While some companies steer clear of outreach emails and consider them spam, others use them to generate dozens of quality leads without spending millions.
In this article, we explain why businesses should use outreach and how to put together a cold email campaign that actually works.
Why businesses need outreach
The goal of an outreach email is to make contact with a lead who could benefit from your products or services. A personalized offer is at the core of the email campaign.
Using this tool allows businesses to:
- Generate leads without extra marketing expenses. Email outreach is a budget-friendly way to attract new customers since it doesn't require large investments. There's simply nothing to pay for except the tools used to automate the campaign. Outreach emails are a great fit for startups and small and medium businesses — anyone working with a limited budget.
- Get targeted leads. When working with outreach emails, the company builds its own contact list. This makes it possible to select people who are genuinely interested in your product.
- Enter new markets. Cold emails let you find partners not only within your own country but abroad as well. You can always create a campaign in English, Italian, or any other language — the main thing is that your offer is potentially interesting to the recipient.
How to build an outreach campaign that converts leads
We've put together five tips for creating a high-quality cold email campaign.
Prepare your list
It's not enough to just gather your recipient list into a single spreadsheet — you also need to segment it. The more precisely you understand your audience's pain points and needs, the more precisely you can craft an offer that gets a potential customer interested. Plus, this way your outreach email is far more likely to land in the "Inbox" instead of the spam or promotions folder.
Before launching, it's worth manually filtering all the information in your list. Remove unnecessary user data and add anything missing: recipients' names in the correct grammatical form, a readable version of your company name instead of a hard-to-pronounce legal entity name, and so on.
Write a relevant email
The key principles of a good email are personalization, creativity, and simplicity. An email shouldn't sound like a bureaucrat's speech — about everything and nothing at once.
Six tips for a "wow" email
Communicate warmly and openly. Choose a restrained, friendly tone that would work equally well for a 40+ decision-maker at an oil company and a 25-year-old head of an IT startup. Write without flirting, excessive formality, or over-familiarity.
Don't forget about personalization. Address each recipient by name and craft the subject line for every recipient individually, based on their company's business and your offer.
Show that you know the business you're reaching out to. Check out the company's website and social media in advance, and look into recent news and events. Find an angle to hook onto — if the company is planning to open its first branch abroad, write about how you can help with that.
Add a compliment. If you use the company's products and like the quality of their work, mention it. Just don't overdo it — a compliment shouldn't come across as flattery.
Avoid selling or proposing a meeting time in the first email. First, you need to get the recipient interested — only then move on to scheduling a call and a soft sell. Prepare your follow-ups. Build a logical sequence of 3–5 messages that keep reminding the recipient about you. Don't send "reminders" an hour after the first message and then every half hour after that — the optimal gap between emails is 1–2 days.
Launch the campaign
Once your list is ready and the emails are written, you can start sending. Special tools can help automate the process. Here are a few of them: Lemlist, Mailshake, Outreach, Reply.io and Hunter. These tools are easy to use:
- Upload your contact list.
- Set up the variables you'll use for personalization.
- Set up your email sequence.
- Launch the campaign.
These tools also let you check the results of your email marketing campaign. They show all the key metrics: delivery rate, open rate, conversion rate, and reply rate.
Email outreach: yes or no?
Cold emails don't just work — they deliver excellent results with minimal time and budget spent. If you put in the effort to build a solid list and write a non-templated, personalized email, a single campaign can generate dozens of interested leads at practically no cost.