Is Cold Email Marketing Dead?
This is one of the popular questions which is surfing the internet.
The answer to this question is, “Cold email marketing is not dead”. Some cold email marketing strategies are dead. In fact, it is one of the oldest yet most powerful mediums for lead generation.
Cold email marketing is a supplement to inbound marketing. Many SaaS and B2B companies have adopted cold email marketing as a standard practice. It does not look like sales or naggy when is done with updated strategies.
What Is Cold Email Outreach?
Cold email outreach is a method of generating leads by sending emails to your ideal prospects. Using firmographics and demographics, you will collect the emails of your prospects and schedule an email campaign for them.
Cold Email Marketing for Startups: Does It Work?
According to eMarketer study, email marketing is four-time more effective than any other digital marketing channel.
There is no better way to make new connections and customers for your startup. A cold email often does not have a good reputation in the market. It is because people are not utilizing with proper strategy. Cold email outreach benefits many startup companies due to its power of scalability.
Pros And Cons Of Cold Email Marketing
PROS Of Cold Emailing
1. Effective in terms of both cost and time
According to Hubspot, you get $42 for every $1 spent in cold email outreach, and it makes the ROI up to 4200%.
The most effective pros are that you can gain a high return on investment for the cold email campaigns since it cost you almost nothing to send those emails. You can also use the most underrated feature which is the attachment of documents.
2. Easily analyze and tweak the campaign
In cold email campaigns, it is important to see the progress of the campaign. By analyzing the open rate and click rate, we can tweak the email campaigns. You can do A/B testing with different subject lines or different content or different scheduling time to know which strategy works for you. For example, use two different subject lines for two campaigns and check the open rate. Based on the open rate, you can decide the best to use for your future campaigns.
3. Build your own email list
Today’s social media platforms may disappear tomorrow. In India, TikTok gained popularity, and then it was suddenly banned. Can you imagine how much effort businesses put into grabbing an audience on Facebook? All the effort goes to waste when Facebook changes just one guideline.
Another major advantage is that regardless of the platform, it is wise to own your audience in an era of rising and declining platforms. Email lists give you that authority.
4. Enhance brand awareness
Cold emailing is highly targeted, which is its biggest advantage. In other words, you’re only reaching the target audience who are interested in your service or product. You can reach out to the prospects and make them aware of your service or product.
5. The ability to automate and track
The next thing on the Pros of cold email marketing is Automate…Automate…Automate…!
Email tools can help you increase productivity by allowing you to, for instance, send personalized cold emails, integrate with other apps or software, use templates, schedule, etc. Additionally, you can track the number of opens, clicks, replies, and any other event or behavior that helps to improve your sales and marketing.
6. Reaching a larger audience
In outbound marketing, this method is the most effective way to reach out to a larger audience. Also, you can target the prospects by focusing on a particular geography. It also helps you to increase sales exponentially. It is very effective at generating leads, which is one of the reasons cold emailing has become so popular. By reaching out to potential prospects through email, businesses can increase their chances of converting the prospects into paying customers.
7. Allows you to reach the person who is hard to reach
It is hard to reach business people who are in a higher position. For example, we can not reach out to the CEO, Founder, etc easily and pitch our product. It is even hard to get an appointment from them. Cold email makes it easier to pitch them and make them aware of your product or service which can solve some pain points.
CONS Of Cold Emailing
1. Do not yield immediate results or feedback
Since emails are not as dynamic as telephonic conversations or direct conversations, some emails can be responded to immediately, some emails can be responded to later like after a month or even after a year, and some will be ignored or moved to the spam folder. In order to prevent getting into spam, you should always give an opt-out option.
Another challenge is – you don’t know whether certain prospects will reply to your email later or they decided not to reply. You can nothing about it but an extra effort. You can send follow-up emails as an extra effort.
2. Huge competition
The next cons in cold emailing are here. Your target prospect you are trying to reach gets hundreds of emails per day. There is a lot of competition in email marketing. So it is difficult to stand out and grab your prospect’s attention.
3. Blocked by spam filters
There is a high chance of getting blocked by the google firewall. A 2018 study from Validity found that 6% of marketing and sales emails get blocked by spam filters globally.
4. The first impression is hard
In terms of cold email marketing, you are trying to reach a complete stranger and convince that person to try your product or service. The message you have to convey should resonate with that person who is reading. They should get the curiosity to learn more about your product or service. If that doesn’t happen means the email is gonna travel to the digital garbage. Don’t just get satisfied with the good open rates. Open rate is one of the attributes. You have to get an impressive subject line to make the first impression better. And then you ought to keep the first message shorter.
Try to talk about their rather than solutions. If they are able to relate to the pain point which is quoted in the email, then there is a high chance of making them reply to your email.
What makes cold emailing different from spamming?
| COLD EMAIL | SPAM EMAIL |
|---|---|
| Sent to target audience only | Sent to anyone and everyone |
| Highly personalized email | Generic email |
| Has visible opt-out option | Contains no out-out option |
| Sent from a professional business email | Sent from non-business domain |
| The content conveys the purpose clearly | Content is irrelevant and too salesy |
Even if you follow the guidelines of the CAN-SPAM Act, GDRP sometimes your genuine email is considered spam, and either it is delivered is spam or it will get blocked.
Top 5 Mistakes to avoid in cold email marketing
1. Follow best practices of email deliverability
Email deliverability is one of the important pillars in cold email marketing. There are many factors to improve cold email deliverability. One of the important steps to consider is to update the email authentication.
The SPF allows email senders to specify which IP addresses are allowed to send an email for a particular domain. The DKIM protocol, on the other hand, provides an encryption key and digital signature to verify that an email message has not been altered or forged.
The next important step is email warm-up. Since it is a non-permission-based email, some people will mark your emails as spam. This will affect your sender’s reputation and put your future emails in the spam folder. So it is important to do an email warm-up for better email deliverability.
2. Talk about the prospect’s pain point and the challenges they face
If your email speaks a lot about your product or services, then you will never get a reply. Because these kinds of templates will never make any impact on the recipient to purchase or subscribe to your product or service. You have highlighted why they have to opt for your product or services.
Make sure you talk about their challenge in their language by using their industries’ technical words.
3. Personalize the subject line
Personalize the email as much as you can. To stand out from the crowd you have given the reader a one-on-one feeling. Personalization also helps you to escape the spam filters. If you use the same content to 100 recipients then automatically the spam filters will kick away the emails and block your sender IP.
4. Use verified email addresses
The status of the email is dynamic. Before sending an email, making sure that the email is valid or not is a mandatory process. This process will keep the bounces away and increases the sender’s reputation. If you verify an email, you will get the results as valid or invalid or unknown or catchall. You should eliminate the emails with results invalid and unknown from the email list. After that isolate the catchall domains and verify those using Emailchecker. You will get the results as catchall pass and catchall fail. Ignore the catchall fail from the list. Use the email addresses with the status valid and catchall valid for the cold email outreach.
5. Avoid using spammy words in both the subject line and email body
The ISPs (Internet Service Providers) will monitor your email domain, email subject line, and email content using their algorithms. If you use any spammy keywords like “$$$”, “Free”, “Refund”, “Save big money”, etc.
Wrapping Up
From this article, I hope you have learned a lot about cold email marketing’s pros and cons. Please read our blog top 10 cold email marketing strategies to know more before starting your cold email outreach.
If you are not yet ready to start the cold email campaign for your business, give a try our cold email marketing course. We are happy to help!
