the growth trajectory of email usage will continue to increase in the next few years and reports also revealed that millennials and B2B companies are more fond of using email.

These findings clearly suggest that there is a vast opportunity awaits in the future of cold selling. That being said, let us unfold these takeaways in creating your successful email campaign.

Here’s how:

1. Prospect right

Before going all out drafting and sending your emails to your prospects, secure first your list to whom you’ll send your emails. Identify precisely who your target audiences are and while listing down, remember to always aim for relevancy.

Prospecting is all about finding relevant prospects that you would reach out to.

While prospecting, it is also important to note that your goal is to prioritize those who will speak to you over leads that look perfect. Your first sales aren’t about money but finding experienced prospects who are willing to talk to you. So start with someone who already knows the potential customers, ask for a referral, and search for prospects that you are already involved with.

2. Prepare to set up

Before we go further, let us first go over these important points needed to send emails.

Do not send cold mail from the main domain, that’s the main point. Instead, buy a secondary domain and then redirect them to the primary domain so that prospective customers end up on the correct landing page.

After that, set up the email addresses on those domains then add the Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC), and Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records to DNS. These are basically ways to make your email more reliable and deliverable. Next, warm up your domain. This means interacting with others, sending and receiving emails, getting clicks, and opening messages. It makes your email address look like a real email address to the spam detection system. If you do this, your email will not end up in spam.

Finally, you need to select cold email software. This allows for the automatic replacement of dynamic tags such as {{firstname}}, automation of follow-up sequences, monitoring of statistics, and more.

Ensure that it is compatible with the email provider you chose.

3. Get that killer subject line!

Now, let’s get down to the core.

We cannot emphasize enough how subject lines highly influence the prospect’s decision to open your mail or not. It is basically your first contact with the recipient, therefore, you need to give it a blast of careful thinking.

Instead of the usual promotional line, why not opt to use a line that will ring their curiosity and convince them to open your email. It should be catchy and must grab their attention in an instant, but doing this is not as easy. You need to consider its length, a short but appealing subject line is ideal, and of course, a personalized one. Combine it all and most likely, it will transform into a successful conversion.

4. Short email body

Firstly, no one wants to read a novel. Second, you are not aiming to be the bestseller author of all time. Drop all those nitty-gritty lines that make your email boring.

Saleshandy stated that the human attention span is declining, therefore, it is important to keep it as short as possible. Include only the important information based on your research.

These are the three (3) parts of a cold email body:

a. Introduction – The part where you introduce yourself

b. Purpose – The reason for the contact

c. Salutation – The part where you thank them (closing)

5. Personalize email

Before sending your email, make sure to include the recipient’s name or their company’s name. They will appreciate it more than being called “Hey, prospect!”

Aside from that, you can also earn their trust by mentioning a big name that they might probably know. Do not make it look like you’re bragging though – let them think that they are negotiating with a real and licit person.

Personalize. It holds a deeper value than we could ever think.

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6. Right timing

Choosing the right timing can be pretty challenging to some considering that people have various times and days they open their emails.

However, these are two (2) pointers you might want to know as the best time to send your email:

a. Time of day

• According to Saleshandy, there is a study conducted where it revealed that the best time to send an email is at around 10:00 am as it is the time where most emails are opened, whereas the worst time is around 3:00 or 4:00 am.

b. Day of the week

• Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually considered the best response days of the week if you are trying to contact executives. Marketers say these are the best days for B2B email.

7. Find the right audience

Of course, you will not offer your product to an audience who does not need it in the first place. Your product is specifically designed for a specific audience, and your job is to offer it to those who will most likely be interested in it.

You may opt to bifurcate and/or segmentize your audience to make it easier for you, but do not forget to customize and tailor-fir your content for every segment.

8. Have a clear CTA

Conversions will not pan out if you don’t state exactly what you want your recipients to do. You need to state a clear Call-To-Action (CTA) and tell them what you want them to do next.

Take note that in creating your CTA, you need to have only one. Do not make a confusion, if you want them to fill out a form, then so be it. Embed and/or attach the link. However, do not ask them to send you also a response, just choose one. Don’t ask things simultaneously – that’s uncivil.

9. Make sure to follow-up

After sending an email and not receiving a response, following up is one of the basic measures a salesperson should take.

It is difficult to seal a deal with just one email hanging on the line. With all the emails that your prospect receive, it is impossible for them to remember each one of them. Therefore, sending a follow-up email will help you guarantee that your prospects will not lose sight of your offer.

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How to use Woffice CRM to organize your deals

What is a CRM?

In the most simple term, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a software system/tool that helps a company improve its relationships with its potential and existing customers.

CRM serves as the alternate database that stores the businesses’ client data. It is a system that collates all your client/lead information all in one centralized repository which highly promotes organization and increases productivity.

Benefits of using CRM

Better knowledge of customers. Considering that you have all your customer’s information stored in one single place, makes CRM one of the most advantageous tools in your organization. Unlike spreadsheets, CRM stores not only basic information such as your customer’s full name and contact details, but it also piles up critical information such as their company, position, and even the relationship they have with your current contacts. It may also provide you with information about their first visit to your site and all the activities they did.

With this information all at your fingertips, you get to know better your customers, hence, giving you a broad spectrum of choices on how to build a connection with them.

Higher Productivity. Unlike Spreadsheet, CRM allows you to limit manual tasks and have things automated, instead. With CRM, you no longer have to spend too much time with administrative tasks such as reporting and inputting data. Instead, you can focus more on your prospects and study what they really need.

Customer retention. Aside from nurturing relationships with your customers and potential customers, you can also use CRM in keeping your existing customers. You can make use of CRM in sending follow-up emails and it can also serve as your subordinate reminding you to reach out to clients you have not contacted for a while.

In addition, CRM also allows you to manage your marketing campaigns to sustain your customer’s interest and ensure that they will not swerve back. It includes sending email campaigns, offering a free trial, or answering a post-purchase survey.

Increased teamwork and collaboration. Since data and all customer information are shared within the organization, the communication between the different departments is streamlined properly making it easy for them to integrate activities.

When to use CRM

If you are doubtful and confused about why can’t you generate quality leads and constantly have challenges closing a deal, you might want to integrate a new and advanced tool into your business.

Below are just a few factors that might trigger you to invest in CRM:

• It takes more time for your customers to make a purchase decision (more than a week)
• You’re sending different emails to different customers
• You consume too much time creating and analyzing your campaigns
• Your analysis does not present a detailed and comprehensive data about your campaign
• You are targeting various demographics simultaneously

With those factors, you may want to consider assessing your organization and/or evaluate whether your tools and resources are still giving you the benefit that you need, or do you need to level up some more.

How to use a CRM

Once you have decided to integrate CRM, here are six (6) important steps you need to know:

1. Add your salespeople – After you adapt CRM in your organization, make sure that you get all your reps bound together on the same page. You may want to engage first your top salesperson to serve as an advocate and let others follow.

Preferably, the sooner you get your reps on board, the better. However, make sure that you clearly communicate the value of CRM, particularly on how will it help them in generating leads.

2. Customize settings – Your CRM should reflect what your customer goes through before arriving at their purchasing decision or your sales process. For example, your sales process includes “prospect”, “connect”, “demo”, “close”, and “follow-up”. You need to individually create deal stages in your CRM pipeline so that you can standardize your sales process for your sales reps.

Next, create your own custom property to store your data. CRM has a default “property” or a field where you will input the details about your prospect. For example, you might want to add a field for “Goods purchased” or “office address”. Create these custom properties before importing your existing data into your CRM.

3. Import contacts, companies, and deals – When transferring data from your old and new system, make sure that each column in your spreadsheet matches a contact property in the CRM. This is to ensure that your data will flow seamlessly.

4. Integrate other tools – What’s great about CRM is that it creates a path for all your marketing, sales, and customer success information to be centralized, giving you convenience and a chance to get rid of those arduous manual data entries.

You might be thinking that using several tools makes your work easier. It may be somewhat true, but only if you’re using the right tools. Otherwise, it will make your work ineffective and time-consuming.

With CRM, you can generate your leads by asking them to fill out a form, start a conversation with your reps, and if they need more time, your marketing team may encourage them through educational content — as seamless as it is. You do not need to import and export all your data from one place to another.

5. Set up dashboard – Of course, in your organization you want everyone’s performance to be aligned so you can properly usher them in the right direction, hence, a CRM dashboard is a must. Your CRM dashboard will serve as the control panel that you can customize based on your needs.

6. Enable reports – Sales managers spend a lot of time researching data. Meanwhile, sales reps should spend as much time on sales as possible. For this reason, you may create daily, weekly, monthly, and/or quarterly email reports that present the accomplishments of each team member for a particular duration. This will encourage friendly competition between the group and gives them the motivation to keep on going even after they’ve hit their quota.