Crafting Cold Emails for Higher Open Rates

The Art of Writing Cold Emails That Leads Actually Want to Open

There’s more art than science to crafting cold emails that work well
Successful emails are the result of careful testing, as well as solid principles
Techniques like A/B testing and market research inform email writing efforts
Boom Demand takes on the experimental burden so sales teams can focus on building relationships!

Crafting cold emails, as the name implies, is an art, not a science. Imagine if there really were just one single, tried-and-true method or formula or format that always worked, no matter what company or industry you were reaching out to. There would be no need for the hundreds of other articles and blog posts out there talking about how to do it. And yet, here we are. Since clearly no one has yet discovered the One True Email Template, sales professionals are free to innovate and experiment. There are some good principles and practices, however, that we do know about. Following these is the way that the most successful salespeople achieve better email open rates.

First, Don’t be Afraid of a Little Trial-and-Error

We’ve all heard the famous quote attributed to Thomas Edison: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” There’s certainly something to be said for persistence in the face of a difficult goal. Sometimes the way forward only becomes clear after traveling a short distance down a wrong path. What we’re getting at, though, is not that you need to get lost in the woods or keep sending out messages that are clearly not getting a good response. It’s that crafting cold emails is an iterative process. It works best in the context of A/B testing. Each time you have an idea for a better way to approach a certain class of cold lead, compare the performance of that idea with a control group like the previous best performer.

A/B testing allows individuals, teams, and companies to make careful changes to their user experiences while collecting data on the results. This allows them to construct hypotheses, and to learn better why certain elements of their experiences impact user behavior. In another way, they can be proven wrong—their opinion about the best experience for a given goal can be proven wrong through an A/B test. More than just answering a one-off question or settling a disagreement, A/B testing can be used consistently to continually improve a given experience, improving a single goal like conversion rate over time. (Optimizely)

Always strive to improve your open and response rates by testing different email sales copy in a controlled way!

Severe Underperformance Calls for Deeper Analysis

If you find that a cold email campaign is getting very poor responses, you may need to consider how to reformulate it completely. First, though, you need to know why it’s not getting the kind of engagement you expected. One common reason for this is having a simple misunderstanding of the quirks of a particular market segment. Different industries and industry sectors tend to have distinct traditions and tendencies. Some of them, for example, are incredibly tech-savvy, but others may have a strong preference for face-to-face relationship building. Your email pitch should reflect that in your call to action. You also may need to make sure that your template addresses the real pain points that are common in that industry. Likewise, the solutions and value you present should be relevant. Many of these things you can only easily discover through that process of trial and error. That’s good, though. The sooner you learn of them, the sooner you can correct for them.

Let Boom Demand Take the Lead at Crafting Cold Emails

This process of crafting cold emails in the context of trying to get better open and response rates is an essential chore, but clearly, it’s time-consuming. Your in-house sales team probably does not have the time to be constantly adjusting their messaging. They would rather be building relationships and closing deals. That’s why Boom Demand’s sales development teams are such an important and game-changing solution. Our SDRs not only specialize in sending warm leads directly to your best account executives, but they also serve as a kind of sales laboratory. We can test and determine the most effective ways to reach your target markets. Contact us today to start enjoying museum-quality sales art!

Drawing of person at computer who is alarmed

Spam Emails: How to Avoid Becoming What You Hate

How to Avoid Getting Your Emails Spammed

Legitimate business contacts are sometimes confused for spam emails
The best ways to stay out of the spam filter are to be careful with words
Boom Demand makes it easy for you not to worry about being spammy

Even after decades of changing strategies, cold emailing is still one of the pillars of B2B sales outreach. You can call and try to connect on LinkedIn all you want, but some prospects hide behind firewalls of gatekeepers or just aren’t interested in social media. Sometimes, there’s just no other way to reach a potential prospect than by sending them an email out of the blue. This is important because if an email is how they prefer to hear from you, you want to be sure they’ll actually get it. Now, no one likes getting spam emails, including you. They’re a huge waste of time and often not just spam, but outright scams. That’s why so many people are leery of cold emails. It’s also why email service providers continue to develop increasingly sophisticated filters to make sure we never see the seedy underbelly of the internet.

Confusing Cold Approaches With Spam Emails

Sales professionals have the responsibility to do all they can to be seen as respectable and legitimate. That’s why their outgoing messages have to be both creative and attention-grabbing, but also truly helpful. A problem arises when you realize that many of your legitimate business proposals are likely to contain language that’s very similar to the wording of spam emails. Spammers do this on purpose, to create the illusion of legitimacy. They also try to be enticing. You’re both trying to create interest, but they’re doing it specifically to snooker their victims. Unfortunately, that puts the burden on the sales professional to be even more careful. The reason for this is because of the advanced spam filters used by email administrators.

What NOT to Do If You Want to Reach The Inbox

IBM’s SecurityIntelligence blog provides some insight into how spam filters function, and what are the biggest things to avoid doing to prevent your emails from getting trapped in their webs:

“There’s no one rule for how spam filters work. Each has its own quirks. Some frown on email sent from free services like Hotmail and Gmail, for example, or may downgrade messages targeted just to an email address without an accompanying name. Each engine is unique. Fortunately, email administrators can manipulate most of these settings to their liking… “The art of spam filtering comes into play when analyzing the contents of a message. This is where the best filters shine, but it’s also where legitimate messages can end up in spam purgatory. “Some content tactics are almost certain to land a message in the spam folder. Emails containing attached executable files or links to blacklisted websites are sure giveaways, as are those with common spam keywords. A few years ago, many spam filters flagged emails containing short codes from services like bit.ly and 3.ly. With the profusion of short codes spawned by Twitter, however, that tactic is less common today.”

Words Not to Use

Beyond those kinds of suspicious blunders regarding attached content files, the most important thing you can do to avoid getting your cold emails lumped together with spam emails is to be careful of the specific words you use. The basic rule is to not sound too pushy, or too-good-to-be-true. Exclamation points in your subject line, especially when combined with words like “free!” and “act now!” are screaming neon red flags to spam filters. Most of the time, sales professionals shouldn’t have any need to resort to desperate language like that. Just in case you want to be sure, though, you can find some excellent and fairly comprehensive lists of the kinds of words you should avoid using in your email content here and here. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by looking at those long lists, but it’s important to remember that they apply first and foremost to subject lines. Your subject lines, along with the coded headers that you don’t see, are what the filters comb through. If you have legitimate reasons for including those words in the body of your message, don’t sweat it. As long as you don’t overuse them, they should be okay.

Let Boom Demand Handle Your Email Work

If you’d rather not worry about this kind of problem at all, that’s a great reason to let Boom Demand and our professional team of Sales Development Representatives take on your outreach tasks. Our SDRs accelerate your entire sales funnel by finding and driving warm leads directly to your top salespeople. Your teams can switch from traditional, comprehensive sales tasks to working as specialized account executives. You can spend all day building and closing deals with the leads we bring in! We do this by focusing on a specialized cadence of contact points, expertly using the phone, social media, and of course email to reach your prospects. Our emails go out on an individualized basis, using the most effective wording possible to turn cold leads into warm prospects. Contact us today to stop worrying about accidentally sending out spam emails, and accelerate your sales growth, instead!

B2B Lead Generation Outsourcing Considerations

All About Outsourcing Your B2B Lead Generation

Lead generation involves many time-consuming marketing and sales activities
Customers don’t look for the same criteria that concern sales managers
First impressions from lead generation strategies can make or break a conversion
Boom Demand provides powerful and effective B2B lead generation outsourcing

There is absolutely no shortage of advice available online about how to effectively market to your potential business partners and customers. Much of it revolves around the same strategies. Make sure you have outrageously good email subject lines. Don’t forget to post on weekends and at the right time of day on each of your social media platforms. Use video, but don’t make it look like a commercial. And content, content, content. Content is still king; you gotta have lots and lots of great and useful content that touches on all the right keywords without being too salesy. But who the heck has time to do all of this? If you’ve found yourself asking that question, that’s a good sign you might want to consider B2B lead generation outsourcing.

What Customers Want VS What You Want

As a person in charge of your company’s sales efforts, you may be most concerned with making sure that the company puts its best foot forward. You want to be certain that everyone on your team has the tools they need. You also want to avoid wasting time and other problems that could slow down the entire enterprise. While those are important goals, and the tasks that surround them are essential, there’s one very big problem causing a huge disconnect. That’s not what your customers care about. This may seem shocking at first. “Of course they care about these things!” you may say. If the company goes belly-up due to poor sales, where will they get what we provide? And yet, the market is vast. You have competitors who would fill in the gaps. Your customers would not go unserved. So what makes the difference now? What stops your customers, your lifeline, your fuel for growth, from going elsewhere? It’s what they really care about. It’s how much they trust your brand. Customers who have to deal with the ins and outs of their own businesses and personal lives may never look at your company the same way as you do from the inside. There’s a good chance they might be able to understand your issues, as many of them might be in similar positions in their own organizations, but their interaction with you is for a different purpose. For them, it’s all about getting this product or service and having it be worth the money. That means you’ll have to convince them first. Will they buy from you if they don’t trust you in the first place? And how will they know they can trust you before they ever see that product or service working for them? Well, how did you find each other?

How B2B Lead Generation Outsourcing Can Work For You

They say that first impressions are the most important. As humans, we have a tendency to form judgments about the people and organizations we interact with from the very first moment of our first encounter.

“We tend to get attached to our initial impressions of people and find it very difficult to change our opinion of them, even when presented with lots of evidence to the contrary. As a result, it’s important to be aware of how we come across to others during a first meeting. Then we can employ impression management skills—modulating any irritating traits and accentuating our strengths—to ensure that people have a more favorable opinion of us.” — Psychology Today

That’s why the way you first meet your customers matters so much. In other words, you have to consider the impression that your lead generation strategy makes on the people who end up buying from you. Perhaps more importantly, what impression has it been making on the people who are not buying from you? If you find that you’d like to improve the impression you give people when they first meet your brand, B2B lead generation outsourcing may be the key. Outsourcing essentially means letting someone else do for you something that they are more experienced at doing. This results in greater efficiencies and lowers costs, which should appeal to your bottom line. It also means that the company you outsource to is more likely to already be familiar with current best practices and the latest innovations in the field. That means you’ll have all the benefits of experience and creativity on your side, but at a much lower cost than doing it yourself in-house. What’s not to like?

Why Boom Demand is an Awesome Lead Generation Partner

It may seem counterintuitive, but what we’ve discovered over the years is that the difference between B2B and B2C is really quite superficial. At the end of the day, we’re always talking about relationships between individual people. In both B2C and B2B interactions, the people you want to reach are consumers of online content looking for solutions to their problems. Whether the problem is a domestic need or a critical business issue, the way to reach people is the same. You provide content that answers their questions, that entertains them, that tells them a good story, and they’ll provide their contact information. If they like your email subject lines, they might go for more. If your social media presence is fun and engaging, you’ll build brand awareness among both end consumers and potential partners. Boom Demand leverages these characteristics of human nature when our sales development representatives call and email and post online. With Boom Demand B2B lead generation outsourcing, we find people for you, and we help them find you. For those who want to get closer to you, we set appointments for them to have a conversation with you or your sales team. We let you focus on what’s most important to you: closing solid deals. Meanwhile, we fill the funnel! Contact us today for a river of warm leads!