Have you been wondering how to widen your customer horizon? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. The easiest way to reach out to a wider audience is through cold outreach.
In a survey, about 59% of respondents said that emails influence their buying decisions. Hence, cold outreach can open doors for an extra boost in website traffic, audience engagement, and conversions.
But how you go about doing it is extremely crucial and will determine your success.
So, in this blog, we talk about the key takeaways from Amanda Natividad and Rand Fishkin’s video on cold outreach as part of SparkToro’s “Office-hours” live stream.
Let’s get started!
What Is Cold Outreach?
Cold outreach refers to the process where you reach out to or contact someone via email who doesn’t have any connection with your business. The email is meant to make them aware of your product or service and provide them with an offer.
However, a good outreach email should be super specific and have a personalized approach. It could require a lot of research and creativity to get noticed and form the right impression. Always verify email addresses before cold outreach. This prevents bounced emails and increases engagement. So let us discuss in detail how to go about conducting a successful cold outreach campaign for your business.
Where to Find People for Your Outreach?
Here’s a list of simple sources of potential leads for your outreach campaign-
1. Look for Aggregators to Create a Decent-Quality List
Aggregators are basically sources of leads who gather a huge volume of lead information and resell it to their clients. So, to streamline your cold outreach, you can buy relevant lead information from a renowned aggregator. You can then send personalized and interactive emails to them and fulfill your sales and marketing objectives.
2. Research Useful Industry Roundup Lists
Roundup lists are a fun and easy way to present content. They include posts like Top 10 Products, Best tools list, etc. They may also include a step-by-step guide or timeline on a particular topic, including social shares and feedback from customers, and pretty much anything that can be compiled into a list.
You can look for such roundup lists that align with your business and reach out to them with a relevant and valuable offer. Getting mentioned in such lists will help boost your website’s traffic and ultimately increase your customer base.
3. Reach Out to Influencers on Social Media
Social media is a very effective platform for cold outreaches. This is the era of influencers and micro-influencers, and reaching out to them is an effortless way to promote your business.
You can look up some influencers online and research more about them. SparkScore is a free tool to measure the relative engagement a social account receives compared to its size.
Moreover, you can leverage social platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. for your company’s benefit. You can easily find out valuable information on potential leads through social media. Search for marketing directors on LinkedIn, and follow them along with a short but relevant message.
Similarly, you can create a private list of users on Twitter and follow their content, check out interesting discussions and chime in when appropriate.
4. Conduct Searches for Queries
Try to research real-time data on how people are searching for answers. What, when, why, who, how, where-type questions will provide you with a lot of information regarding what the audiences are looking for. This information will then clue you in on how to draft your message and what important points to cover, increasing your chances of conversion.
Five Rules of Cold Outreach
For running a successful cold outreach campaign, there are certain rules you should adhere to. Let’s have a look at them-
1. Show That You Care
Your leads should be convinced that you care about them, and only then they will give your offer some consideration. You can express care by conducting proper research on them, learning about their pain points, and writing a personalized email to them with an offer they cannot say no to.
2. Do Not Demand Attention
Just because you follow someone or go through their content regularly does not mean that they have noticed you. You cannot expect them to give you attention or consider your offer without putting in sincere effort.
3. Do Not Sound Robotic in Your Emails
You must have noticed a lot of emails in your inbox that sound like they’ve been sent by a computerized bot. Such emails are a total no-no. Make sure that the message you write doesn’t sound robotic. It should sound personalized, include some humor, and be relatable.
To personalize the experience for your recipients even further, you can make use of interactive content. You can add a relevant interactive content piece like a quiz or calculator in your email. This will help improve your email readability and conversion rate.
For creating such interactive content, you can sign up with Outgrow’s 7-day free trial and get going.
4. Be Genuine
Be genuine with the offer you make, do not try to paint a better picture of your product or service than how it actually is. Chances are you’re reaching out to smart people, and they’ll know when you’re lying. Be careful!
5. Don’t Waste Any Time
Try to keep your email short and sweet. Time is money- both yours and theirs. Spend some time researching about the person you’re reaching out to, and write an email that makes sense to them.
Where Can You Go Wrong With Your Cold Outreach?
Sometimes your leads totally ignore your cold emails and all the follow-ups you send. Why does this happen?
There are certain things you need to consider in order to avoid any mistakes with your outreach campaign. Let’s learn more about the shortcomings of your cold outreach.
1. Irrelevant to Recipient
Before sending out outreach emails, make sure that the offer you’re making is relevant to your audience. Because if it’s not, they’re not going to waste any time in replying. For this, you also have to make sure you’ve developed a clear understanding of your target audience.
2. No OOH Moment
While writing a cold email, you need to think outside the box. Think beyond clickbait, find out what can keep them reading beyond the subject matter of your email. If there is no such OOH factor in your email, you’ll lose your audience.
3. No AHA Moment
When you finally convince your readers to read beyond the subject, you then need to focus on the offer you’re making. If your offer is valuable to them, you’re a winner. Your audience will have their AHA moment and respond to you in order to enquire more.
4. Vague Request
Do not beat around the bush, write an email that makes a point. Your request should be specific to your product offering. A vague message will go unread and be considered as just a waste of time.
5. Clarity About Your Company
People you reach out to might not know you. It’s not about fame, it’s about clarity. You need to make your audience understand what your company is about and how your product or service will be useful to them.
PRO TIP: Instead of Cold, Do Warm Outreach
1. Be Social on Social Media
Bring out your social side on social media platforms. Reply to posts on Twitter, Instagram, etc. Reach out through social media when your offer is relevant to the user’s content. Try to start a conversation that makes sense.
2. Create Readable Content
An important point to be noted is that your audience will never READ your email, they just skim through the content to check if it’s useful for them or not. So, try to avoid long-form content and write short and sweet emails. Try embedding interactive content like quizzes and surveys to turn the tables (and heads)!
3. Send Guest Post Requests
Find out if your leads accept guest posts, if they do, research on what kind of content they promote and try your hand at pitching them for the same. In your outreach email, try to explain why they should choose you and not someone else.
Conclusion
There you go! In this blog, we’ve talked about cold outreach in detail- DOs and DON’Ts through our understanding of SparkToro’s “Office-hours” live stream. We hope that you’ve understood enough and you’re ready to give it a try!
If you think we missed out on something, please let us know in the comment section below!
FAQs
1. How do you conduct a cold outreach?
You can conduct an outreach campaign by first compiling a list of relevant leads and then drafting and sending out personalized emails to them with a valuable offer for consideration.
2. How can I improve my cold outreach?
You can improve your cold outreach by writing emails that are personalized, include humor and will be relatable and relevant to your audiences.
3. How many times should you cold email?
For a cold email outreach, an average of three to four emails sent over a couple of weeks is generally enough to understand if the prospect will be interested in your offer or not.
