Email is an effective way to make contact, if you do your homework before hitting "send." Imagine someone receiving a cold email from you. This doesn't mean you should completely forget about emailing prospective customers. Once you’ve narrowed your audience, find the right person within the organization to contact. Ideally, this is the person who will make the decision on whether to use your product or service. If, for some reason, a person's email address isn’t connected to her LinkedIn profile or she's not on LinkedIn, look for other social profiles or the company's website to find contact information. Did you know that 35 percent of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone? Rose Leadem suggests that your subject lines need to be clear and concise and “include exactly what your email is about.” Rose adds that your subject line should be fairly short so it reads well on mobile, and an email should never be sent without a subject -- these often don't get opened. “People don’t have all day to read your email. Test the subject line that's opened the most, as well as the email copy with the most engagement, the email with the best homepage click-through rate and the best day and time to send emails.
Email is an effective way to make contact, if you do your homework before hitting “send.”
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Considering that the average office worker receives a whooping 121 emails per day, it’s no wonder it’s a challenge to get your emails read.
Imagine someone receiving a cold email from you. Why would she open it? She has no idea who you are, what you do or why she should care about what you’re offering. Can she even trust that you’re legit and not a scammer?
This doesn’t mean you should completely forget about emailing prospective customers. Email remains one of the best ways to communicate and interact with your audience. It’s just that the days of spray-and-pray email are over. Instead, you need to update your approach to cold emailing — and converting — by taking the following steps.
Identify the ideal prospect.
This is obvious: If you manufactured pizza ovens, you’d want to connect with restaurants and pizzerias, not landscapers or physicians. In other words, only target the individuals or organizations that could benefit from what you’re selling. Take into consideration factors like location, demographics and interests. Think about the brands, style and tone of the customers you’d like to work with. If they don’t resonate with you, it’s best to look elsewhere.
Once you’ve narrowed your audience, find the right person within the organization to contact. Ideally, this is the person who will make the decision on whether to use your product or service. If you can’t connect with her, at least make an initial and genuine connection with someone within the organization who can introduce you to the main decision maker.
The good news is that tools like LinkedIn have made this more convenient — just search for the job title you’re looking for within an organization to locate the relevant person you need to contact.
Map out what your prospects care about.
After you have identified your ideal prospect and know who to contact, think about what keeps her up at night and how you can help her solve this pain point. For example, if you’re an attorney specializing in small business and you just read in the local paper that a small business is being sued by a customer, that’s a problem you could help with. If you offer cybersecurity services, think about the repercussions virus-infected businesses face and how you can prevent them.
Get their email address.
Now you need to go out and get those email addresses. Start by installing the free Sales Navigator for Gmail extension from LinkedIn. It provides a sidebar inside your Gmail account so you can see a person’s LinkedIn profile data, as well as icebreakers like connections and interests.
If, for some reason, a person’s…
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