Writing effective cold emails is not an easy feat. The prospects you email don’t have a prior relationship with you, making it even harder to establish familiarity with them. So, it’s only natural that you will be haunted by questions like:
- What can you possibly say in messages 2, 3, and 4?!
- How many follow-up emails are ideal?
- How do you get your ideal clients to respond?
But are these questions stopping you from starting your cold email campaign? Don’t worry; we have some nifty tips up our sleeve so that you nail your cold email campaigns like a pro.
Let’s dive right in.
Cold emails are fun
Sure, cold emails come with their share of uncertainties, but they are super-effective in generating results for your B2B business. In fact, 80% of businesses prefer emails to calls. [Source]
And cold emails are scalable as well. You can just hit send and deliver your offer to hundreds of clients within just a few minutes! Whereas you can only make so many calls in a day, right?
Besides, with some creativity, your cold emails can work wonders for your business. For instance, personalizing your email subject lines and customizing your first lines is an age-old formula that has always worked for cold emails.
So, why aren’t your first cold emails getting a reply?
There may be several reasons why your first emails are not getting the attention they should:
- Maybe your prospects were busy,
- Maybe your prospects weren’t looking to buy,
- Maybe you emailed them at the wrong time,
- Maybe you did not reach out to the right people, or
- Maybe you weren’t persuasive enough with your pitch.
But how can you sail through the uncertain waters of cold emails? Consider coming up with an effective cold email follow-up plan.
Cold email follow-up 101
As marketers, we all know that losing out on warm leads means losing out on a juicy ROI. So, following up on your first emails helps keep the conversation going and doubles your chances of getting a response from your prospects.
But what do you write in a follow-up email for your warm leads? Let’s have a look.
- Provide context on why you are reaching out.
It’s important you establish trust and credibility from the get-go because you may lose your leads if you come across as too pushy. Even though prospects like being told about the solutions they can try, they absolutely don’t like being chased after. So, mention the context of your pitch in every follow-up email.
Cold emails give you the unique power of pitching to people you haven’t met or talked to - people with no context of who you are and what you can offer. Without context, your prospects will have no idea what your offer is or what you are talking about.
And there’s an easy way to do this, too, by replying to the previous email in your campaign. This way, everything stays in one thread and seems like a natural conversation – an approach drastically different from the flurry of sales emails your prospects get flooded with daily.
As a result, you don’t need to worry about making an effort to provide context. They can quickly come up to speed with your offer by clicking on the three magic dots to open the email thread and learn about everything you’ve sent them up until now.
- Include a call to action on your cold email follow-ups.
Including a call to action in every email helps your prospects understand the next steps they need to take if they are interested in your offer. Letting them know about the due course immediately establishes clarity because, surely, the last thing you would want to do is to leave them wondering.
For higher response rates, ask people to take clear and precise actions like:
- A ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question,
- A push to book a meeting with you,
- An urge to subscribe to your social media channels, and so on.
So, be direct in your follow-up emails and let them know about their action to boost your engagement rates, number of meetings, or even subscribers.
- Keep your follow-up emails short.
Consider sending your second message within just a few days or a week after your first email. You don’t need to write a long script for your first follow-up email. It could be a simple, one-liner bump like:
“Hey [prospect name],
Making sure that this didn’t get buried.”
There’s nothing more impactful than a simple and succinct message. Follow-ups like this would help you to move the email up their inbox and draw attention back to the original cold email.
Note: If your follow-ups are too long, your prospect won’t even make an effort to read the past emails you’ve sent.
Bonus tip - make sure your cold emails are relevant to your prospects.
Don’t just send generic cold emails to a cluster of leads – make your emails as relevant as possible. You can do so by writing from scratch or customizing your emails according to your prospects’ niche.
Writing emails specifically for the niche allows you to propose solutions or ideas for their business (something you may have picked up by talking to people from the same niche).
- Include social proof.
Attaching social proof in your follow-up cold emails talks volumes about your product or service. Not only do social proofs help you establish trust with your prospective customers, but it also lets them know how efficiently you can cater to your customer’s needs.
So, add a case study, testimonial, or success report of one of the companies you’ve worked for in the past that’s in the same niche as them. A social proof could also be a big meet or a huge win you are excited about.
For instance, let’s assume you are selling website design to financial services firms. So, your email script can be something like this:
“Hey [prospect name],
Huge fan of [company name]. Congrats on the recent acquisition of [company name].
Recently I built a website for [your client], and it’s already increased the deal flow they are getting by 17% - leading to millions of dollars in additional assets for them to manage.
Would love to talk about redesigning your site if there’s any interest.
Mind if I send over a couple of times for a quick call?
Thanks,
[Your name]”
As you can see, this email and case study is highly specific to a business niche. If you pitch to a fintech company, your case study should be about helping a fintech company with your services in the past.
So, it’s always a good idea to add an ROI figure to your case study as it strengthens your value proposition and adds credibility to your service.
Build your entire outbound flow in minutes with an automated omnichannel outreach system.
- Add value to your follow-ups.
Never underestimate the value of, well, adding value to your cold emails. Adding value to your cold emails has two-fold benefits:
- Your offer stands out among the tons of other sales emails, and
- Your chances of getting a response from your prospects get bumped up substantially.
At Omni, we follow the two-ideas principle to add value to our cold emails. If, like us, you, too, are sending emails to agency owners, you can take a cue from the following email template:
- Keep your cold email follow-ups logical.
Imagine that you are reading out your email at a networking event. If you don’t manage to catch your prospects’ fancy with your email script, maybe you need to reword it or rethink your approach.
Your follow-up emails for warm leads shouldn’t have a missing context. They shouldn’t even require people to know who you are – the offer in your email should do all the talking.
Reading your email out loud will help you understand how your email copy flows and whether your offer sounds persuasive enough. Keep tweaking your email copy until you are convinced your offer sounds lucrative.
- End your email follow-up drip with a breakup email.
Yep, you read that right – a breakup email. A breakup email is the implementation of the famous “loss aversion cognitive bias” in marketing, where you can encourage your prospect to take action by leveraging on the loss of a missed opportunity.
Your breakup email could be something like:
“Hey [prospect name],
At this point, I will assume increasing the conversion rate on your website and getting more customers is not a priority this year.
Please feel free to reach out if that changes.
Looking forward to working together.
Thanks,
[Your name]”
A direct email like this elicits the feeling of FOMO (fear of missing out) and ensures that your prospects know that your offer comes with an expiry date.
Note – if you are sending cold emails to multiple people in a company, it’s better that you complete an entire email drip sequence with one person before moving on to your next prospect.
But how many cold email follow-ups should you send?
While there is no specific answer to that question, ideally, you should keep the conversation going until you get affirmative action from your prospects, even if they respond to your emails.
However, in the case of a brand-new prospect, the different approach may be different. At Omni, we usually send 3 follow-up cold emails on top of the initial. So, that’s 4 emails in the drip with the following sequence:
1. Initial email,
2. A quick follow-up email (2 days after the cold email),
3. The 2 ideas email or a big announcement email (4 days after the follow-up email), and
4. The breakup email (7 days after the second follow-up email).
Note – You could also include a 4th follow-up email in your drip sequence 2 weeks after the 3rd follow-up.
This entire cold email follow-up sequence gives you about a month – enough for your prospects to respond if interested in your offer.
Pro tip – Email your prospects on different days and times. If your emails aren’t being opened, sending them on the same day and time won’t help your case in converting prospects.
Summing up
Nailing warm follow-up emails to leads is an art that can only be mastered in the long term. So, don’t get disheartened, and stop chasing your lead if they don’t respond to your emails.
You can always go back to a lead, say after 6 or 9 months or even a year, and try again, with a different email. Sort your list of bounced leads, add them back to your campaigns, and keep contacting them.
As they say, “persistence is the key to success” – a mantra that also holds true for cold emails.
But you don’t have to wait years to get your cold emails right. We have an easy hack for you – OmniOutreach.
OmniOutreach helps you be the cold email king by simply automating your entire outbound channel. That’s right! We have put together our years of knowledge on cold emails and automated everything so that you generate thousands in sales in just 10 minutes/ day!
All you need to do is to import your leads, answer a few questions, and set up your campaign – that’s all! We handle the rest for you.
Start your free trial with OmniOutreach now and get your personal sales development rep.
