B2B cold email campaigns: The best practices in 4 steps
There are specific steps you should follow to launch a successful cold emailing campaign.
By successful, I mean a campaign that will produce results on a long-term, consistent basis. and keep your online business assets (brand, IP and domain reputation, prospect list) safe.
1) GET A GREAT LIST TO EMAIL
Every cold email campaign will rest on these basic principles:
Showing the right offer/product/service to the right audience at the right time.
Assuming you’re great at what you do, now you need to find people who are most likely interested in what you have to offer.
Segmenting your prospects can be based on characteristics such as industry, size, revenue, pain points (requires furthe research) etc.
Once you identify the organizations to target, focus on the individuals with the power to make a decision.
There are several prospecting tools that will allow you to source prospects based on very specific criteria.
However, from running cold email campaigns for our clients here at Yantle, Linkedin Sales Navigator remains the best choice.
Once you have target organizations and decision-makers you want to speak with, it’s time to do further research on them.
2) RESEARCH YOUR PROSPECTS
The best cold email campaigns don’t use the “spray and pray” method, targeting thousands of prospects without any context.
Time after time, we see the best performing campaigns use personalization.
You can use tools such as Snov.io to find email addresses.
But don’t stop there — is there something particular you noticed about their business you can help with?
For example:
- CRO business can mention suboptimal design elements on their website
- A Facebook marketing agency can mention that they’re missing a pixel
- Copywriters / content marketers can mention poorly written copy on the website
The majority of cold email tools now allow “merged fields” for added personalization.
Simply populate your CSV file with prospect information with further research and upload it!
Woodpecker.co, for example, offers this and many other advanced features.
3) USE THE RIGHT TechSTACK
Your cold email campaign needs to be scalable and predictable.
The entire system, a machine, needs to allow data to flow seamlessly through all stages of your campaign:
- Prospecting
- Research
- Data syndication
- Cold email automation
- Follow-ups
- CRM
Depending on your requirements, you will need 2–3 tools to achieve this, or a tool for every stage.
The cost of each tool will also vary depending on how complex your set-up needs to be.
For example, some of our campaigns required extra tools such as builtwith.com to get granural data on target organizations.
Assess what you need and do your due diligence accordingly.
The great thing about these MarTech SaaS tools is that most of them offer a free trial.
Get 40% reply rate and generate qualified leads using Linkedin or cold email with the 20/60/20 rule of copywriting
4) WORK ON DELIVERABILITY
Deliverability is absolutely crucial.
If your emails end in spam/junk, you can guess what the results will be like.
None.
You should send emails from a new domain to protect your main domain and its deliverability.
The new domain should be quite similar to the main one, usually, the best way to achieve this is by changing the domain extension.
E.g.
main domain: company.com
cold emailing domain: company.co.uk
Deliverability can be complex subject and incredibly messy if you run into problems.
That’s why stay on the safe side before you send your first cold email.
Here are the most important things to remember.
Deliverability checklist:
Infrastructure
- Trusted providers with good reputation
- Domain fully authenticated to send emails: SPF & DKIM set up correctly
- Consistently send from one ‘from address’ and have the same reply to
- Check that they’re not receiving any other emails by mistake
- Create a new domain
- Check IP domain reputation
- New domain, wait 2–4 weeks and warm up the address. Use it as a normal email to build traffic
- Don’t use free domains
- Have a strategy for sending to ramp up the numbers, also don’t send too often, not too rarely
- Don’t annoy recipients
- Unsubscribe button (test this)
List quality
- Don’t purchase lists
- Validate lists
- Don’t send too many emails to one corporate domain
- Choose whom to send to
- Active people (last 6 months)
- How is my sign-up process?
Content quality
- Plain text is better than images and links
- If we include links, make sure they are not blacklisted
- No capslock in subject
- No stop words (work from home, opportunity, money making etc.)
- No stop words in subject line
- Good quality content (targeted, relevant)
- Do SPAM testing and make sure it’s 10/10
- Don’t like to domains with poor reputation
- Don’t use links linking to redirected pages
- Don’t use link shorteners
Deliverability
Avoid spam filters!
- Use different IP address to send emails
- Use reliable internet domain and mark it with DKIM keys and SPF keys
- Avoid spammy words in the email
- Continuously check %% delivered, opened, replied, and bounced
- If bounce rate is 10%+ and reply 2% or less, that’s a high-risk of being listed in anti-spam systems
- Avoid unnecessary tags and code
- Don’t copy from MS Word — it will contain code and trigger anti-spam systems
- A/B test a lot to find winning performance indicators
