Cold Emails Are Not Bad!
No one likes to receive or send cold emails – not even the people in the business of sales. But sales folks know that cold emails are a necessary evil to achieving success in sales. When companies just start out and are building the business, they can live for a long time on referrals and references. Business can be good and sales can be steady in these early stages – all without sending any cold emails. In fact, cold emails are looked at with disdain and disgrace from the viewpoint of budding entrepreneurs. They see the cold email process as an area that they don’t even need to consider. Many businesses start off with a bang and there isn’t a need or the bandwidth to handle more business. Yet, the day does eventually come when the buzz dies down and the referrals start to hit dead-ends. What do you do then? You send cold emails, that is what you do! The dreaded cold email soon becomes your new best friend and you start to believe they are actually not that bad. Whether you need to keep the business going or you want to start scaling your business, you need cold emails to help you reach your goals.
The nature of cold outreach
We have been surrounded by cold outreach forever. It is part of human nature to reach out, connect, meet someone new. This human trait has passed over to the business world and, in fact, is at the heart of doing business. We all mix business with friendship – whether we like it or not – it just happens. You might tell a friend about a job or you might do direct business with a friend or business colleague. We find it easier to work with people we know and trust. We also meet new people all the time – at work or socially. This is also a natural part of human interaction. Meeting new people is a form of cold outreach. An in-person cold interaction at work or socially is more widely accepted. But when you receive cold phone calls or cold knocks on your door, though not unexpected, you do tend to shy away from reaching back. This is also a natural reaction. When you are not out socially with an open mindset or at work where new people come along all the time – you are focused on something else when the cold call or cold knock comes along. However, once in a while, you do take the cold call or the cold knock. It could be the right time or you are suddenly curious. This goes for cold emails too – and it is almost easier to reply back to a cold email because you don’t have to talk to a live person. This gives cold emails the edge over cold calls and cold knocks – and is why cold emails have taken pole position when it comes to the outbound sales process (OSP).
Many clients come in from the cold
The funny thing about cold emails is that many of your best clients have come from cold email campaigns. You know those clients that you have become friends with and go on business golfing trips with – many originally came from cold email campaigns. It’s true, and it is another reason to think that cold emails are not so bad. Cold emails lead to greater company success and great clients that become your friends. One day when you tell your clients that you found them through cold emails – they won’t believe you! That’s how important and effective cold emails can be to a business.
Just spam, not a scam
The old spam label to cold emails does not go away. Your cold emails will still be looked at in some form or another as spam. Ultimately, people don’t like to be spammed, but if you present the content of your emails in a non-spam format, you can get taken more seriously and get more opens/replies.
We looked deeper into this topic in an earlier post about creating the right email format – but here are the key takeaways to making your emails look less like spam:
Non-Spam Email Components:
- Short, straight forward subject line
- Intro line asking a question
- Brief main body content
- Exit line asking a question
Spam features to LEAVE OUT:
- Links
- Attachments
- HTML content
Also, just because you receive emails that act like spam, it doesn’t mean that these emails are a scam. Most of these emails come from legitimate businesses who are using cold emails to find new sales opportunities.
Bottomline: If you want to grow your business beyond referrals and plateaued revenue numbers, then you must embrace the cold email experience. As you have seen, cold emails are an extension of human nature and can be warmed up to look less like spam. This will lead to more sales opportunities and soon to be “best friend” clients coming in from the cold.
Oppaday is a proven outbound sales process system.
The Oppaday system provides the knowledge and foundation to build an ongoing successful outbound sales process.
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