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Cold Email Playbook to Start Your Outreach
Cold Email Playbook to Start Your Outreach
Naitik Chavda avatar
Written by Naitik Chavda
Updated over a week ago

If you are just starting your business then cold emailing is an excellent choice to reach out to new prospects and build relationships with potential customers, partners, or collaborators.

This is because cold emailing is a powerful tool for generating new leads and opportunities. You can initiate any conversation with potential customers and turn them into customers or partners.

With targeted outreach, you can offer personalized solutions to their problems, increasing brand conversions and revenue for your business.

But to make sure your message is opened, replied to, and doesn't end up in spam you need to approach it thoughtfully and strategically. The key is to identify your ideal customer profile, craft personalized emails that are specific to their needs and interests, and follow all best delivery practices.

But before we move on to best practices let’s see who cold email is for.


Cold email use cases

Lead Generation

Cold emailing is an effective way of generating leads and attracting new customers. The best way to target prospects who fit your ideal customer profile is to craft personalized emails that tackle their specific challenges and pain points.

By using this approach, you can build a connection with potential customers and increase their chances of becoming paying customers.

Customer Engagement

Cold emailing can enhance customer loyalty and help you retain existing customers. Sending personalized offers and promotions that reflect their interests and preferences will encourage them to keep doing business with you.

Using this approach can also help you gain valuable insights and feedback from your customers.

Investor Outreach

Using cold email to secure funding for your business can be a great way to attract investors. You can generate interest and start a conversation with investors by sharing your company's vision, mission, and financial projections.

As a result of this approach, key stakeholders in your industry may also begin to trust you and establish relationships with you.

Recruitment

Recruiting top talent through cold email can be an effective way to build a strong team.

You can emphasize our company's unique benefits, such as opportunities for growth and development, flexible working arrangements, and positive company culture, and attract candidates who share your values.

This approach can also be used to reach out to passive candidates who may not be actively seeking jobs now but might be interested in your company

Link Building

Cold emailing is the best way to build valuable backlinks and increase your website's search engine rankings. You can increase your online visibility and credibility by offering high-quality content or resources other businesses or websites in your industry can use.

As a result of this approach, you can establish relationships with other businesses and industry influencers, which can lead to future collaborations and partnerships.


Cold Email Vs. Spam Email

Any email whether it’s cold or normal can land in the spam inbox or can be marked as spam by your recipients if it has not been crafted properly with a personalized approach and if the right deliverability practices are not followed before sending it.

Here are some different examples of when your emails can be marked as spam:

  • Misleading subject line - Example: Using a subject line like "Important update" to trick the recipient into opening the email, when it is actually a sales pitch.

  • Overusing promotional language -Example: Writing an email that uses phrases like "Limited time offer!" or "Act now to get this amazing deal!" repeatedly.

  • Poorly formatted emails - Example: Sending an email that is full of long paragraphs and no breaks, makes it difficult to read.

  • Too many emails -.Example: Sending multiple emails every day to the same recipient, promoting different products or services.

Cold email does not support any of the above practices and can be a stellar tool if you follow certain best practices and can generate numerous new opportunities for you and grow your business like never before.

So to help you succeed in cold email outreach, we've put together the best practices, tips, and real-world examples to guide you.

In this playbook, you'll learn how to write compelling, write compelling email bodies, outreach strategies, and generate leads using cold email.

Let’s get started!


Prepare your outreach

Know your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Knowing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is critical before doing any outreach because it helps you to narrow down your focus and target the right audience with your email copy. This ensures that your outreach efforts are not wasted on people who are unlikely to become customers.

For any business, their Ideal Customer profile is an individual within a company that would seek to gain the most out of your product or service. It defines the most valuable prospects and customers that are most likely to buy from you.

According to a study by HubSpot, companies that target their ideal customer profiles see a 70% increase in sales leads and a 55% increase in web traffic. In addition, they are able to close deals faster and have a higher customer lifetime value.

So how can you know who your ICP is? Let’s find out:

Spend time in your existing customer's database

The best way to find out who your ICP is to go into your existing database and study the patterns/commonalities of your customers. There might be some customers who have similar patterns out of the rest.

These commonalities are your buyer signals and the customer who has these are your best customers.

Some Similar patterns and commonalities could be:

  • Common pain points

  • Use of one feature(inside product) more than any other feature before converting into a paid customer.

  • Multiple visits to a particular blog/website page before signing up for a trial.

  • Higher signups from a particular location.

  • Most profitable deals.

  • Customers that have brought in the most amount of referrals.

  • Customers with the highest Customer Lifetime value.

  • Common end goals

These patterns can differ from business to business and are not the same for any two businesses.

Also since this is a recurring process and not a one-time event make sure you are revisiting your database from time to time to identify new and outdated patterns.

List down your best customers and their attributes

Once you have identified common patterns and attributes that your customers have it’s time to list them down for a more structured approach. Segment your customers based on their common attributes, and analyze which segments are bringing the most value to your business.

Look at how your ideal customers interact with your business. What pages do they visit on your website? What types of content do they engage with? What are their pain points and how can your business help solve them?

Once you have listed the ideal customers and their attributes prepare a scoresheet. You can do this by scoring the most common attributes and patterns 10 on a scale of 1-10 and 1 to the least common attribute.

All the attributes and patterns are your cream customers profile and attributes and that’s what you should focus on.

Connect with your best customers

Once you have identified your best customers, it is time to connect with them and learn more about their motivations for buying your product, as well as what they accomplish with your product/service.

We recommend creating a survey and asking them questions such as:

  1. What were your end goals before you purchased our product?

  2. What challenges were you facing before purchasing our product?

  3. How were you resolving your pain points before purchasing our product?

  4. Where do you get your information from? How did you learn about our product?

  5. What is your buying process? Who are the decision-makers involved?

When you have collected all the data from your best customers, you can repeat the process (you did in for analyzing patterns in the database) compare your best customer profiles, and look for commonalities. There are some patterns that stand out immediately, while others might need a closer examination.

As you did earlier, you can repeat the scoring pattern to find out which profiles are most profitable for your business. Based on the results of your analysis and evaluation you will be able to develop a best-fit rating to see how well an account matches your Ideal Customer Profile.

It can also be used to identify future target organizations and leads.

We recommend creating a sheet like this to also keep your ICP and Non-ICP clear so that there is no mix-up while prospecting.


Outreach Strategy

Once you are crystal clear on your ICP and what are their traits. It is easier to build a list of customers and to find new leads for your business in alliance with your ICP traits.

So where you can find our ICP and how you can find them?

There are two kinds of strategies that we recommend for this:

Intent/Trigger-based Outreach

Intent-based or trigger-based prospecting involves identifying potential clients based on their recent behavior or behavior patterns.

A few examples of trigger events include a new product/service launch, expansion or relocation, merger or acquisition, funding, industry events, awards, a new hire in the top post, and a move from their competitor.

If you reach out to these prospects in a timely manner, you'll be able to capture their interest and increase the chances of them becoming paying customers.

Using intent-based prospecting can be a highly effective method of generating leads and growing your business, but success requires careful planning and execution. Here are some examples of the common trigger and cold email outreach

  • Local Event - missed connecting

  • Funding News

  • A user of competing tool/technology (tech lookup)

  • Job opening based intent


Targeting your niche

Find ICPs from B2B Databases

Another strategy is to target your niche and you can do this by extracting data from an authentic B2B database website that provides data as per your filled-in requirement.

For example: if you put a requirement that you need an IT service database, with XYZ job title and a certain company size based on your ICP definition these databases will provide you the exact information and you can target your niche.

Scraping from LinkedIn & website

It is also possible to extract data of ICP from one particular website by scraping LinkedIn or a website. You just need to again enter the right information and your ICP traits and these websites will show you the data and you can extract it.

Examples of such scraper websites are

  • Octoparse for G2, Clutch, goodfirmsetc directories

  • Phantombuster for Youtube, Twitter, Slack, GitHub, Instagram, and Google Maps.


Key ingredients to succeed

Now that you know how to identify, create and find your ICP let’s move on to the most important part of cold emailing which is how to do cold emailing for better results and what are the key ingredients to succeed.

A. Good cold email copy

Effective email copy is the backbone of any successful cold email outreach campaign. In fact, a study shows that 47% of recipients decide whether to open an email based solely on the subject line, while 69% report emails as spam based on the content.

It is therefore crucial to craft an effective message that will resonate with your target audience and compel them to take action.

A good email copy will increase your open rates, engagement, and drive more conversions.

Let’s discuss the most simplest and successful structure to make your cold email outreach successful.

Subject Lines

Your subject lines are the first thing that your prospects will see in their inbox it can be a dealbreaker. It is the determining factor for your recipients in deciding whether they should open it or not.

Here are a few best practices to follow while creating subject lines.

  • Short (3 words magic): Don't ramble! Keep it brief and focused. Subject lines with three words can be extremely effective at grabbing someone's attention.

  • Personalized: A personalized subject line increases the chances that an email will be opened by adding the recipient's name or company name.

  • Question: Including a question in the subject line can pique the recipient's curiosity and encourage them to open the email.

  • Surprise: Adding an element of surprise or unexpected information can grab the recipient's attention and make them curious.

Following are examples of some most effective subject lines.

Pre-headers

The preheader is the text that appears in email previews before they are opened. Preheaders complement subject lines making emails more appealing to open.

Having a pre-header improves deliverability & personalization significantly. Saleshandy allows you to set a preheader for better results.

Refer to this article for Pre-header.

Greetings

Greet your prospects in the language and tone that resonates with them. Keep your greetings straightforward and very concise.

Don’t forget to address the recipients with their first name and if that is unknown you can use a general greeting like

Hey there, Hey, Dear Customer

Personalization

It is estimated that by personalizing your cold email subject line and content, you can increase your response rate by 100%.

Sending an email that feels 1:1 to your recipients, not 1 to many, is important.

By taking the time to research and personalize your message, you can highly increase your chances of getting a response.

Here are certain ways to personalize your emails:

Mail Merge

People love reading their names and things about them so add merge tags all over your email wherever necessary. You can create merge tags as per your requirement and always add them while doing outreach in your subject lines and email copy.

The mail merge method involves extracting data from databases and spreadsheets and inserting it into content, such as cold emails.

A merge tag (custom field) is used to store the extracted data, which is reflected across all content made up of that 'tag'.

Here is how the merge tag looks in Saleshandy

Personalized lines - Manually & through AI

You can do more than surface-level personalization by adding icebreakers in the form of compliments in your email copies as everyone likes to hear good about themselves and their work.

The fastest way to do this is to go to your prospect's website, profile, or any other place where they are present online and try to find something to complement them. It could be anything from their recent achievements to starting something new or anything that they shared online.

Here are some examples of compliments:

  • Complimenting achievements: “I loved reading about your growth story from $1m to $10m! It’s, 's truly impressive, kudos!”

  • Complimenting blog posts: “Your blog post on fitness tips was fantastic, I can’t wait to try out some of your recommendations”

  • Complimenting product release: “Aye! The new UI of Desku is absolutely amazing, I’m sure it’s going to be a massive success!”

  • Complimenting experience: “Being in business for 25 years is a remarkable achievement, That’s honestly super impressive!”

  • Complimenting impressive case studies or clients: “Just saw that you helped

AgencyFort generate $10M worth of pipeline with your latest cold email campaigns - that’s amazing!”

You can also create these Icebreakers compliments through AI tools like Lyne if you don't want to do it manually.

You just need to provide the LinkedIn profile Urls of your prospect the tool will provide personalized lines to you.

Spintax

Use dynamic content for all your recipients & create custom versions of your email’s greeting, introduction, content paragraphs, and sign-off phrases that resonate with each individual recipient. This will help you personalize your content at scale and will also boost the deliverability of your emails.

Here is how Spintax works in Saleshandy

You just insert

{Spin} | Hey| Hello| Hi {{endspin}} in your email copy and the system will automatically spin and send unique content to all your prospects.

To learn more about personalization refer to this article

Offer & CTA

Avoid generic offers in your cold email make it specific about your prospect. Don't offer everything that you provide in the form. Only offer something that you think is of value to your prospect.

It is recommended to keep your offer clear and direct so that your recipient understands it easily.

Here are some suggestions to consider before writing an offer:

  • Consider a feedback approach instead of a hard sell to start a conversation with your prospect. A customized solution will help you better understand their needs.

  • Instead of asking prospects to sign up, initiate conversations or meetings with them. In this way, you can build trust with your prospects and establish a connection.

  • Understand your prospect's market and the problems they face before pitching your product or service. This will enable you to offer a solution tailored to their needs.

  • Demonstrate the value of your product or service by sharing success stories. Your prospects will be more likely to trust your company if they see social proof.

  • Use language and tone that is appropriate to the prospect's job role and designation. Your offer may be more appealing if you use industry-specific language and address their specific pain points.

The following are some examples of CTAs where prospects take action to gain value and, at the same time, we get to know their interests:

No HTML/Plain Text

When you send plain text emails instead of HTML, you can increase the open rate and deliverability of your cold emails. However, if you send an HTML email, you may land in the spam folder as HTML emails can trigger spam filters.

A plain text email, on the other hand, is simple and straightforward and is more likely to bypass spam filters and make it to the recipient's inbox. Furthermore, plain text emails appear more personal and authentic, increasing the likelihood that your recipient will engage with them.

Here is how you check and clear HTML from your email in Saleshandy

Links

It is advisable to use links cautiously in your cold emails as they can impact your deliverability.

Here are a few recommendations while adding links:

  • Use reputable URLs: Make sure the links you include are from trustworthy sources and don't include any suspicious or spammy keywords.

  • Too many links can trigger spam filters and decrease your email's deliverability. Limit your links to one or two relevant ones.

  • Before sending the email, make sure your links work and lead to the intended destination.

  • Use link shorteners to send emails with links that are not messy and more professional. Try a link-shortening tool to make your links look cleaner and more appealing.

B. Technical setup

Once you have worked on perfecting your email structure it is very important to start working on deliverability. If your email is not landing in the primary inbox no matter how stellar your copy is it won't generate any impact.

Here are some ways to improve and set up your email deliverability

Alternate Domain & Deliverability

Whenever you are doing deliverability setup avoid using the primary domain and opt for some variants in your domains.

For example, if you are reaching out to your customers from the saleshandy.com domain the with email [email protected] it is not recommended to use the same email for cold email outreach.

This is because cold email outreach involves a lot of experimentation and in the beginning you might not be sure about a lot of things and you might get marked as spam because of this experimentation which can result in loss of primary domain.

You might also lose existing clients because of this.

To avoid all this it is recommended to create 5-10 domains with different suffixes and experiment with them.

Here are some examples of secondary domains that you can create:

Also, note that G Suite / O365 / Zoho are the most common service providers and delivers good results in terms of higher deliverability.

Once you have chosen secondary domains for your outreach it is important to authenticate certain records for smooth email deliverability.

An authenticated email is like a passport that allows it to reach smoothly to your prospect's inbox.

The following four types of authentication are needed if you want to reach out to a lot of prospects at a time without the risk of having your email account blocked.

SPF

The SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is like a "mailing list" that is created by an email's sender domain. This list contains all email servers authorized to send emails on behalf of that domain.

When an email is sent, the recipient's email server can check that the email was sent from an authorized server.

Alternatively, the recipient may reject or send the email to their spam folder if it was not verified.

DKIM

A DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) signature verifies that the email was sent by the authorized sender and that the content of the email hasn't been tampered with.

DKIM allows email servers to verify legitimate emails by checking their signatures. It reduces the risk of email spoofing and improves the delivery rate of emails.

DMARC

DMARC (Domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance) is a policy that combines both SPF and DKIM for enhanced anti-spoofing protection.

By implementing DMARC, you're telling email servers what to do with emails that fail SPF or DKIM authentication (e.g. reject, quarantine, or deliver with caution).

This helps prevent phishing attacks and improves email deliverability.

Custom Tracking Domain

Custom tracking domains let you track clicks and opens in your email campaigns rather than using your email marketing service's default tracking domains.

Using a custom tracking domain will improve the deliverability of your emails and protect your sender's reputation. With a custom tracking domain, links in your emails look like they are coming from your own website, rather than from a third party. In this way, you can make your emails more trustworthy to recipients, because they will be able to recognize your domain name in the links.

Furthermore, custom tracking domains can help you avoid spam filters so your emails are more likely to reach your subscribers' inboxes.

These email authentication protocols demonstrate to email servers that your emails are legitimate and should be delivered to recipients' inboxes. The result will be a better deliverability rate and fewer spam complaints.

Verification and bounce rates

A clean and updated list of email addresses is important since people change professions and their emails change. If you send an email to an outdated address, you will experience a high bounce rate and your email will not be delivered.

That’s why it is recommended to verify your email list before doing any outreach.

You can verify your prospect list using Saleshandy by by simply uploading the prospect's data.

To learn more about email deliverability & setup read this article.

C. Strategy and experiments

Follow-ups

Cold email is definitely not a one-time event it is recommended to follow up at least 3-5 times during a time period of 30-35 days to get better results out of our outreach.

If you are sending the entire campaign with follow-ups in the same week it might not be that effective as your prospect might be busy with something more important that week and might not have time to even read your email.

Additionally, ensure that follow-ups are within the same thread. Sending them separately may lose the relevance and the tone you established in your previous email.

Here is an example of how follow-ups can change your game and might help you get those open and replies:

A/Z testing

It is very important to know what works for you and what does not and experimentation is the best way to know that. When you experiment more you get an idea where to put your efforts and what works in proving the best results.

With A-Z testing you can test multiple variants of your subject lines and email copies at the same time and send out the best-performing version for better results.

Here is how it works in Saleshandy:

Name and profile photo

Ensure you have a proper name and profile picture created by your email client as this creates more authenticity and gives your recipient the satisfaction that a real person is contacting them instead of some fake online profile.

If you have a business or work somewhere it is recommended to keep your name like

Dhruv from Saleshandy instead of just Dhruv as that not only stands out in the recipient’s inbox but also serves as a reminder.

Schedule and time zone

Consider your target audience's schedule and time zone when sending cold emails. You don't want to send an email when your prospect is asleep or busy with work, as it may get buried in their inbox or even be ignored. You can schedule your cold emails by following these tips:

  • Research your prospect's time zone and schedule your email for them during their business hours.

  • It is best not to send emails on weekends or holidays when people are less likely to check their work emails.

  • Consider your prospect's industry and role when choosing the best time to send your email. If you are trying to reach a busy executive, it might be a good idea to reach out in the morning or evening when they are less likely to be in meetings.

  • Find the optimal sending schedule for your audience by experimenting with different times and tracking your results.

You can add your desired schedule and send emails in your prospect’s time-zone with Saleshandy. Follow this article to know how.


Conclusion

With all this effort and structured process, you can easily scale up and generate millions in revenue with the right strategies and steps shared above.

Here is data from one of our successful customers, who generated around 30000000 $ in five years using Saleshandy. You can also generate the same results and even more with cold emails so get started and start skyrocketing your results!

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