A cold email outreach campaign is when a business sends emails to sales prospects that your brand does not yet have a relationship with in the hope of securing new clients or customers who previously knew nothing about your business.
The aim of cold email outreach is to get the recipients to take a desired action in response to your message and to turn them into customers or positive leads. This means your email must include an actionable and clear call to action (CTA) that encourages the recipients to make a purchase, download a white paper, book an appointment, or pursue another intended outcome.
A weak and unsuccessful cold email outreach campaign will likely deter potential customers or cause them to unsubscribe from your mailing list. Worse still, your email may not even reach their inboxes in the first place.
You can move prospects from your cold outreach list to the warm one when they have completed your desired conversion. A warm outreach campaign sees marketers send personalized and targeted emails to customers with whom they have already built a connection.
In this article, we explore six reasons why your cold email outreach campaign might not be working so you can make improvements and build your warm outreach list.
Your CTA is unclear
The CTA in your cold email is a critical component that prompts your recipients to take action. If your CTA is weak or unclear, it will significantly reduce the likelihood of conversions and decrease the effectiveness of your cold email outreach campaign.
A strong CTA should be concise, specific, and compelling. It should clearly state what you want the email recipient to do, such as book a telephone appointment, download a white paper to get more information, or make a purchase.
For example, instead of a generic CTA like “Download this white paper for more information,” try a more specific one like “Download this white paper to read more about our AI research and how it can help automate your workflow.”
(Source: Self-made/screenshot)
If the recipient takes the desired action and becomes a customer or even a positive lead, you can build an enduring relationship with them by adding them to your warm email outreach campaign.
The email looks like spam
While generic messages in template form are easier to craft for cold email outreach campaigns, they can often look like spam to the recipient. A poor email design and irrelevant content are major spam factors that a recipient would look out for.
AI-powered spam filters will also send your email straight to the junk folder without the recipient seeing it if you use too many images, links, or trigger words. Some common trigger words include free, earn money, get rich quick, winner, bonus, urgent, and guaranteed.
Try using spam checkers like MailGenius to identify and remove trigger words from your email content.
Focusing on the relevance of your content, enhancing your email design, and avoiding trigger words can increase engagement, prevent your email from being marked as spam, and build trust between you and your recipients.
As you increase your cold email volumes and warm up your domains, you will also improve your sender reputation.
If a prospect receives a number of cold emails from the same address at a gradually increasing rate, the steady rise in volume will establish a positive email reputation. This will also decrease the chance of your emails ending up in the spam box, especially if an inbox recognizes you as a frequent visitor.
Your content isn’t engaging
First, the main goal of the subject line is to capture the recipient’s attention and get them to open the email. If your subject line is boring or irrelevant, you’ll see decreased click rates and open rates. Thirty-three percent of recipients open an email because it has an attractive subject line.
Creating a clickbait-style subject line is a brilliant way to improve your open rate. Whether you hint at including a discount code or coin clickbait terms, such as “exclusive offer,” saucing up your subject line can increase consumer clicks tenfold.
If your subject lines are effective and the recipients open your emails, you need to engage them immediately. If an email is too long or doesn’t provide value, your audience may send it to their junk folder or opt out of your mailing list entirely.
In your email body, ensure that you include images, GIFs, interactive elements, and marketing hooks for guaranteed engagement. Take this example from Boden for instance:
(Source: Boden)
Their inclusion of a GIF of a shrinking drink alerts us that the sale will soon be over, adds some urgency to their CTA, and encourages customers to get clicking.
The average recipient spends around nine seconds reading a brand email, so you don’t have much time to direct recipients to your CTA.
In addition, if your email includes broken links and missing images or doesn’t display well on a mobile, your recipients will have a bad experience trying to engage with your content, which will decrease the chance of conversions.
Your value proposition is lacking
When using a cold email outreach campaign to boost sales, your message must include a clear value proposition statement. This statement should describe the specific benefits your customers will reap if they buy from your brand and explain what makes your product or service better than those of your industry competitors.
Take this example from Asana for instance:
(Source: Asana)
Here, you can see that they have established that they are the #1 AI work management platform, and they have mentioned a few buzzwords that encapsulate their specialties.
Marketing consultant Geoff Moore developed a template for brands that need help crafting their value proposition statements: For (your target customer) who (statement of need or opportunity), our (product or service name) is (product category) that (list of benefits).
(Source: Slideshare)
For example, an SEO agency’s value proposition statement would read: For small businesses that want to rank higher on Google, our link-building package is a robust service that ramps up the domain rating of your website by boosting the quantity and quality of the backlinks pointing to your brand’s website.
You haven’t followed up
One of the biggest mistakes made when conducting a cold email outreach campaign is not following up with the recipients. It is easy for decision-makers to overlook or forget about your initial email, so following up is crucial to increase your chances of getting a response.
However, it’s essential to be strategic about the content of your follow-up emails. Don’t just repeat the first email or ask if they saw it. Try to add something new, provide additional information, or add something that will grab the recipient’s attention, such as a video message or exclusive discount.
In addition, you should consider how often you send follow-up emails, as you don’t want to spam your recipients with content they are not interested in. Some brands find that the 2-5-1 rule can be quite an effective time frame.
The first follow-up should be sent two days after the original email, the second five days after the last email, and the third one month after that. If they have not responded after one month, it is very likely they’re not interested in what you have to offer.
There are a number of helpful tools, such as Close, that can help personalize, schedule, and automate your follow-ups to elevate your sales outreach.
The email isn’t reaching the recipient’s inbox
No matter how well-crafted your cold email outreach is, you will not increase your conversions if the emails are not reaching the recipients’ inboxes. The deliverability of your email can be affected by several things:
- high bounce rates: Make sure you send emails to verified and updated email addresses so they don’t bounce back;
- low sender reputation: Make sure you use a recognizable and professional email address with your company’s domain name. This will show customers who sent the email, which will increase credibility and trust;
- trigger words associated with spam: As mentioned, spam filters will send your email straight to the recipient’s junk folder if it includes trigger words.
Wrapping up
If done right, cold email outreach can be a powerful tool for increasing sales. With a well-crafted campaign, you can successfully generate positive leads, build enduring relationships, and increase your chances of closing deals.
By addressing these six issues and adapting your cold email outreach campaign accordingly, you can strategically improve the effectiveness of your campaign.
Remember to measure the performance of your cold email campaigns by keeping track of the open rates, click-through rates, and response rates. This will help you identify what is working and what is not, especially regarding subject lines and content.
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