How to get responses to your cold emails

The inbound method relies heavily on building an infrastructure that will allow your organisation to get a continuous stream of incoming leads. Having said that, there is always a case for using well written cold emails to generate incoming traffic to your website or better still get some much needed leads for your sales teams.

The problem is, most emails usually end up in your prospect’s SPAM folder and only the very best will elicit a response. Here is how you can write emails that deliver value and get responses at the same time.

Start with the subject of the email

There is a great blog post on the various types of subject lines you can use to boost your open rate.

The biggest reason why prospects open emails is fear of missing out. What does that mean? Well your subject should try and pique your prospect’s curiosity and also sound important enough for him to open.

For example, if you are offering a trial for a customer success software. A couple of really useful subject lines can be:

“Here are 5 things that help teams turn support to customer success”

“Don’t waste time on the wrong customer success solution”

The first subject line invokes your prospect’s curiosity, while the second talks about the fear of missing out. The jury is out on whether or not you should use question marks in your emails but the subject line should not lose context because you wanted to avoid a question mark.

The opening line is vital

You got your prospect/customer to open your email. What next?

If your opening few lines are just another rant about how good your company is or what services you offer, the prospect is probably going to close the email and delete it.

As in cold calling, what you say immediately after your prospect says “hello” is vital. Your opening line has to catch your prospect's attention.

We cannot stress how important it is for your prospect to connect with your email and find it worth his time reading on. You have to make your opening count.

Here is an example of one such opening:

Hi <prospect first name>,

My name is XYZ from ABC.

I just wanted to share how <company relevant to prospect’s company> used our product to move to a customer success mentality from a support mentality (and had a 35% increase in revenue from customer success).

Notice how we have name dropped an existing customer and introduced context at the same time!

This brings us to a very important aspect of writing emails. Personalise your emails so that they are relevant to your prospect’s problems and specific to their industry type.

Imagine being head of customer success and getting emails about how a software helped an organisation make better outbound sales!

Deliver value throughout the email

If you have to talk about how great your software or service is, make sure you do it with facts and figures.

To make sure you don’t lose your reader’s attention, include industry specific insights and share existing customer case studies/quotes.

No one wants to read you brag about your product, so make the email about your prospect’s problems and what you can do for them. You should know your prospect's by building personas and should have a good idea of what their problems are.

Here is a quick example of what you would say:

We can make sure that your team is ready for the next level of support by doing these 5 things <discuss main points as mentioned in email subject>.

But don’t take our word for it. You can read the complete cases study on how ABC helped QWR here.

Remember, the 5 points in question should talk about how your product/service can help fix a problem and not just talk about 5 important features of your product/service. The above email blends your value offering but also continues to name drop and reference existing customer case studies.

The call to action

If you have done everything right so far, the product/service pitch has been delivered. Now is the time to include a call to action.

This could be asking your prospect to reply to your email or suggest a time for a call.

For example;

If what you have read so far seems useful, I would love to setup a call on <suggest date and time>. I look forward to your response.

Instead of leaving the time open for your prospect’s consideration, suggesting a time to talk will get you more responses (as it suggests that you are already setting aside time for the meeting).

Before we see the full email, there is one important section that most sales individuals neglect when they are sending out an email:

The signature

Make sure you use the signature section to link back to the latest in your organisation, it could be the latest product or a killer feature that is getting rave reviews. If nothing else, you can use the signature section to point back to a recent case study or review.

Here is an example:

XYZ

Manager success ABC

We just launched SuccessSoftware 2.0! <Hyperlink to product page>

So what does the full email look like?

Subject: Here are 5 things that help teams turn support to customer success

Hi <prospect first name>,

My name is XYZ from ABC.

I just wanted to share how <company relevant to prospect’s company> used our product to move to a customer success mentality from a support mentality(and had a 35% increase in revenue from customer success).

We can make sure that your team is ready for the next level of support by doing these 5 things <discuss main points as mentioned in email subject>.

But don’t take our word for it. You can read the complete cases study on how ABC helped QWR here.

If what you have read so far seems useful, I would love to setup a call on <suggest date and time>. I look forward to your response.

Regards,

Sales Individual

Manager success ABC

We just launched SuccessSoftware 2.0! <Hyperlink to product page>

Before we wrap up this blog post, we would like mention it is vital that you continue to experiment with your emails. If at first you don’t succeed, try again. We will be talking more about managing change in future blog posts. Remember to change only one element at a time in your email so you can see what worked for you.

We are always looking for feedback so don't hesitate to share it with us at any time. We are available on twitter: @insideselling