Let’s be honest, neither cold calling or cold emailing are very fun. If someone tells you otherwise they are either crazy or lying.
They are, however, effective.
The reality is that there is not always an endless stream of inbound leads to follow up with. In order to keep the pipeline full we need to resort to outbound methods.
Cold Calling
Cold calling used to be a primary part of people’s professions. How many dinners in the 90’s were interrupted by those pesky telemarketers?
The disgust for those out of the blue phone calls continued to snowball right into the 2000’s. It is becoming less and less effective to cold call and see results.
Even in a B2B setting it feels out of place. So what is the alternative?
Cold Emailing
When DoInbound was starting up it was hard to get the word out. We developed a niche product with a specific goal in mind. We opted to use email as a way to let agency owner’s know instead of calling.
The theory is that with emails you can make a cold out reach less abrasive and more fun for the recipient.
Subject lines such as “Coming in cold but hoping to help” and “Personal Invitation” received open rates over 75% with click rates over 35%.
The emails prompted owners to our website to self educated and schedule a demo if they were interested.
We always aimed to keep an inbound approach to our outbound method. We strived to produce great content to help agency owner’s improve their businesses and created a product to do the same.
Specific Ways to Improve Cold Emailing
First off you need to track everything. We created email templates within HubSpot’s CRM and tracked everything from open rates to customers won. We innovated every 50 to 100 outreaches to try and improve out metrics.
You need to build lists efficiently. I used tools such as Sidekick and Name2Email to quickly identify correct email addresses of prospects. From there Sidekick allowed me to easily import that contact into the CRM. Once in the CRM I identified them into groups and created custom templates depending on the agency size.
One great podcast to listen to to help improve your cold email game is this one from rocketship.fm.
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