How should I use cold email for my business?

Many of our clients are looking for the silver bullet with email.  Or they are looking for the silver bullet of the next template to use, or the best marketing automation system.  Franky, they are looking in the wrong place. Let’s start with the basics.

What is your sales script?

We are big fans of the StoryBrand approach to selling – basically, how do you make your customer a hero in his or her own life. If you want a great free tool to use to clarify your sales script – check out this tool from the folks at online sales script.  Until you can be this precise – you are not ready to try to sell anything whether it is by email, on the phone, or in person.

We are amazed at how many people still try to tell everyone how smart they are or how cool their product or service is but do not tell the potential client what problem they solve, why it is important to them, and why they should listen to them.

If you are clear on who your ideal clients are and what hot problem of theirs you solve, then you are ready to sell to a potential client.  If so, then you should consider cold email technology.  This might just be your email client.

What is cold email?

In simple words, cold email is when you email someone you don’t know in order to get them to buy something from you.  Many people spend their time looking for the biggest list, the coolest tool, the hot new template, or the perfect lead magnet. If you are a small business, that is unlikely to work. You do not have the time or money to do this well.  So, what will work?  First, let’s look at some things to consider.

10 things to consider when deciding to use cold email

1. What is your strategy?  We teach strategy before tactics, but likely you are looking for a few good leads each week per sales person – that is you if you are a small business owner with less than ten employees. so, what is the list of people you should be contacting that matches your ideal client avatar?
2. Cool templates don’t work for cold emails.  if someone is not expecting an email from you and do not know who you are they are going to ignore your email if it looks massed produced.  Your message, your subject line, and the mapping of an offer to a ready buyer is what will work.
3. You need to focus on a focused attack – not volume.  Face it, you need a few active qualified leads in your active sales process.  What is timely for your business right now?  Who wants it?  Spend the time looking at your linked-in contacts or potential customers in your area and craft a custom message to them that they are likely to act on.
4. Stop focusing on how many emails you can send out without being blocked as spam and find out what you can send out that would never be classified as spam.  Face it if you are spamming 100,000 people, enough are going to report it as spam if it is a goofy offer that you thought of in the shower last night that does not resonate with your potential client.  Pick a small number of potential clients that have a problem that you can solve right now.  Reach out to them.
5. Monthly frequency to the masses does not work, just because you heard that someone has to hear your message 7 to 8 times before they are ready to buy, if you are seeing low-quality information it will not be received well.  And do you want to wait for eight months for people to get in touch with you?  What were you selling eight months ago?  Are you still selling the same thing?
6. Cold emails are a poor-quality tool to use to get people to a webinar or to download an eBook or other lead magnet.  Why?  They are not looking for another webinar to attend. they are busy and they are not looking for something else to read that is 20 pages long.  Companies are understaffed and overworked because of the move to virtual and the shortage of workers.
7. List quality matters more than the templates that you create.  You need to spend more time looking for high-quality leads for your business and reaching out to them with a time offer for a problem that they have now.
8. Cold email is great for starting a conversation.  When we were consulting with a robotics company a couple of years ago, we used a cold email after a new announcement by Walmart about their robotics strategy.  We sent it to twenty-five senior technology contacts that were in positions that cared about what Walmart was doing with robots.  We asked for then to jump on a quick zoom call to let us brief them on how this project announcement might affect them.  We got 80% of them onto sales calls. And filed our active sales queue.
9. Datascrappong is key.  Whether it is from paid lead sources, linked in, websites (or yes all of the above) – you need a list of people concerned about what you are selling because they have a problem you can solve right now. You need to do your homework and then strike out with a timely offer.
10. Cold emailing takes work, hard work,  It is not about using a bunch of new tools and linking them together with Zapier.   It is all about getting the right offer – to the right person – at the right time.  To do that, you need to do your homework and make sure you are making that offer.

If you want more backup information, there is a great podcast that I listened to this morning that goes into more depth on these.  But the video is 24 minutes long.

How do you crush it with cold email?

You work hard to make sure that you are targeting the right people, with the right message at the right time. If you need help with figuring that out, that is what we do when we work at creating a sales and marketing strategy with our clients. To get our MONTHLY high quality summary of new trends like this delivered to your inbox subscribe here. If you want to schedule time with us – you can do so on your schedule via zoom and we will jump on a short 15-minute call with you to discuss your needs. Happy selling.