A cold email is a traditional but an effective way of connecting with people. When done correctly, it can help you build a loyal and mutually beneficial relationship with your customers and prospects.
Cold emails have the potential to open up opportunities for you by getting new contacts and leads. By honing your cold email skills and knowing what mistakes to avoid you can effectively expand your professional network.
Let us see what common mistakes are made by professionals when sending out cold emails so you can make sure not to repeat them in the future.
Key Mistakes Made By People When Email Prospecting
Usage of Poorly Structured Subject Lines
A subject line determines the tone of your email and can capture the attention of the reader. This is why if you want to successfully execute your email prospecting strategy, you need to make sure that your subject line is clear, to the point and give your prospect a reason to open your email and read it. Using vague or wordy subject lines will make the reader lose interest and ignore your email.
Tip: Avoid making the subject line too sales-y to not end up in the spam folder of your prospects.
Sending Generic Messages to Your Prospects
Once you have reeled in your prospect to open the email with an amazing subject line, it will all be for naught if the message of your email is generic. To get a response from the prospects, encouraging them to follow you and purchase your products or services, you need to make sure that your email has an authentic message.
Having template based content in your email is not going to help your cause. You need to understand that you are sending your email to a human so make your message and content human and genuine as well.
Tip: Write your emails as if you are having an actual conversation with your prospect.
Not Talking About The Prospect
The easiest way to turn away a potential prospect is to endlessly brag about your company and product in your cold emails. Remember that you want to approach the project and are writing the email to them. As a salesperson you need to understand the needs, pain points, and points of interest of your prospect. Recognizing these elements in the email and proposing a solution for it will work in your favor.
Tip: When you are crafting your cold email, keep this in mind: It is about the prospect, not you.
Not Segmenting Your Emails
One of the most common mistakes made by email marketers and salespeople is that they do not put the effort in segmenting their emails. To get a successful response to your cold emails, you need to make sure that you are not writing the same message to everyone. Sending a thousand emails with every email being the same is not as successful as sending a hundred high quality, segmented and tailored emails to your prospects.
Make quality over quantity your motto when sending cold emails.Your prospects belong to different fields, with varying preferences and interests that you need to cater to. Tailoring your emails to address the person’s name, title, and some significant fact about them will allow you to create common ground that can be further explored later.
Tip: Conduct research on the prospects, their interests and profiles to get a better idea of how you need to communicate with them to get their attention.
Dragging The Length of Your Emails Unnecessarily
No one has time to read a long and boring cold email. The purpose of cold emails is not to overwhelm the prospect with information about you but rather to get their attention and create interest. This can be achieved with concise, to the point, and interesting content.
Lengthy sentences that do not talk about anything of significance to the reader will make them lose interest. Having jargon and fancy words in your emails may seem cool but it only confuses the prospects. This also makes it hard for the prospect to read and digest the content. So, be as clear as you can using polite and simple conversational language in your emails.
Tip: You will have a chance to tell your story and the detailed explanations of your unique selling proposition when the prospect replies back so try to wrap up your email in 5-6 sentences.
Forgetting To Add a Call-to-Action (CTA)
The purpose of a cold email is to inform a prospect about what you want them to do. To achieve this you need to add a call-to-action (CTA) that is specific and tells the prospect what you are expecting. The CTA can be a direct question, a phone call, a meeting, a request to subscribe to a newsletter or even information exchange.
Tip: It is best to use one CTA so you do not overwhelm your prospect with multiple requests and also to keep the message clear.
Thinking The Job Is Done With Just One Email
Not following up with the prospect after you send them your cold email is a novice mistake to make. The job is not done with just one email, you have to compete with the numerous others approaching your prospect. It is important to remind the prospect about you. Sending a follow-up email can make the prospect remember you and your email consequently. However, when sending a follow-up email, make sure you tailor it according to the prospect to let them know that it is not yet another spam email taking up space in their inbox.
Tip: Through customized emails and adding specific information about the prospect you can highlight their importance to you.
Conclusion
Sending cold emails is part of the job for sales professionals looking to grow their networks and generate potential leads. It is easy to make common mistakes when executing your cold email prospecting strategy if you are not careful enough. Keep these mistakes in mind the next time you send an email to potential prospects.
cool read