In most B2B marketing conversations, cold emailing is regularly described as a challenging outbound marketing channel. But that’s only because it is often misunderstood.

Cold emailing, otherwise known as email outreach, involves sending unsolicited email messages to unknown persons who possibly are not aware of your services/products.

It is a frequently deployed marketing technique among B2B companies, especially because it is inexpensive. Besides, when done the right way, it’s probably more effective than other client acquisition methods.

Why may cold emailing seem too hard for some?

Results can be hard to achieve via cold emailing. The reason being that it’s almost impossible to start meaningful conversations with people you have no acquaintance with, much less get positive feedback from them.

However, the main reason cold emailing tends to fail is the manner of execution. There are do’s and don’ts that must be followed.

We have seen several cases where B2B digital marketers fail to adhere to the rules — mostly, due to the lack of knowledge.

Here are some of the more common instances:

  1. In some situations, B2B companies try to sell their product/services to the prospects right off the bat by engaging them to buy instead of giving potential clients time and space to warm up to them.
  2. There are also cases where acquisition strategists fail to resist the urge to speak more than it’s necessary about their company’s achievements.
  3. A cold email outreach may fail because the subject line is not captivating enough to draw the prospects’ attention.
  4. In other scenarios, it’s not the subject line or the email body. Rather, the CTA (call-to-action) is just too weak, leading to the loss of a potential lead.
  5. These days, a lot of cold emails get too cluttered with direct links, where the use of hyperlinks would have worked just fine.

Such emails usually end up in the spam box.

  1. In addition, failing to keep the content short can be a huge turn-off. Prospects find it tiresome to read through long paragraphs. At best, they’ll skim through quickly and close the email.

Sadly, many B2B marketers make one or more of the above mistakes when running email campaigns.

As a result, cold emailing now suffers from having the reputation of a non-viable marketing tool.

However, in the next section, we will go over the techniques and tips for how to use cold emailing successfully.

The right strategies for applying cold emailing in any business

For every successful cold emailing campaign, each of the following principles must be strictly applied:

  1. Aim to create a relationship between you and the prospect through personalization.
  2. Engage your readers’ curiosity and drive a feeling of urgency into their minds. How well this is done determines how effective the CTA will be.
  3. Relate with your prospects from a place of common interests around a subject matter.
  4. Use the right words, keep your message concise and be spot-on with the points.
  5. Use a content structure that projects neatness and also helps the prospects feel relaxed reading what you have to say.

Even though there are so many enterprise organizations using the cold emailing technique, you can enjoy a better success rate if you conform to the principles above.

That said, let’s now discuss the hidden benefits that email campaigns can offer.

Why cold emailing can be a highly effective client acquisition strategy

In today’s business world, there are many companies that are yet to add cold emailing to their digital marketing stack. Why?

All that’s required to own an email account is internet access, which is available to almost everyone.

To further explore why cold emails can be extremely powerful, we will draw a useful comparison by analyzing other marketing mediums:

1. Telemarketing

It’s estimated that it takes between 7-9 calls to successfully convert a prospect via a phone conversation.

Whereas, batches of cold emails can be sent out within minutes automatically.

Follow-up emails can also be strategically set to hit prospects’ inboxes at key moments.

2. Email marketing

Cold emailing and email marketing are not the same.

In email marketing, templates are used to reach out to thousands of unsegmented prospects.

However, recent security upgrades on most email systems enable them to detect such messages and flag them as spam.

With cold emailing, you can use a simple framework that ensures your emails will successfully drop in your prospect’s inbox.

How good can cold emailing be as a marketing trick (statistical examples)

Well-designed email outreach can crush every other marketing campaign in terms of results. Sometimes, you can get up to 80% open rate and 20% of willing-to-buy customers.

See some extra examples of proof that cold emailing works (feel free to use them as case studies for your campaigns).

What’s the perfect recipe for a successful cold emailing campaign?

Crafting and deploying cold emails that get prospects to act as desired do not happen overnight. You must be willing to invest time and effort to understand the peculiarities of your business.

That way, you can identify the right ways the technique will work for you. You will also be able to optimize the email outreach strategies you have learned.

That said, keep in mind that the following factors will ultimately determine the outcome of your campaign:

  • The effectiveness of your prospect targeting procedures.
  • The precision of your customer segmentation process.
  • How you lay out the value proposition of your service/product as a solution to the prospect’s needs.
  • Your understanding of the market situation
  • The competitive advantage you have to solve those problems (your position)

While all these may seem technically too daunting, you don’t need to fret. We will show you a simple step-by-step process you can use anytime.

How to start cold emailing for an outbound marketing campaign

First, you need to deal with the cost. But don’t worry: compared to alternative methods, cold emailing is one of the most affordable.

So, let’s say you want to send 2000 emails per day (the number often recommended by experts), then you should have the following in place:

  • A dedicated domain, which is available for around €5 per annum
  • An email sender, which will cost about €2 per month
  • The sending tool. You can use Waalaxy, which is available for about €40-€80 monthly.

Altogether, you’d need anything around €47 to €80 monthly to set up a full-fledged email outreach suite.

With that out of the way, let’s now look into the cost-effective nature of cold emailing relative to other marketing mediums in a B2B setting.

But, note that the values given here may not reflect the actual costs at the time you bump into this post. However, we expect the comparison to always stay the same.

CPM (Cost Per Mille) of cold emailing compared to other channels

CPM is also known as Cost Per Thousand Impressions. When it comes to cold emailing, it is expected that you send out at least 2000 emails in a day.

You can do that using the G-Suite sender.

However, for this analysis, we will reduce the value to 1900 emails in the expectation we will get 100 leads (the 20% of 2000) each day.

Thus, on the 20th day of the campaign, we will have contacted a combined sum of 38,000 prospects.

Then, using the mathematical relation: CPM = cost of suite / total emails sent, we will have the following outcomes.

At €47 total cost of the suite, we have; 47/38000 =1.24

At €80 total cost of the suite, we have; 80/38000 = 2.29.

Thus, we end up with a CPM between 1.24€-2.29€ (equivalent to $1.49-$2.75) for a cold emailing project.

Below are the CPMs of other B2B marketing platforms:

  • $30 for ads on Pinterest
  • $9.68 for ads on YouTube
  • $7.19 for ads on Facebook
  • $7.91 for ads on Instagram
  • $6.59 for ads on LinkedIn
  • $6.46 for ads on Twitter

CPC (Cost Per Click) versus CPR (Cost Per Response) in Cold Emailing

When it comes to quantifying engagement on cold emailing campaigns, CPC gives a more reliable measure. CPC helps to know if a prospect opened the email you sent or not.

By extension, it also shows if the subject line was catchy enough and whether the prospect tried to read the content at all.

However, clicking on the email alone is not enough. We also want to know the response rate. This is where the CPR comes in.

An average response rate between 10-25% is one of the ways to determine a good cold emailing campaign. For this demonstration, we will be content with 10%.

Using the data from our calculations on CPM, we will use the following mathematical relation:

CPR = cost of the suite / (No. of daily emails *Response rate* duration of the campaign).

At the €47 cost of suite, we have: 47 / (1900 * 0.1 * 20) = 0.01.

At €80, we will have 0.023€.

Now, let’s see what’s on offer on other platforms as of the fourth quarter of 2018.

  • $3.72 CPR for ads on LinkedIn
  • $3.61 for ads on YouTube
  • $1.33 for ads on Google
  • $0.40 for ads on Twitter
  • $0.57 for ads on Facebook

Conclusion

From the foregoing discussion, it’s easy to see that cold emailing easily comes on top when cost and effectiveness are considered.

Then comes LinkedIn as it has the lowest CPC, CPR, and CPM values compared to the other mediums.

We hope that being armed with this information, you will be able to set up and run the most efficient and cost-effective cold email campaigns that will boost your business.