How To Write Effective Cold Emails That Get Responses In 2022

Contacting the customer in cold is one of the oldest sales techniques that have always existed, cold emails are still an extension and one of the purest transformations that the market has been generating, especially for the B2B field.

In 2022, the art of sending cold emails that get responses is still a subject that is being explored and refined on a small scale; it is also a topic on which we are focusing our blog and one of our primary company goals.

In the B2B world, tools like FindThatLead are already necessary, making the process of assessing, prospecting, validating, and contacting all those customers quicker and easier, even on autopilot.

You don’t close a sale, you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise – Patricia Fripp

What is a cold email?

They are called COLD emails because they are sent to people you have not contacted yet and without their permission, that is, people with whom you still haven’t had any kind of relationship before contacting them.

Cold emails are not SPAM, the main difference between them is that sending cold emails brings value to the recipient, they are not intrusive and they are personalized.

We generally send cold emails with the objective of generating enough interest in the recipient to respond to us and to achieve a successful professional relationship or simply to start a conversation.

In any case, our cold email should have its main mission to inform the recipient of what you do and how you could help them.

Here are some simple examples:

• If you’re a graphic designer and you think you could improve a company’s logo design.
• You are a content creator, your strategy is in line with the values of a company and you can offer some kind of collaboration.
• As a consultant within a digital marketing agency, you have noticed that a company could get many more customers by following a strategy and you want to offer them your help.
• You are a supplier of materials and would like to create a professional relationship with intermediaries and retailers.
• You are a trainer of some skill and want to invite several potential clients to attend a Webinar.
• You are a recruiter and you are interested in contacting an interesting profile for a position in your company.
• You think you have an interesting professional profile for a sector and you contact several recruiters from the same sector to apply for a job in a much more personalized and differentiated way.

Do cold emails work?

As we have already mentioned before, sending cold emails is one of the purest branches of the sales process as a negotiation, but it is not only aimed at sales: marketing strategies, recruitment, finding a job, and even negotiating professional collaborations, among other strategies, are all benefited from a good cold email technique.

As an answer to the previous question. YES, it works and in 2022 it is one of the most effective (if not the best) techniques to generate leads, said by many Lead Generation agencies.

Nowadays it is not enough to send an impromptu email to the wrong recipients, you must follow a strategy, find the target and communicate the right message so that the recipient is interested so you can convert those impromptu emails into optimized cold emails that get responses.

How do I know if my cold email strategy is working?

You know that your cold email strategy has worked well when you have generated enough interest in your prospects to get them to respond.

This entire strategy is measurable and we can analyze it with various metrics

• Open Rate

It measures what percentage of recipients have opened the email we have sent them.

This metric mainly indicates how good is our Subject Line, it is the first thing that recipients see before opening the email, it should provide value and indicate an idea of what they are going to find inside the email.

Your subject line must capture the prospect’s attention quickly, the inside of the email may be perfect, but if the subject line is poor, no one will see it and it will remain unopened.

You should aim to have at least 50% open rate, a lower rate means that you have to improve your subject line, or adapt it to your target. There will be times when your open rate is not high enough and you will have to analyze which subjects work best for each audience.

💙Trick: Personalizing the subject line is always a good idea, simply adding the name of the person who will receive the email usually increases the open rate by 15% (do not abuse this technique, creativity and differentiation are rewarded).

• Reply rate

This measure tells us how many people have responded to our email, it is the metric that tells us the success of our cold email campaign.

A cold emailing campaign usually has between a 6,5% and 10% response rate, which is considered a very good campaign for those who achieve a 15% response rate.

If our open rate is higher than 50% and our emails have no response, we must rethink whether the failure is inside the email.

What should you include in a cold email to get responses?

So, how can you compose a cold email that doesn’t come out as desperate, shallow, or pushy? We’ll go through everything you need to know, as well as what we’ve tried ourselves to run a successful cold email campaign.

• Subject Line

As we mentioned before, the subject line is the first impression that your prospect will have before opening your email, it has to be good enough to grab their attention and make them read it in its entirety. In this post, I give you the bible of subject lines.

Example: Can we talk about lead generation on [Company]?

• Opening line and ice-breaker

Once the email has been opened, our prospect will start reading the email from top to bottom and, if the first thing he reads is not interesting enough, he will stop reading and it will be another prospect who will send our email to the trash bin.

For a cold email to be effective, we have to develop a good opening line, which is visual and eye-catching.

Normally we usually greet and put the recipient’s name, ask how they are doing or how they are doing in X project can be a good idea.

In the next line, we must break the ice, put your creativity to the test again and think of something that you think may interest your prospect: Congratulate them for a recent achievement in their company, a promotion, a piece of content that has inspired you or simply show admiration, but be creative!

Example: I’m not gonna hide it, I love the way your team works at [Company Name], I think it’s amazing the progress you’re making in the [Industry] sector.

• Cold email body

Once we have been able to get their attention let’s offer the real value. Why have we contacted them?

Find the problem he may have and explain how you could solve it. (Numbers and results convert!)

Be brief but provide value, and show that you really know how to solve their problem, the better you know your target audience, the more you will convert.

Example: I wanted to congratulate you on the great quality of your content on @username. From Findthatlead we want to expand our content campaign and I would love to count on you for a collaboration.

• Cold Email CTA

Next part, CTA (Call To Action), why are you going to write your prospect an email? In most cases, the best CTA is to have them respond to your email and be able to arrange a meeting or call with them.

Try to have only one CTA per email, redirect their effort to read, understand and respond to do just one action, in most cases, that they respond to you. Try to close the conversation with a question.

Example: Could we have a chat sometime this week?

• Signature

Make your mark, show in a signature who you are and what you do, display the forms of contact that you have available and, why not? your social networks or your blog if you have it well worked. Your photo is essential, your prospects like to see who they are talking to, a photo generates trust and trust translates into more replies.

A good signature should have:

• Photo
• Your name and what you do
• Contact
• Social Networks

If you want to create a signature for free and in a super simple way, I highly recommend Signature Maker, our signature creation tool of FTL.

Winning cold email strategies and tips.

Like any marketing or sales technique, the art of sending cold emails has to be part of a well-defined strategy, we must know everything about what we offer, our target, how to contact, follow up, and analyze our failures and successes…

In FindThatLead, the search and prospecting of leads is our daily task, in large part, our Outbound Marketing strategy is based on sending cold emails.

I’m going to show you some cold email tips, secrets, and strategies we have at FindThatLead to write cold emails and make them awesome:

• Keep it short, silly.

Our take on the famous “Keep it simple, silly” is simply here to tell you that the longer you stretch your cold email, the higher the chances your prospective client would bounce off in the middle of it, not bothering to complete the rest.

Studies suggest that perfect cold emails should not be more than five sentences long, else the response rate would be abysmal.

Imagine getting a 2000 words essay talking about a product you’re not familiar with. Would you really bother reading through it all?

The answer is most likely, NO.

• Come to the point.

Know how to pitch well, do not waste time in building salutations and castles. It does good to come straight to the point.

You know their pain points and you know the solutions that you can offer. Figure out how you can address the same and pitch it to them without any backspaces.

Often, people waste a lot of time in building up a pitch. In the process, they lose the lead.

Everyone’s time is precious and millions of leads and emails are exchanged every day. Make sure your lead does not waste any.

Also, you do not want important and relevant information to get lost amid irrelevant conversations.

Address the challenge, provide a solution and wait for a reply!

• Write like you are having a conversation.

This does not mean going verbatim. It just means that be direct, crisp, and concise in stating what you want as you would while explaining verbally.

Keep in mind that the prospective client to whom you are addressing the cold email to cannot see your expressions of enthusiasm.

The only thing which is going to make or break the deal is your written words. Make sure they count

💙Pro tip: We firmly believe that you should add a hint of your personality in your cold email copy. That helps your message stand out and that human touch to it makes the recipient want to know more. Even if the reply is negative, you’re more likely to get a response when you’re being yourself and not robotic.

• Personalize what you can.

Templates are fine, but nothing is better than customized and personalized touches, and cold email is no different.

Since this is the first time you are knocking on someone’s door, you need to make sure you’re giving them a reason to open the latch.

You need to show them how different you are from others.

So, personalize your cold email copy with little changes. Instead of using the trending cold email templates on the internet, choose to only be inspired by them.

A few ways to personalize your cold emails include using “you” to address the recipient, talking in the first person instead of looking like an agency ready to spam someone’s inbox, using GIFs, ditching the fancy templates, and mimicking how you’d write a handwritten letter.

• Follow up 

Before you ask, no, following up does not seem like an act of desperation if you keep certain things in mind.

You have sent your cold email, now is the time to follow up.

Simply because each one of us receives hundreds of emails a day and you can’t really blame your prospect for missing out on your message!

Why is this a part of writing the perfect cold email? That’s because what do you do if your favorite TV show ends season one abruptly?

You wouldn’t know where to go, or what to watch next – so how can you expect your prospect to know where to reach you or what more value you can add to them?

Although, we do recommend spacing out your follow-up cold emails so that you do not bombard the prospect.

Now we know keeping track of when you sent an email to who, and how many days it has been, can get really overwhelming.

That’s why you should consider automating your cold email follow-ups using smart tools like the Email Sender by FindThatLead.

While those are some of the rules we follow to get people to respond to our cold emails, there are also a few no-nos we found along the way.

How can I set that follow-up in autopilot with the FTL tool?

It’s as simple as setting up a drip in your campaign in “Send Emails” and launching it, the tool itself will generate these emails if they haven’t replied in the specified days, that’s awesome!

Cold Emails that get responses [Proven temples]

Here are some templates so you can inspire your perfect cold email.

Don’t cheat and don’t copy literally what it says, remember that each prospect is different and for each audience, you need a different strategy.

Remember to be creative to create cold emails!

You need to know how your strengths can cure the weakness of your clients and use your cold email to pitch just that.

These are two magical emails that can be the precursor to a long professional relationship.

This is the email that will make or break your first impression.

Remember in this world of cut-throat competition, rarely does anyone get a chance to make a second one.

• Backlink outreach email to get a response

• Collab with influencers

How to get more replies on autopilot

We had anticipated in the first part of the blog, the tools dedicated to Outbound Marketing are getting better and better.

This post talks about the qualitative part of a good cold email strategy, but of course, as long as you put into practice what you have learned in this post, the quantity of emails comes automatically thanks to FindThatLead’s free tools.

From the prospecting phase of new leads to automated follow-ups, through an amazing tool to create email lists with the parameters that best match your target audience.

I may have said it a few times but it’s amazing, you can generate leads through cold emails on autopilot!

A final word on cold emails that get responses

Remember, for each target audience you have to modify the strategy, you can create the perfect email but if it goes to the wrong recipient, it will not be one of that cold emails that get responses.

If you consider yourself an empathetic and creative person, I assure you that a good cold email strategy is the best way to generate leads in 2022.

You can use much of what you’ve learned here for all kinds of online cold contacting. Scrab.in is an incredibly powerful tool for cold contacting people and B2B lead generation through LinkedIn.

Now I’d love for you to put everything you’ve learned in this guide to the test in your cold email campaign. Why don’t we get started now?

Try FindThatLead