Email lists are a central component of any successful digital marketing strategy. But, building your cold email list from scratch may seem daunting, especially if you are just getting started.
Avoid using a free mailing list found online or buyable one; these aren’t effective and can cause your emails to be marked as spam. Instead, use these strategies to grow your email list:
Collecting Email Addresses
When starting a cold email campaign, your first priority is to gather a list of prospects. Use a prospecting tool to find a targeted list of B2B decision-makers that would benefit from your product or service. Or ask existing customers or prospects verbally if they’d be willing to receive marketing emails. It only takes a few seconds for someone to write down an email address.
Once you have a clean list of prospects, it’s time to start sending emails. It’s important to warm up the email address before sending at scale, which means gradually increasing the number of emails you send daily. This helps establish your email account as a legitimate source of communication, reducing the likelihood that future emails will get marked as spam.
When reaching out to new prospects, try using a personalized subject line or email body. This will help engage your recipients and encourage them to reply. Also, include a clear call-to-action and offer value in your email content. Strategic follow-ups can also increase reply rates, but be sure to space them out and keep the email content relevant.
While conversions are often the primary metric for measuring email success, there are many other metrics to consider as well. Monitoring metrics can give you insight into what is working and what isn’t, so don’t be afraid to experiment with different variables.
Segmentation
When you create a list, it is important to know how to segment it. This is an essential part of cold email marketing that can make or break your campaign. Listed here are free cold email marketing tools that you can use for your own ventures!
Segmentation allows you to target your email campaigns with the most relevant content possible, and a more tailored approach for each recipient. This will result in higher clickthrough rates and conversions, as well as increased engagement and response rates.
This can be done by identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), which is the set of characteristics that define your ideal customers and prospects. This information can include things like industry, department, location, and company revenue, among other factors.
By identifying the specific needs and pain points of your buyers, you can craft a compelling story around how your solution can help them address those problems and achieve their goals. Your buyers don’t buy your features; they buy your value proposition, and a clear understanding of how you can solve their problems will make them much more likely to respond.
Another way to use segmentation is to target emails based on buyer behavior. You can do this by analyzing the actions of your current customers, or by asking them how they like to receive their content. For example, some buyers may prefer video, while others prefer written content. Knowing the most popular formats for your audience will help you provide them with the best type of content to increase the likelihood of a response.
Automation
Cold emailing offers more flexibility than traditional sales channels, as it can be automated through a number of software tools. It can also be highly personalized, which increases the likelihood of a response and helps to establish connections that can lead to future business opportunities. It is also significantly more cost-effective than digital advertising, allowing you to target specific individuals within an organization rather than the entire audience.
In addition to personalization, effective subject lines are vital in gaining the attention of prospects and increasing the likelihood of replies. A subject line that is clear, concise, and relevant to the prospect’s needs will increase the chances of them opening the email and engaging with your offer or call-to-action. Subject lines should also be tested to identify what type of emails receive the highest responses, which can then be employed in future campaigns to achieve even better results.
Using an email marketing tool can help to make the process of building a list and sending email messages more efficient by automating certain tasks. By enabling you to create, test, and optimize email campaigns through a range of advanced features, you can improve the performance of your cold emailing efforts and get the most out of your investment in marketing automation.
Tracking
Before you start building your list, it’s important to first spend time researching and compiling a comprehensive ideal customer profile (ICP). This way, you can ensure that the emails you send are highly relevant and resonate with your prospects’ business needs, interests, and pain points.
In addition, you’ll need to identify the best ways to collect and verify your leads. Some examples include hosting webinars or online events, networking with industry leaders, and attending conferences. While these methods may take some extra effort, they can yield high response rates and deliver a strong return on investment.
Once you have a comprehensive prospect list, you can begin sending out cold emails. To improve your reply rate, be sure to follow up with your recipients a few days after you initially reach out. This allows you to connect with your leads again and reminds them of the value you offer. Additionally, you can try using triggers or intent-based email campaigns based on your ICP to ensure that the emails you’re sending are relevant to your target audience.
As you send out more emails, be sure to keep an eye on your performance metrics, such as open and click rates. These metrics can provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of your campaign and help you refine your strategy over time. For example, if your open rate is low, you might want to change the subject line or consider using a different template.
Measuring
There are various metrics that you can track to assess the effectiveness of your cold email campaigns. These include open rates, reply rate, click rates and more. Measuring these indicators will help you refine your outreach strategies and ultimately increase the conversions from your list of email contacts.
The most critical of these metrics is the open rate. This indicator will tell you how many recipients opened the email you sent them and it is a good indication of the relevance of your subject line and email content. The higher the open rate, the more likely it is that the recipient will engage with your content and ultimately take action.
Reply rate is a great indicator of how effective your call-to-action and follow-ups are. This metric is usually calculated by counting the number of responses you receive from your list of email leads. You can use tools like Mailtrack to measure this or a dedicated email follow-up platform like Woodpecker which automates this process and sends emails one-by-one until you get a reply.
When it comes to email follow-ups, it’s important that the messages you send are personalized and relevant. This will help ensure that your prospects are engaged with the content you send and it will prevent them from unsubscribing from your mailing list. It’s also a good idea to sneak some value into your follow-ups such as a link to an interesting case study or invitation to an upcoming webinar.
Refinement
As with any marketing campaign, it takes time to get results. This is why it’s important to track the success metrics of your cold email campaign. Using the data you collect, you can refine your approach to improve performance over time. This could be through tweaking your subject line, or experimenting with different types of emails.
In addition, the quality of your cold email copy is critical to success. It’s worth taking the time to write a clear and concise email that speaks directly to your prospect’s needs, desires, and challenges. This will help to separate your email from the dozens of other marketing emails that they receive each day and make it more likely to garner a response.
It’s also important to be persistent in your outreach emails. It often takes multiple touchpoints to get a response, so don’t be afraid to send follow-ups. But be sure to space them out and vary your approach in each one, so that you don’t become a nuisance.
Finally, it’s a good idea to run an email warmup process before starting your campaign. This involves sending a low number of emails every day and gradually increasing them. This helps to establish your email account with email service providers and reduces the chance that your emails are marked as spam.
