20 Best Cold Email Outreach Practices To Improve Sales

Being in sales requires you to connect with people and 8 in 10 prospects prefer talking to reps over email. That’s why you have to put in efforts to grab the prospects’ attention to draw them towards your product or service through email. Only then it is possible to make maximum conversions. However, to do so, you have to follow some email outreach practices.

Do the strategies you follow currently give you the desired outcome? If not, it is time to adopt a few new ones and relearn how to do email outreach if you want to see an increase in your sales figures. 

What Is Email Outreach?  

Email outreach is a simple process of connecting with people via email. In the world of sales, email outreach involves reaching out to the target audience to turn them into customers.  

It is a skill that you must possess if you wish to stand out in the crowd of competitors. Email outreach campaigns can be successful only when you have a strong strategy as the foundation. 

Sending cold emails is an outbound sales tactic that helps generate leads effectively with minimal investment. 

You get $38 per every $1 you invest, which means an average ROI of 3800%

Though you are emailing individuals you have no prior connection with, there is a high chance of building a lasting relationship with them and closing a sale soon. 

Is Cold Emailing Illegal?

There is a misconception that outreach emails are spam. It is chiefly because marketers send a huge volume of emails without bothering to personalize them or make them relevant to the target audience in email marketing outreach.

Email outreach is completely legal as long as you fulfil the following requirements:

• The email is personalized and has a suitable subject line.
• Has the name of the sender and complete contact details. 
• Adds value and is relevant to the recipient.
• Aims at building trust instead of forcing the recipient to make a purchase.

For effective email outreach, you should send carefully crafted emails to prospects while keeping the guidelines of GDPR and the CAN-SPAM Act in mind. 

Importance Of Email Outreach

Wondering why outreach for sales is important? You have to focus on it because cold outreach campaigns has several benefits to offer.

1) Getting in touch with the target audience

With emails, you can target the audience based on their age, gender, job, income, location and the like.

The conventional method of reaching out to the audience involves getting ads printed in newspapers and magazines or displaying them on billboards.

Needless to say, the traditional method of advertising is expensive when compared to sending emails.

Also, cold email outreach is easier and more convenient. You can modify it whenever you want to based on what group of the audience you are targeting. The target audience will feel as though the products or services are exclusively for them. It helps in making more sales.

 2) Increase in brand awareness

You can make your brand well known to the masses by email marketing. By sending perfectly designed and well-targeted emails, the brand image improves significantly. This helps in turning leads into customers. 

After a while, they may become your loyal customers who are assets to every brand.

3) Wider exposure

Forwarding emails is simple as it requires just one click. The emails sent by you don’t stop just at the target audience; they reach more people thanks to the share button.

When there is an attractive offer or special discount, your audience’s chances of forwarding them to friends and family are higher. This way, your job gets easier.

Now you know why outreach is important for sales!

20 Best Email Outreach Practices

Here are the email outreach best practices that you can use to get more sales and brand awareness.

1. Pursue the right prospects

As a salesperson, it is crucial to put your time and efforts in the right direction. It would be best if you went behind the right leads, and for that, you have to analyze which of the prospects are worth pursuing. It is one of the basic email outreach practices.

While most often, the policy is to rope in the maximum number of prospects possible, it doesn’t work the way you would expect it to. If you go behind any lead without a solid strategy at hand, there will be a disappointment. The number of deals without a future will be more, and you won’t feel motivated enough.

First, you have to find out what an ideal prospect looks like. And then follow the prospects that fit into that definition. This way, you will get your hands on prospects that will help you in achieving your goal.

2. Be buyer-centric

You have to be more buyer-centric in your approach. Nobody will have interest in your sales pitch unless and until there is something in it for them too. Draft the email in such a way that it focuses on what’s in store for the buyer. It has to be more about building solutions.

When you talk about the features, you are seller-centric, and when you choose to speak about the benefits, you are buyer-centric.

It would be great to highlight the buyer-centric message in a different color to make the distinction evident.

Example –

If you are emailing a company wishing to help them with your product, begin with the following lines:

I learned that your company is expanding its sales team and you would need <product/services>

3. Say no to templates

When you use templates for a cold email the recipient would immediately understand that and lose interest in you. 

While follow-up email templates are convenient when you have to email 1000s of people, they turn the recipient off. It may be challenging to craft emails exclusively for every prospect, but you can do at least something to personalize the emails. 

You must make the other person feel that you are talking to them, and you can do that by using their first name, name of their company, job title and industry. It may seem like extra work, but it will all be worth it as people will want to respond to your email. It is one of the best email outreach practices to get more sales.

4. Keep the subject line short

One of the most critical email outreach tips is having a short and compact subject line. If you write very lengthy ones, the email service provider will shorten them, and that would leave you with only half of what you want to convey. To avoid your subject lines from getting truncated, you should keep them short. You can also use SalesBlink’s Free Subject line generator. 

Here’s how you write them whilst conveying the message you want to:

5 steps to <goal> with <product or service>

Hire easy with a 5-point checklist

5. Use a person’s name as the sender name

The first thing that the recipient will notice in your cold email is the name of the sender. If it is from an email address like [email protected] or [email protected], the recipient will ignore your email. 

After all, why should somebody have an interest in generic company addresses? It is evident that it is a marketing email asking you to buy a product or service.

If you don’t want your email to end up in the trash folder, you have to use a person’s name as the sender’s name. The chances of people opening an email from ‘Ashy Garry’ are higher than the ones from [email protected]. 

6. Give importance to the opening sentence

Your cold email’s first sentence is as important as the sender’s name and subject line. There are emails service providers that provide a preview of the email in the inbox. Some ESPs also let you create your message for the preview. If this is so with your ESP, don’t miss out on this opportunity. You can use the urgency tactic here so that recipients open your email.

Here are is an example for you:

7. Create a sense of urgency

The emails with subject lines that create a sense of urgency will have higher open rates. The main reason people don’t actively respond to cold emails is that they feel that they can do that later on. You can counter this tendency to procrastinate by crafting your subject line in such a way that it creates a sense of urgency. 

Here are a few examples of how you can put this email outreach tip to use:

Last chance to avail 50% discount on our premium plan!

Special offer (40% off) ends tomorrow.

You can use words like ‘Hurry’, ‘expiring’, ‘limited time’ to create urgency.

8. Stay to the point

Nobody has an interest in reading long essays about your product or services. You must understand that you are reaching out to busy people who don’t have all day to read your email. It is vital to keep your message short and simple while being to the point.

In other words, don’t beat around the bush in your emails, or else they will be in the trash folder. Start your email with a catchy subject line, talk about the recipients’ pain points, show how your product or service can help and create a good impression about yourself clearly and concisely.

9. Use active voice

When you draft the message, make sure that what you want to say is in active voice and direct. It is like speaking straight to the prospect by using their name. The email should be easy to read and make you sound confident. Also, an active voice is better because the message is more concise and easy to understand.

Example: Instead of beginning with a line like – ‘You have been contacted in connection with setting a meeting ….”, use the following – “I am reaching out to you for …”. 

You can easily see the difference in both tones.

10. Keep a tab on your email frequency

The most important thing to keep in mind in cold email outreach is the frequency of your emails. You shouldn’t email the prospect daily or once in 2 days. Doing so will send your mails to the spam folder and even annoy the prospect.

The thumb rule is to keep a gap of at least 2 days between emails but not exceed 7. The ideal pace would be 3-4 days between every email.

11. Bring in some personalization

There are certain things that you need to bear in mind while drafting your emails. You have to make changes to your message based on which segment of the audience you are targeting. Your email has to sound relevant to the prospects you are getting in touch with. Creating templates for different audiences will be a good outreach email strategy.

With SalesBlink, adding personalization elements to outreach email at scale is possible. Now, you won’t have to work on each email manually and personalize it. This is possible with the help of macros or placeholders that you can add to your template. And that’s not all; you can even personalize images with SalesBlink.

Take a look at it below. Every email you send will have the first name of the prospect inside the image, making them feel special.

12. Highlight you being on top of trends

You have to show that you are on top of trends related to the prospect’s industry. This is one of the email outreach practices that make you look genuine.

You can do so by highlighting your recent work in the prospect’s industry or mentioning a piece of breaking news in their industry related to your product or service. This tactic works in making you seem trustworthy. The prospect will think that you know what you are talking about and understand their needs.

13. Add a CTA

In your email, you have to mention a strong CTA (Call to action). While this may seem obvious, email marketers send cold emails without telling the prospect what to do next.

After talking about your strengths and addressing the prospect’s pain points, you have to include a strong CTA. It can be a simple reply, scheduling a call, a meeting or a demo. If you mention the call to action clearly, you can expect the prospect to respond to you.

14. Add a video

Leverage the immense popularity of videos in your outreach. Though there is nothing a one-on-one meeting with your prospect in person is the best, a video is a good idea too. You can get in touch with people living in different geographical locations and time zones with videos.

But does creating videos require you to have a huge budget? Not really. There are free tools to help you out in creating videos without you having to make any investments.

You can come up with convincing video prospecting that connect with the audience without spending money. Just keep the content good enough, and you can close more deals.

15. Use another medium to get in touch

Emails are an affordable and easy way to reach out to prospects, but if you go one step ahead, contact the prospect through another channel and see how you get better results.

For instance, you can call the prospect if you have their phone number. Just ask them whether they got your emails and how you can be of help to them. You can also send them a physical brochure or pamphlet if you have their mailing address. It will help in making you look genuinely interested in the prospect.

16. Avoid Starting With Conversation

How would it feel when an absolute stranger comes to you and asks you how you are? It would seem odd, right? That is precisely what happens with cold emails.

Asking someone ‘How are you?’ out of the blue looks rather bizarre. As you don’t know the person already, you mustn’t begin your conversation in such a way. If you do so, the prospect would understand that you are just trying to sell them something.

What looks better is to start with a relevant question and a quick introduction of yourself. Look for exciting ways to get the ball rolling and stay away from pleasantry in the first email.

17. Mention about competition

It is one of the most advanced email outreach practices.

Knowing well about your competitors can go a long way in helping you plan a better marketing strategy. It will help you understand what you need to do to stand out in the crowd.

That doesn’t mean that you should show the competitor in poor light. Bashing rival companies only means that you are not strong enough, and prospects are more likely to move away from you.

You can instead mention how different your product or service is from that of your competitors. State the unique features of your product or service without putting others down. The prospect would want to know how good your product or service is and not how useless someone else’s is. Give them a solid reason to choose you over others.

18. Add value instead of pitching

Most email marketers pitch prospects regularly, and it gets difficult to set yourself apart from them. Adding value will work. Prospects always look for what is in store for them, and if you offer something of value, they will likely choose you. Get into the shoes of the prospects and see how your offer will benefit them.

It can be anything like a free ebook, a tutorial to resolve their issue or any other freebie that would be useful to them.

19. Test your emails before sending them to prospects

There is nothing more annoying than poorly formatted emails. First things first, test your emails by sending them to your colleagues and see how they look. This is one of the most important email outreach practices to help you succeed. You should send emails to prospects only after you are completely satisfied by their look.

20. Leverage sales outreach tools

Automation is the key when you speak of cold email marketing. Your job would become easy with a sales outreach tool. You can automate initial conversations and follow-ups with prospects using this tool. As a salesperson, you will see a lot of spark in your working style with increased productivity. Also, the mundane nature of your job will get a fresh lease of life with amazing results.

After knowing about the best sales outreach emails, let’s move to the mistakes to avoid. But before that read sales motivational quotes if you lack the drive.

Cold Email Outreach Mistakes to Avoid

Now that you know about the email outreach practices that work well in acquiring leads, it is time to look at the mistakes that most salespeople commit, and you must steer clear of them if you really want your email outreach campaign to be successful.

1. Giving lengthy introductions

It is now well known that the recipient is not interested in who you are and which company you work for. That means there is no need to give long introductions; you can just get to the point straight away. What prospects care about is what you have in store for them. It usually works when you show prospects how your solution saves time and money. 

2. Keeping the tone too formal

You may be an expert in your industry, but you needn’t show that to the prospect. Try to keep the jargon aside and focus on using a conversational tone throughout the email. Write as though you are meeting the prospect in person and are explaining what your solution can do for them. If you are unsure how it sounds, get the email read by your team member before you hit the send button.

3. Adding more than one CTA

It is quite natural to add multiple CTAs in the cold email, thinking that the prospect may take at least one action. But that is not usually the case. It would help if you only tried to add one CTA per email, or the prospect would not do anything. 

4. Not proofreading your email

Spelling and grammar mistakes will make you look unprofessional and drive the prospect away from you. It is therefore important to check the email once before you send it. It would be even better to get it to proofread by another team member

5. Not following up

You’re mistaken if you think the prospect is not interested in you after getting no response to the first email. It usually takes several follow-ups to get the prospect’s nod. So, you have to follow up persistently if you want to see results. However, don’t end up stalking the prospect in your enthusiasm to follow up. 

Start Following The Email Outreach Practices

Email outreach is essential as it gives your product or service a wider exposure without a lot of investment. Craft cold emails the right way can give you the desired results. By taking a little extra time out for your cold email outreach strategy, you reap a lot of benefits. 

The email outreach practices mentioned above are the ones that would help you in making your email outreach stand out in the crowd. Leveraging the power of automated tools such as SalesBlink will make the whole process quite convenient.

Start implementing our suggestions and see the outcome.

You can thank us later.

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