Cold Outbound Emails are not Dead*
*They just need to be accompanied by other touchpoints to have a chance to be opened.
Gone are the spray and pray days of prospecting emails as your source of qualified prospects. Here’s why…
There’s too much noise.
Email is not the primary way people communicate anymore.
Email providers are getting more aggressive about filtering spam.
Prospects don’t like gimmick headlines, which are getting more and more outlandish as companies try to bump up open rates, which is a vanity metric. (See my Your team thinks you’re an a**hole post.)
But email is not dead. It can still work. Here’s a recent personal example:
As the President and COO of a company, I get close to 200 emails a day, with anywhere from 10-15 cold prospecting emails that actually make it past my spam filter. I’m an aggressive “report spam & unsubscribe” recipient of emails from people I don’t know. However, I recently received a prospecting email from (let’s call them a Business Development person) that I opened and we recently started a trial with their product.
I never would have opened the email and would have reported it as spam, but this person had pinged me in other ways; in other words, he wasn’t a true stranger. For one, he was active in my LinkedIn network (but not selling me), and two, I had recently heard about his company from someone else in my network. Those two things lead me to click on the message instead of spamming it.
As for his email, it was to the point and clearly articulated something that I thought might be valuable to our business. He also made it very simple to engage with his company, start a trial to see if it added the value I thought it might (still TBD).
I typically don’t have a ton of time to entertain things that are not strategically important and in alignment with our annual business plan; adding something new, even if valuable, is difficult to justify in the midst of all the other initiatives I’m trying to move forward. But as I alluded to, the email in question was not truly cold — it was “warmed up,” if you will, by me already being familiar with the sender through earlier LinkedIn activity and the word of mouth about his company from trusted colleagues in my inner circle.
Sales Leaders, the take-home here is pretty simple. If you really want someone to open your reps cold emails, help make them a little warmer by:
Approaching the recipient beforehand through multiple channels — LinkedIn, his personal network (if you have a connection there), etc. This will give you a better chance that they read your email.
Providing a clear and easy message that resonates and makes it easy for the recipient to learn more. This will improve your odds of getting a response and possibly starting a trail.
Cold email is not dead, but it is if done alone.
Use your network.
Use the phone.
Use social to engage, not sell.
Happy selling…