Welcome to the second day of our week-long series on creating and sending effective personalized cold emails. Today we’ll be covering defining goals and understanding email metrics.
Defining Goals
Before writing a single word of email copy you need to decide what your goals are for a particular campaign.
All too often, companies launch email campaigns hoping that dashing off a message and clicking a button will make customers magically appear. The reality is that you should approach a cold email campaign with very specific goals in mind.
The more focused you are, the more attuned you will be to every aspect of your campaign. The details matter.
Before sending a message, decide what you want the email to accomplish. A click to a webpage? A phone call? A web demo? Maybe just further conversation over email?
A general rule of thumb for cold emails that we dig into in MXP Online is: don’t try to close in the first message. Ask users to do just enough that they move closer to the deal zone. That’s it.
Using Email Metrics
Using an automated email tool, like the one we covered in our first post in this series, you’ll have access to a series of metrics. You can use this data to measure the effectiveness of your email campaign, all the way down to the performance of specific aspects of particular messages. Some examples of simple email metrics include:
- Open Rate: Measures how many people actually open your message (i.e., a measure of how effective your subject line is).
- Click-Through Rate: Measures how many people click a link and convert to a landing page.
- Reply Rate: Measures how many people actually respond to your email.
More complex email metrics include meetings set, online conversions, accounts activated and new customers.
Depending on your particular customers or business, some of these metrics will be more important than others — but account acquisition and customer acquisition are key metrics for any campaign.
Account acquisition is often about finding out who the decision maker is and getting a meeting with that person. If your goal is to maximize account acquisition, you should pay specific attention to open and reply rates for your messages. Reply rates should be broken into marketing qualified leads (MQL) and not MQL.
Your goal in this case is to “activate” conversations with as many accounts as possible to drive opportunities in your sales pipeline.
Customer acquisition is often about getting as many people as possible to self-service onboard. Important email metrics are open rates and click rates. In this case, reply rates will be low because the call-to-action is to click rather than reply. Your high-level goal is to get as many customers as possible to sign up.
In part five of this series, we talk more about what you can do with these metrics once an email campaign gets going.
Cold Email 101 Index:
Part 1: Cold email marketing: Getting Started
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.