The Ultimate Cold Email Outreach Guide (+5 Templates)

Are you aware that email offers you a 44:1 ROI? It definitely looks like the best channel to reach out to prospects, doesn’t it? However, it will only work for you when you do it correctly. Performing outreach when blindfolded will always give you sloppy results, be it any channel.

Therefore, you must understand the importance of cold email outreach & follow certain guidelines to make the most of your efforts.

You are at the right place if that’s what you are looking for.

This guide will look at the fundamentals of cold emailing, mistakes to avoid, and tips to improve cold email outreach with templates and tools.
Let’s dive straight in!

What Is A Cold Email?

A cold email refers to an email that you send to a prospect who doesn’t know you & vice-versa.

It may sound similar to spam, but it isn’t so. Cold emailing is a great marketing tactic. You can make people know about your brand and make your presence felt. 

You can use cold email outreach to find customers, boost sales, connect with businesses and influencers professionally, share stories with the press and also search for new investors. 

What Is A Good Cold Email Open Rate?

You can mark your cold email outreach campaign as a successful one if your open rate is more than 37%. However, anything more than 25% is a good number.

With open rates, you can set your goals for upcoming campaigns, but the metric can mislead you at times, and you, therefore, have to focus on other metrics such as response rate for your email campaign. 

What Is A Good Cold Email Reply Rate?

On average, the response rate for cold emails is 1%. A good number can vary from 5% to 20% to something even higher. There is no upper limit! A reasonable reply rate is at least half of your open rate. There is no specific or ideal response rate- as it depends on several factors like your industry, the target audience, the goals of your company, and many more. 

When Should You Send A Cold Email?

No matter how painstakingly you created your cold email outreach campaign, it will succeed when you send it when the recipient is most likely to engage with it. However, there is no fixed ‘best time’ as the moods of recipients can change anytime, and you also have to consider the time-zone difference. Some say that mornings are the best time to send cold emails, i.e. between 6 AM and 10 AM. People are more likely to open the email at this time of the day.

Coming to the best day of the week, Monday and Wednesday seem to be the best days to send your emails.

Is It Legal To Send Cold Emails?

Sending cold emails is legal. Though it is not a solicited email, you can’t label it as spam till it :

1. Is personalized

2. Has a relevant subject line

3. Has the sender’s name and contact details

4. Adds value to the email recipient

5. Aims at building a relationship rather than pushing a sale. 

As long as you comply with the guidelines of regulations like CAN-SPAM, CASL, and GDPR, you can send cold emails without worry. 

Cold Emailing Mistakes To Avoid

With cold email outreach, you can turn your startup into a successful venture. However, for that, you must use it the right way. There are some commonly made mistakes that you must avoid to leverage the power of cold emailing, such as:

1. Writing lengthy emails  

Nobody is interested in reading long paragraphs in a cold email. You must keep it short and interesting so that the prospect doesn’t get bored. That is why you should focus on providing sufficient information about your company and your product or service in a few lines. 

2. Being too pushy

The main aim of the cold email need not always be to close a deal. It can also be to build relationships with potential customers, investors, and new partners. Focussing too much on sales will make the recipient lose interest in you. It should be more about building connections and providing value so that you can move to the next step in the sales process.

3. Not adding a clear call to action

You must clearly mention what you want the recipient to do after reading the email. That is why always add a clear call to action that directs the recipient to take the next step. It can be to schedule a meeting or a plain reply. When you don’t provide a CTA, the prospect may ignore your message. 

4. Keeping the subject line too lengthy

Your introduction email subject line has to be short and to the point. If it is too lengthy, the prospect may not be able to understand it properly. Also, it may get cut off when opened on the screen of mobile devices. As most people like checking their emails on the go, there is more use of mobile devices. If you don’t optimize your emails for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, you are at a loss. 

5. Writing long introductions

The truth is that people hardly bother about who you are. All they want to know from your email is what it has in store for them. Therefore, it is wise to give the introduction part a miss and get straight to the point of reaching out. Tell the prospects how your solution can help them save time, money or resources. Make the first line of your email attention-grabbing as it will appear as the preview text below your email subject line. 

6. Using misleading subject lines

Click-bait is a strict no in email outreach. If you try to mislead the prospect, they will never trust you again, which is ultimately your loss. Remember that your subject line has to match the content of your email while being catchy enough to get more opens.  

7. Using jargon

You may be well-versed in your field and have ample knowledge, but you needn’t show that off to your prospect in your cold email. Using professional jargon will only distance the prospect from you. So, try writing your email using simple words and keep the tone conversational so that there is some warmth in your message.

8. Placing multiple CTAs

While adding a CTA in your email is good, adding too many of them will not benefit you. You may feel that with multiple CTAs, the prospect would respond to at least one, but the truth is that they will get overwhelmed with too many call-to-actions and, as a result, not take any action at all. So, try sticking to one CTA per email and make it clear enough. 

9. Not proofreading your email

Nothing is more annoying than a typo in an email. The prospect will form a poor opinion of you if your text has several mistakes. It will seem very unprofessional from your end, and that is why you must proofread your email before hitting the send button. Only then you can expect the prospect to take you seriously. 

10. Keeping an over-friendly tone

While it is excellent to be courteous in your email, you mustn’t fake it. When you are trying to be too friendly with the prospect, they will step back. It is rather weird to ask your prospect about how their vacation went when you are a total stranger to them. While you can compliment them, refrain from making the other person feel uncomfortable with fake friendliness. 

11. No personalization

When you sell high-ticket items, it would be better to reach out to fewer people in a day and put in the time and effort to personalize them. Prospects would prefer getting a one-on-one super-personalized email for bigger deals. You can’t just use prospects’ first names a couple of times for such emails and get done with it. You also require in-depth personalization to make the prospect show actual interest in you. 

12. Not adding an email signature

With an email signature, you add a touch of professionalism to your email. The prospect will trust you more when you have an email signature added to the email. It should have all the essential details like your name, job title, company name or logo, and physical address. You can also add links to your social media profiles or the website of your company. Adding your photo to it will be a cherry on the cake. Basically, it should help the prospect reach you if they want to. 

How To Write A Cold Email?

Now that you know the common mistakes people make while writing cold emails, you must know how to write them to get the required outcome. 

Pay attention to the subject line

The prospect will open the email based on the subject line. Because it gives the recipient an idea of what the contents of the email are. The prospect will decide whether the email is worth opening or not.  This means the subject line is more important than your email copy.

Make sure that you use the name of the prospect in it to give it a personal touch. 

You can choose to ask a question, current stats, or mention a trigger event. However, it would be best if you kept it as short as you can. Ideally, the subject line should not be more than 50 characters. Lengthy subject lines get cut off, leaving the recipient with only a part of the actual message.

There are certain things that you must avoid, and they include: 

a. Misguiding the prospects

Using a click-bait to open your email can fetch you high open rates, but you shouldn’t do it. Misguiding the prospect is like cheating, and you will lose the prospect if you do so. You shouldn’t exaggerate your statements in the subject line and make sure that it matches the content in the email copy. 

b. Capitalizing each word

Reps use this practice when they want prospects to open the email instantly. It may even stand out in the cluttered inbox, but such emails can get caught by the spam filters and prevent them from reaching their destination. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you? 

c. Using too many punctuations

Too much punctuation to stand out in the crowd is a bad idea. It will make your email look unprofessional, and the recipient will trash it. 

You have to avoid the above three practices at all costs. 

Capture the recipient’s interest in the email copy

To arouse the interest of the prospect in your email copy and make your cold email outreach a success, you should follow specific rules,

a. Keep the email copy concise and to the point

While writing the body of the email, make sure that you finish it in 3 paragraphs. The first one can be a brief introduction, the second one a product pitch, and the last one can have a CTA to direct the prospect to take the next step.

b. Be clear with your message

Clarity is essential for cold emails. The prospect doesn’t know you and would want you to tell them why you are sending the email. You have to explain clearly how your product or service can help the prospect. It is better to steer clear of professional jargon and ambiguous words. They can make the prospect lose interest in you. 

c. Make it personal

When you are a little personal with the prospect, they would appreciate the efforts you put into knowing about them and their company. Such kinds of emails tend to get more responses. 

d. Add social proof

When prospects find out that your product or service has benefitted other users, they will be interested in you. You can add testimonials and case studies to show them how you have helped many other companies reach their target. 

Scenarios You Face While Reaching Out

When you try to get in touch with potential customers for sales, there will be three types of scenarios in front of you, and they are,

Scenario 1: The potential customer is aware of the problem.

Scenario 2: The potential customer knows about the problem but is getting help from a competitor of yours. Here, the prospect can use your product or service after firing your competitor. 

Scenario 3: The potential customer is not aware of the problem they have. 

The 2nd and 3rd scenarios are pretty common, which is why you have to make sure that your product or service addresses a real problem of the prospect. How well you convey this to your prospect shows your efficiency as a salesperson. Most often, you have to communicate all you can in one or two sentences because the prospects are usually busy.

Tips To Make Cold Emailing Effective

1. Try the market research excuse

This approach is well-suited for startups that have just started. You can cold email potential customers on the pretext of doing market research. Inform the prospect about your startup, what it does, and how it can benefit the prospect’s business.

You can then ask a few related questions and understand the problems, and challenges faced by the prospect. It is also better to get an idea about your competitors in the market and improve your product or service. 

It would be even better if you offer something in return, and that could be a free ebook or a free trial.

2. Aim at the early adopters

Some people are willing to try new things, and you can benefit if you pay special attention to them. Regardless of your product or service, you can grab the attention of such people by sending emails praising their knowledge or offering them exclusive deals. You can refer to them as the special focus group and point out the fantastic benefits your product or service has to offer. 

3. Use the help of social media

You can tap the potential of social media and get in touch with prospects personally. Facebook and LinkedIn will be a great help to you for gathering information about prospects. Finding a few common interests will help you get a common ground for starting conversations with prospects. You will be also able to add a personal touch to the emails.

4. Only send 20-40 emails in a day

Your cold email outreach should not be about shooting 100s of emails each day. When you send so many emails, you won’t be able to customize or personalize every email. As a result, there will be a dip in the quality of your emails that affects the open rate and response rate. Additionally, flooding prospects with too many emails can make them ignore you completely. That is why, as a startup, keep the email count to 20 to 40 emails per day.

5. Track the campaign

Apart from writing an email that will resonate with the target audience, it would be best to track your results. The main metrics here would be open rate and response rate. They will also reveal whether or not your campaign went well. You can tweak upcoming cold email campaigns based on the results of the previous one. Try different techniques and see how they fare. 

Cold Email Templates

As you have learned so much about writing cold emails, the following are a few cold email templates that you will find helpful.

Template 1

Connecting your email to the latest development in the prospect’s company

Download Template Create Sequence with SalesBlink

Template 2

Trying to grab the prospect’s attention, build desire, and direct them to take action to get the benefit.

Download Template Create Sequence with SalesBlink

Template 3

Being straightforward with what you have to offer along with providing social proof

Download Template Create Sequence with SalesBlink

Template 4

Using the Before-after-bridge where you make the prospect imagine their life after using your solution

Download Template Create Sequence with SalesBlink

Template 5

Using a little flattery to get the attention of the prospect

Download Template Create Sequence with SalesBlink

Cold Email Automation

As and when your startup scales up the ladder of success, you will have to send more cold emails. It can become a daunting task if you have to do it all by yourself. Consider this: when you send 100 cold emails to people followed by 10 follow-ups, the number of emails sent will total to 1000. Can you do this manually? It would be pretty tricky, and that is where automation steps in. It helps in reducing the workload of reps. 

How to find emails of prospects?

Before going to cold email automation tools, let’s talk about generating leads. Lead generation is the first and most crucial step in the sales cycle. Doing it the traditional way is cumbersome, and that is why you have sales automation tools to help you.

With a tool like Lusha, you can find anyone’s email address using their name and website domain.

When emails don’t reach the destination, you won’t get the desired results. It prevents ruining your efforts and better return on investment. To help reduce the bounce rates, you can use SalesBlink’s Email verification tool. You can check whether an email address is valid or not before sending cold emails.

You have a lot of cold email automation tools to help you out. 

a. Standalone tools

There are standalone cold outreach tools that are useful for companies that have just begun with cold emailing. Such tools will help upload the contact list, schedule email sequences and track the metrics.

b. Browser extensions

Browser extensions have been expanding in the recent past. The ease of installing them is the best part. You can install such extensions on your internet browser, and use them easily.

c. CRMs

CRM stands for customer relationship management. CRM software is a complete system that helps with managing sales, sending cold emails, and tracking leads. Cloud-based CRMs are even better as they allow you to use them anytime and anywhere without downloading, installing, and maintaining the software. 

However, you have to choose one of the above 3 that suits your needs. 

Cold Email Software Tools

1. SalesBlink

SalesBlink is a full-stack cold sales outreach platform that automates outreach, and closing.

Outreach

For outreach, the tool automates cold email sequences with several follow-up emails.

You can customize messages and send them in bulk using SalesBlink. The tool also allows you to save email templates and schedule them to hit the intended inboxes at the right time. SalesBlink lets you build campaigns effortlessly. It automates most of the sales process tasks so that you don’t need to do redundant and time-consuming tasks manually. It helps save the time of sales reps, and they can focus on their primary job profile, which is selling.

You can personalize emails at scale easily with SalesBlink. One way of doing so is by mentioning the prospect’s name in the email subject line and the email body. Then there is the option of setting your email signature.

You cannot just personalize your emails but also the images you send in them. This image personalization feature in SalesBlink lets you upload any image and personalize it. Personalized images make the prospects feel that you as a salesperson have taken the pains to make the content relevant. It would thus result in a higher response rate, which is the dream of every salesperson.

SalesBlink has a fantastic tracking feature to find out opens, clicks, replies, and bounces. It makes it easier to handle mass email outreach.

CRM

With CRM, you can manage leads and replies. It will also help you understand who your hot leads are and simplify prioritization.

It is a complete package that finds leads and builds outreach sequences in a matter of 5 minutes.

Learn how to build and launch your first outreach campaign in SalesBlink in the following video:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UxxxRLurCRU

Pricing:

The monthly paid plans are: 

Scale- $29/month

Growth- $99/month

Business- $199/month

You get a discount of 15% if you choose yearly billing.

2. Yesware

Yesware is a tool that helps sales reps and email marketers. It enables you to create cold email campaigns. Using this tool, you can personalize the emails, create drip campaigns, schedule them, and set a reminder to follow up. In addition to that, there is real-time email tracking. 

You can see the campaign data on the dashboard and see prospect behavior. 

Pricing – The Pro plan costs  $15/month per user.

The Premium plan costs  $35/month per user.

The Enterprise plan costs  $80/month per user.

3. Prospect.io

Prospect.io is a tool that helps in lead generation and email automation. Using a credit-based system, it finds the email addresses of prospects with the help of social media and other websites. It also verifies the email addresses of prospects. Using the tool, you can create personalized drip campaigns and customize email templates. There is also a tracking feature to find out the number of responses and bounces. 

Pricing: The Essential plan costs  $79/month.

The Business plan costs  $129/month. 

While the Enterprise plan is available at a custom price. To get additional email finder credits,  you have to pay extra, starting from $39.

4. Streak

Streak is a CRM software that manages the sales funnel, sends emails, and gets tracking reports. It can also integrate with Gmail. You can personalize and customize email templates, schedule automated follow-ups with reminders and carry out cold email campaigns. The tool comes with email filters for ease of use. 

Pricing –  There is a free Personal plan with basic functionality. 

They have a Professional plan that costs $59 per month per user.

The Enterprise plan costs $159 per month per user.

5. SmartReach.io

SmartReach.io is a cold email software that has several unique features to offer. It automates sending emails and follow-ups, allows personalizing the emails, has built-in email validation and spam tests, allows tracking open, click, response, bounce, and unsubscribe rates. In addition to all that, you can integrate it with more than 2000+ apps. 

Pricing – There are the following 3 plans to choose from,

The Standard plan costs $24 per month per user.

The Pro plan costs $39 per month per user.

The Ultimate plan costs $59 per month per user. 

Start Winning At Cold Email Outreach!

As you have read above, to write the best cold outreach emails, you have to keep several things in mind, such as using a catchy subject line, keeping the email copy short and concise, mentioning a CTA, and adding social proof. You also have to avoid using click-baits to make prospects open your email. When they come to know about it, they would lose interest in you right away.

You have to win the potential customer’s trust in you through the cold emails, and a well-planned strategy would do just that. However, it would not stop with just the strategy; you have to implement it well too. 

With the best cold email outreach tools, you can automate tasks that take a lot of time. From creating campaigns and templates, such tools can be pretty handy in making the life of sales reps easier. Some of these tools are standalone software, while others are browser extensions to ensure ease of use. There are cloud-based CRMs as well. It would be better to choose a complete cold outreach platform like SalesBlink so that you get to use the features you need for cold emailing.

FAQs