Like most people, you don’t want to settle for mediocre conversions with your cold email outreach. Instead, you want the best email outreach strategy to generate warm leads that impact the bottom line.

 

 

There are a few things to remember when doing cold email outreach, like ensuring that your emails are personal and highlighting your value. These, among many other things, are what we’ll detail for you to understand and use in your own cold email outreach campaign for game-changing results.

 

 

Let’s take a closer look and dive deeper into the techniques.

 

 

Cold Email Outreach: The Ultimate Guide to Conversion

 

The learning curve is steep, so don’t waste resources jumping into cold email outreach without knowledge. Instead, use this guide to get started on the right foot and learn the best way to prepare, implement, and analyze cold email outreach results.

 

 

1. Setting up your signature, profile, and provider

 

When starting out, you need to set up your signature, profile, and provider. These three elements will determine how successful your cold email outreach efforts will be.

 

• Your Cold Email Outreach Signature

Avoid getting too fancy and creative with HTML. Instead, keep your email signature clean, professional, and focused on relevant information. The easiest way to achieve this is by putting your full name and position in the company below it (with a hyperlink to its website).

 

• Your Cold Email Outreach Profile

Include your full name, a photo of yourself smiling and looking professional, and relevant information about yourself. Think of all the times you’ve received a random email—did you ever respond to a “Mike” with no profile photo and credentials? Nope. But you’d reply to a “Michael Smith” wearing a nice suit and an impressive list of achievements.

 

• Your Cold Email Outreach Provider

Using free email providers (e.g., Gmail) may be tempting, but using paid ones will give you a corporate domain to gain more trust and have better email deliverability. Free accounts are also often associated with spam emails, so they come with a bad reputation you don’t want to have.

 

 

2. Avoiding spam folders or getting blacklisted 

 

Spam folders are every email marketer’s nightmare. Once your emails frequently enter multiple recipients’ spam, you risk the chance of getting your account blocked—trapped on a blacklist forever. So, how do you avoid spam folders or getting blacklisted? 

 

 

Here are 3 simple steps:

 

 

#1 – Warm Up Your Email Account

 

“Warming up” your account means using it to send and receive messages like a regular, real person does with their account before using it to send cold messages. Doing so helps you pass the authentication process below for healthy deliverability. You can visit Lemlist’s Lemwarm to automate the task.

 

 

#2 – Run Emails Through Authentication Systems

 

Choose between Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to have your emails checked by an email provider. Run your email through either system to ensure that you’re not falling into the red zone. You’ll also see how well your emails are performing to make necessary changes.

 

 

#3 – Clean Your Email List

 

Sending cold emails to addresses that don’t exist is risky. The more you send to invalid email addresses, the more you’ll get hard bounces—the more your sender reputation declines. So use a tool like Bouncer, choose Lemlist integration, and verify your campaign to clean your lead list automatically.

 

 

3. Finding the right audience to build a cold email list

 

The next step is to identify your targets—determining who your ideal customer is, what their needs are, and where they are most likely to be found. Once you have and fully understand this information about your business, you can start to build a list of potential customers.

 

 

You can find email addresses anywhere (e.g., through Chrome extensions, LinkedIn profiles, and other databases). Just remember to avoid collecting personal emails (it’s illegal), use trustworthy sources, and save your results in a CSV file to upload them to your email software easily.

 

 

4. Writing an effective cold email

 

Once you have a list of potential customers, the next step is to create a personalized message for each one. This message should be tailored to the individual and should include a call to action that encourages them to take the next step. Your ultimate goal? Provide a valuable offer that’s irresistible.

 

Here’s how to write an effective cold email:

 

• Connect Your Sender Email Address

Hop on your email provider and connect your email address. If you’re using G-suite, tap the “Create your first campaign” button, input a project name, and start writing your emails. You can start from scratch (and follow our steps below), but you can also utilize AI writing tools like Jasper.ai.

 

• Master Cold Email Subject Lines

Your subject email line is the first thing people will see, so it has to be compelling enough for them to click through. Our advice is to avoid using all-caps formatting that sounds like you’re shouting, avoid negative tones like “please don’t ignore this!”, and avoid overused and cliche lines. Instead, you want to sound like a real human being (because you are), emphasize the relevancy of your content, and be straightforward.

 

• Write an Engaging Introduction

Once the person opens the email, they’re going to read the first few lines before deciding if your email is valuable or not. This means you have to drive the value of your email immediately, highlight what they’ll get out of the message, and build a rapport to encourage two-way communication. 

 

 

Personalize the Cold Message

 

Now, this is where your CSV file of emails becomes useful. With the right tags and proper columns labeled out, you can easily pull the first name, intro line, and call-to-action from the list. You can even have unique tags for prospects, like tagging someone with “dog lover” to personalize in a few clicks.

 

 

Head on over to your Lemlist to start personalizing your cold emails easily.

 

 

Leverage common interests, pay a genuine compliment, or target a pain point and use their language to start a relationship with the reader. That way, the email doesn’t feel as cold (pun intended) as it actually is—the recipient will appreciate you reaching out to them and offering real help. 

 

 

Templates for Cold Email Messages

 

Not sure where to begin? Here are some proven outlines for you to follow. These templates save you time (especially if you hate writing from scratch) and are guaranteed ways to get a response:

 

1. Personal ice breaker -> Summary of what to expect -> Video that explains it -> CTA
2. Genuine compliment -> A little humor for rapport -> Engaging and personal image -> CTA
3. Genuine compliment -> Unique topic proposal -> What’s in it for them -> Credibility -> CTA

 

You can test which template works best for your audience by conducting A/B tests. It’ll be even better if you can get detailed feedback to see how you should change. You’ll eventually land on a unique template that works best for your situation and business offer.

 

 

5. Sending cold emails in bulk

 

Once you have a list of potential customers and a personalized message for each one, you can start to send out your emails in bulk. This will save you time and ensure that you are reaching as many people as possible. But how many emails is too much? 

 

 

Based on our experience, stick to:

 

• Maximum 80 emails a day if your account is new
• Maximum 120 emails a day if your account is old 

 

Going more than this threshold might alert Google and other email providers. You also want to ensure that you have the manpower and time to respond to the emails, should you get several responses. 

 

 

Remember: Avoid emailing on weekends and stick to regular working hours.

 

 

6. Understanding cold email metrics

 

The final step is to measure your success. To do this, you need to track your open, click-through, reply, bounce, and conversion rates. Understand them by putting them in buckets of “positive” and “negative” metrics, so you know how many people are interested.

 

 

You’ll also see which of your cold email outreach efforts are working and which ones are not.

 

 

Here are a few pointers to keep in mind:

 

• A good open rate for cold email outreach is 50%. Anything below means you have a problem (like you’re landing in the spam folder).
• A good response rate is around 8%. However, if you are sending targeted emails, you should try to get a 20% reply rate (or 40 replies from 200 prospects).
• A good conversion rate is 10%. Aim to get 10 conversions from 100 emails.

 

Send Cold Email Outreach That’ll Get Warm Leads

 

These are just some of the game-changing cold email outreach strategies that you can use to get better results. If you implement these techniques, you will be sure to see an improvement in your conversion rates.

 

 

And, as we all know, the higher the conversion rates, the more impressive and massive your bottom line profits will be. Isn’t that the whole purpose of sending cold emails in the right place?

 

 

Do you need more help? Our team has the experience and expertise to help your brand reach target audiences and generate sales. Get in touch today.