Welcome to the fourth day of our week-long series on creating and sending effective personalized cold emails. Today we’re going to cover a cold email campaign setup.
Basic Cold Email Campaign Setup
Now that you’ve chosen your tools, set your goals and written your copy, it’s finally time to build your campaign. In your email tool, make sure to give your email campaign a meaningful specific name.
Trust me, six months from now you’ll struggle to remember what you were trying to accomplish with ”Email Campaign #1.”
As you build each step of your campaign, make sure to proofread your messages for content and formatting. Pay attention to font, text size, and color. In particular, watch out for formatting changes that can get introduced when copying text from Word documents or Google Docs. To clean up copied text, paste it into a plain-text document first, and then copy the plain text for pasting into your email tool.
There are also lots of other small details to check before launching your cold email campaign. Test all your links to make sure they go where you want them to, and check your email signature. Some tools will include your signature by default, but others don’t.
Always preview your messages or send a test message to make sure. Do you want a new subject line for each message, or do you want to reply to the same thread? And never forget to check if your merge fields are working correctly.
“There’s nothing worse than sending an email that opens “Hi First_Name,” to 100+ business prospects.”
Don’t forget to consider the timing of your messages. A good rule of thumb is to increase the interval between messages for each email that you send. So, for example, follow up with your second message three days after the first one, then wait four days after the second message, five days after the third, and so on.
Test Send
Once you have all your settings and formatting done, it’s time to test.
100% of poorly sent emails come from a lack of testing before the official send off.
Spend the time to properly test your cold email campaign before launching it. To test your messages, send to yourself and some of your coworkers or trusted friends.
Looking at your test messages, double check for spelling errors and broken links. Ask test recipients to open your messages on mobile devices. Is it too long for mobile? Are there any formatting problems? Check that signature one last time to make sure your message contains all the information you want to include.
Once you’ve finished testing, it’s time for one last sweep on your settings. Make sure your emails include an opt-out link at the bottom. Check to see that the sending times and dates are appropriate (don’t send something at 11PM EST on a Saturday). Lastly, make sure that any additional settings are correct.
Now you’re (finally) good to go! Send those emails out and get a good night’s rest. Once the replies start flowing, the real work begins!
Cold Email 101 Table of Contents:
Part 1: Cold email marketing: Getting Started
Part 2: Defining your cold email marketing goals for maximum effectiveness.
Part 3: Learn how to write effective cold email copy.
Part 5: Send a personal, cold email follow up to your contact list.