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Warming Up Your Cold Email

A cold email introduces you and acts as your proxy. Does it represent you effectively?

By Mark Riffey

With double digit below zero weather arriving in Montana this week, the last thing any of us need is a cold email.

What I call a cold email isn’t quite the same as a bulk email. While bulk email is indiscriminately sent to many thousands of people, a cold email might be sent to 10, 50 or 100 people. Bulk emails are seldom effective as lead generation tools, while cold emails can be an effective lead generation tool from a somewhat targeted list.

What is a cold email?

Cold emails are often written from templates and sometimes are pasted into an email program before they are sent. Sometimes, they’re mail merged (ie: personalized), sometimes not. Template-based, mail-merged emails aren’t a bad thing until you send a generic one to the decent quality lead with a message that makes little sense.

Who gets a cold email?

They’re often sent to people you might have seen or heard of at a Chamber of Commerce event – but you weren’t introduced to them and you didn’t meet. You might have their email because of a list you have (or bought) access to, such as an industry group list or a list of trade show attendees.

You might have manually harvested the email addresses from web sites of companies that might be a good fit for your services. For example, if you serve small bakeries, maybe you Google’d “bakery northwest montana”, found a list of bakeries within 100 miles, then grabbed the owner name and email from each site.

While that shows a little effort, it can all be lost depending on your next move.

The trouble with cold emails

Cold emails don’t often get a response, because their content simply doesn’t encourage you to read them, much less take action.

Cold email failures:

  • The subject line doesn’t provoke you to open the email. Instead it says something like “sender’s company name product category”. Example: “Smith-Jones Systems – Point of Sale Software”.
  • The content is so general that it shows you made no effort to understand the recipient or their needs, so it reads like every other spam they receive.
  • The content is written from the “me, me, me” perspective (talks about the company and its services) rather than talking about the reader.
  • The content reads as if it came from a template. While the slightest bit of work could make it personal, that effort wasn’t invested.

Making a cold email personal

This email is your proxy. If you read an email you sent last week, does it sound like you? Is it the introductory conversation you’d have in person with a prospect? My guess is that it doesn’t and it doesn’t.

The email needs to speak to a specific problem. What problem do most bakeries have that your point of sale (POS) software solves? Bakery owners don’t wake up in the morning thinking “Boy, I sure wish someone would try to sell me point of sale software today.” Yet these same bakery owners might be thinking about how annoyed they are about the inability to predict shift coverage based on sales levels, print tax reports, produce custom order tickets, add stations, or some other thing. Their staff may have complained about other problems with their POS.

40% of your clients may have used a specific POS and moved to yours because of three specific benefits, differences or improvements. Do you know what these prospect bakeries currently use? What do their people think about it? Given that 40% of your clients used that tool, you should have some specific info for bakeries still using that old POS. Send a specific email to users of that POS vs. bakeries using other software.

Observation

Have you been in their bakery and bought something so you can see how the staff reacts to working on their registers or POS stations? Did you sit there, as appropriate, and have a cup of coffee while observing how things go when they are busy? Did you listen for comments from the staff?

While you don’t want to fill an email with ALL of this info, this knowledge is critical to understanding why a baker would want your POS.

Sure, these emails are more laborious to produce, but your job is to get new clients, not see how many emails you can send.

You don’t send marketing email? This knowledge also applies to phone and in-person sales calls.

Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s sitecontact him on Twitter, or email him at [email protected].