One of my key responsibilities is to expand the customer base of our product. Of course there are the usual avenues such as paid ad campaigns in Google, Linkedin, & Facebook, social media, publicity, PR, attending conferences and so on. However, one highly effective strategy that is immediately dismissed these days is sending out cold emails.

The reason? - Mass email marketing campaigns. Companies have burnt their fingers running mass email marketing campaigns which usually result in a very low conversion to signups and customers. To draw an analogy, mass email campaigns is like shouting your message from the top of a building hoping that someone down there would listen. In addition there is always the danger of people marking your mails as spam resulting in your email address and domain being blacklisted by email spam filters. A cold email campaign should be targeted, personalized and enable a feeling of one to one interaction with the contact.

From our own experience we have discovered that sending out cold emails can be a very fruitful exercise if done right, in fact it is one of the most cost effective channel for bringing new customers for ClinchPad.

Below is my 5 step mantra of planning a cold emails marketing campaign:

1.) Identify your target audience. You would have already identified your target audience if you are running any form of marketing campaign, if not then immediately stop all of them and go back to the drawing board to figure out your ideal customer. There is no point reaching out to VP Sales of Microsoft if your product can support only 10 users.

2.) Build an audience list. Once you have identified your target audience make a list of such companies and their contact persons. The contact persons should be the decision makers for your product in their respective companies. They will vary depending on the size of the company and the nature of your product. For example, if your target audience is small and medium sized businesses, then the decision makers will be Founders, Co-founders and CEOs . One of the most powerful tools to build this list and the one we use extensively at ClinchPad is Linkedin. Don’t shy away from becoming a paid member at Linkedin, it has a lot of advantages, especially the Linkedin search tool which can effectively be used to build your target audience for you.

3.) Build a mailing list. Search for email addresses of contact persons identified in the previous step. Yes, it is not easy to find personal email addresses but it is not impossible. Fortunately, I found an effective way to find almost anyone’s email address here; you can thank me later for saving you hours of search queries.

4.) Send a lower number but highly targeted mails. Never send the same email to multiple contacts. Do your homework about your contacts before you reach out to them. Look up their social presence to gain as much insight about them as possible. This will help you customize your emails which will lead to an immediate connect. For example, if your contact posted about the shortcomings of a competitor product they are using then your email should be structured to showcase how your product overcomes those shortcomings. This way you will send out less mails but will lead to more responses. The frequency at which we send out emails is 10-20 per day.

5.) Do not oversell your product. One of the most common mistakes made by a lot of people, including us in our early batch of emails, is the content of the email. The email is not about your product and its features, it is about how your product can help your contact and his company. Remember you only have 5-10 seconds to catch the attention of the reader so think hard while composing the email.

We changed the structure of our emails to the below after our initial batch of emails was not getting enough response. Now we get response to around 40% of our emails.

Constructing the Subject of the Email

The more specific the subject is, the better. Use the customer’s company name in subject as it immediately draws attention and compels the user to open and read the email.

How to Structure the Email

The first paragraph should describe what your product can do for the contact and his company and how will it do it.

The second paragraph should describe the reason for writing to the contact. Here you can refer to a post you read or a common conference you attended or some other reason. This establishes a one to one connect with contact and differentiates your email from the generic marketing emails. The more you know about your contact the better you will compose this paragraph.

The third paragraph should contain a clear call to action. This could be a link to register for a trial account or asking the contact availability for a demo or simply requesting permission for a phone call.

Although there is no proven recipe for creating the perfect cold email but a combined flavour of the above ingredients is just about right. In the end, marketing is all about getting your message to the right audience.