Welcome to the first day of our week-long series on creating and sending effective personalized cold emails. It might sound contradictory, but personalized cold email marketing campaigns are easy to do and highly effective. Throughout the week, we want to hear from you! Please email us your questions and share your cold email experiences with us on Twitter.
Cold Email Marketing Overview
Sending personal, cold emails is easy. With tools like Outreach, PersistIQ, or QuickMail, sending at scale is even easier. But even though these tools make scaling easy, there’s plenty to consider while designing a campaign. For example:
- What is my call to action?
- How many times should I email a prospect and over what time period?
- How do I make sure emails look personal and send correctly?
- What metrics are important for my business and what can I learn from them?
- What do I do once a campaign launches?
Throughout the week this guide will answer those questions and more, leveraging MXP Online best practices developed across hundreds of campaigns for fast-growing companies.
Getting Started: Choosing the Right Tools
There are many different cold email marketing tools available, but how do you know which one is the right one to meet your needs? Many of the tools have the same core features, but are built for different use cases. There are basically three main types of mass email that require automated tools:
- Transactional messages: Password resets, support tickets, login confirmations, account alerts
- Content marketing messages: Mostly B2C use cases, often containing HTML and rich graphic content
- Targeted cold messages: Mostly B2B use cases, usually text-based, with limited links
For transactional and content marketing emails, the most common tools are Mailchimp, Constant Contact and SendGrid. For cold emails, however, focus on tools meant for targeted B2B campaigns. They don’t require you to know anything about white labeled IP addresses, opt-in permissions, or even HTML formatting. They’ll help you send emails that will actually land in your prospect’s inbox.
To see examples of emails that didn’t use the right tools, check your spam folder.
You’ll undoubtedly find tons of messages that aren’t targeted, and are full of images, links and buttons.
For simplicity, these tools also integrate directly with email providers in a matter of minutes. When you’re choosing between tools, you should consider price, as well as integrations with other services, click-to-call functionality, and the ability to do A/B testing.
Cold Email 101 Index:
Part 2: Defining your cold email marketing goals for maximum effectiveness.
Part 3: Learn how to write effective cold email copy.
Part 4: Discover how to set up a cold email campaign.
Part 5: Send a personal, cold email follow up to your contact list.