Are you also struggling with finding a relevant cold email strategy for your business? Well, you are not alone.
Cold emails are not easy to start with. Getting attention from a stranger via an uninvited email requires skills; especially when you’re asking something from them. Making your emails stand out from the thousands of other emails that your prospect receives everyday in their inbox is not easy.
To help you get a better knowledge of cold emails, we have created this list of some common mistakes that you can avoid when sending out cold emails so you don’t have to figure it all out on your own.
How Can Common Cold Email Mistakes Affect Your Success?
Before starting with the mistakes, you should know how common email mistakes can affect your business’ success:
- Cold email mistakes lower your open rate
- They lower your CTR (click-through-rate)
- Such mistakes lower your response and conversion rates too
- They can damage your business reputation
With a correct cold email approach, you can easily get in touch with your prospects and get more conversions.
Let’s have a look at the common cold email mistakes to avoid if you want to get more replies.
15 Common Cold Email Mistakes To Avoid
Cold emailing is not as simple as it seems. Most marketers have given up on this strategy because it was not getting them good results.
But cold emailing is one of the most effective marketing strategies if done correctly. It can turn your prospects into customers within minutes. So, if you want to create an effective cold emailing strategy, you must avoid some mistakes.
Here we have pointed out 15 most common mistakes that email marketers make and if you’re making them too, then it’s time to avoid them.
1. Using a self-centered tone
You must know that your prospects won’t like it if you focus on your product’s latest features only. They care about what you can do for them and how you can help them succeed.
Instead of just doing the praise talk about your company or product, you should focus on giving benefits to your readers. You can mention things like how your product can help in your prospect’s achievements and struggles.
Rather than making your prospects hear about your company, try to find out more about them. Once you make them feel that you really know them well and eager to help them and not just want to sell, they will feel good about your business and may end up becoming your customer also.
2. Writing lengthy paragraphs
You should know the fact that all readers scan your emails before they read them. When you keep the paragraphs lengthy, it gives your prospects a sense of tiredness.
You should keep your cold email content short and easy to read. It should not be more than 15 words per sentence. Shorter paragraphs are always easy to scan as the text looks clean and concise.
Make sure to outline the core value in short and pointed-out sentences without making your prospects take too much time to search for it.
3. Sending your emails to the wrong prospect
This is a grave mistake that you should avoid at all costs.
First of all, you should stop sending cold emails to random people. You need to create a proper email list that will contain all the emails of your prospects.
Sending emails to the wrong person may look like spam and may nullify all the hard work that you did. It may also harm your brand image and so be careful whom you’re sending it to.
4. Deviating from the main point
How would you feel if you open an email and see a huge list of random services offered by a business? It will be hard to notice the main point between other irrelevant ones, right?
When you focus on your prospect’s specific pain point it shows them that you know how to help them, and you’re ready to do so.
You can underline the exact pain point that the prospect is currently facing which will make them relate more easily. The more you show your prospects that you understand their struggles, the easier it will be to tease them with a solution, which will bring you more replies.
5. Applying unattractive email design
Most people want their cold emails to look attractive and appealing, almost like newsletters.
The subscribers often unsubscribe to cold emails due to poor design choices which lead to a low reply rate. Your email must look like an email that you’d sent to a colleague, which increases the chances to get a reply.
6. Using languages that are difficult to understand
It is always better to talk in your audience’s language. You cannot assume that everyone understands the industry knowledge. That’s why you should always adjust your writing when reaching out to people.
Using fancy words in your cold emails won’t make you look smarter. On the contrary, you’ll make yourself hard to understand which lowers your chances of getting replies.
7. Not doing A/B testing
AB comparison test. Computer and feedback, research and planning, vector illustration
A/B testing is an experiment where you split test variations at random, to figure out which variation brings better results.
It can help you determine what variation your audience prefers and accordingly you can optimize your future campaigns for higher reply rates. Knowing what doesn’t work for your audience is as important as knowing what it does.
If you want to automate your A/B testing and track the real-time results, you can try cold email automation tools too.
8. Confusing the prospects with multiple CTAs
When doing cold outreach, all your emails should end with a clear call to action. If you use more than one CTA, you might get your prospects confused about what to do next.
CTA is a specific link that immediately answers what to expect when clicking. If you want your prospects to accept the value proposal, you need to make their next step clear.
9. Not proofreading
You must know that there’s no excuse for bad spelling and errors in your cold email content.
If you don’t write the name of your prospects or their companies correctly, it means that you didn’t bother enough to double-check.
Proofreading is important as it gives a personal touch, making it easier to build a genuine relationship with the prospect. Writing correctly prospects’ info should be the bare minimum. It is a good way to capture a prospect’s attention.
10. Not personalizing the emails
Personalization in cold emails performs better as you connect with your prospects on a higher level and build trust more easily.
Once your prospects feel like the message was carefully written especially just for them, the chances of your prospect converting into a customer gets only higher. The readers don’t like to receive generic emails that only aim to sell.
11. Using deceptive subject line
Another common mistake while writing cold emails can be using misleading words in your subject line.
One common practice can be to avoid gimmicks like ‘Re:’ and ‘Fwd:’ in your subject line. You should also avoid using deceptive phrases like “the meeting you missed.”
Your body copy should match whatever promise you have made on the subject. Most marketers think that deceptive subject lines can increase their open rates. Well, that’s not completely false! But on the other hand, such subject lines tend to damage the customer’s trust in the brand as well.
12. Highlighting just the features and not the benefits
You might want to highlight all the features of your brand together but, this won’t interest the reader. Instead of features, you should put your focus on highlighting the benefits your product can provide to the users.
Highlight a specific problem that’s very important to your target audience. The body of the email should inform your prospect what’s in it for them and encourage them to read more.
It is important to focus on benefits because your prospects do not know you. They have no interest in what features your product has. Therefore, your email should be centered around what you can do to solve their challenges.
13. Sending too many attachments
Attaching several documents to your cold emails basically means that your email may land in the spam folder. There are chances that your prospects do not open your attached files to be safe from the internet viruses.
Instead of attachments, you can insert hyperlinks to your emails. Hyperlinks always prove to be effective in directing your prospects to specific pages.
14. Avoiding follow-ups
When you don’t take follow-up from your prospects, you show them that you have given up after sending a single email. There is a possibility that your prospects have missed your first email.
You should always send follow-up emails to remind your recipients about your previous email. You should have a habit of sending at least 2 follow-ups to remind your prospects before giving up on them.
15. Not using proper ‘From’ line
When you get an email from an individual rather than a company, it is obvious that you will trust the organization.
You should create a personalized official email address to send emails as it will clearly state your name. You must remember that the ‘from’ section is the first impression that your prospect will get from your company.
How To Avoid Cold Email Mistakes?
Now that you know the common mistakes you can make while writing cold emails, you must be wondering how you can avoid them.
Well, you can use an effective cold email tool called PursueApp that can help you write mind-blowing cold emails without a single mistake. With this tool, you can even automate the complete cold email campaign.
Conclusion
Following these steps and using an effective cold email tool like PursueApp can help you boost response rates and book more meetings, but most importantly, build meaningful relationships with your target audience.
The more relationships you make, the more potential customers you have, which will eventually lead to higher sales numbers.