Welcome to the fifth and final day of our week-long series on creating and sending effective personalized cold emails. Today we’ll cover how to handle cold email follow ups, and tips on boosting response rates.
If you missed them, check out our previous posts on choosing the right tool for your cold email campaign, defining campaign goals, effective email copy and campaign set-up and execution.
Post-Launch Campaign Management and Strategy
So you’ve launched an email campaign, work is done, right? Wrong.
Studies show that if you don’t respond to an email within 90 minutes the likelihood of getting a response drops drastically.
Handling replies is your top priority (yes, even the negative ones). Try calling positive replies as soon as you get the email back! If you don’t get a cold email follow up or call, set a task to follow up again in another day or so.
For a negative response, send a quick “thanks for your consideration” note — and let them know that if anything changes in the future that they should reach out to you.
A rejection is a great opportunity to share a piece of helpful content, so make sure you take advantage of it.
Most people think that their sales approach should be either cold calling or cold emailing. The truth is that the best practice is to do both. Having access to click and open rates data is a tremendous advantage when cold calling. These email tools give you insights into who knows your company, your name and what you do. These will be the warmest “cold calls” you’ll ever make. You should plan to call within 28-48 hours of the click or open.
Post-Campaign Metrics
After your campaign goes live, the metrics will provide important feedback for next steps. Open rates measure how good your subject line is, and replies measure how good your overall messaging and CTAs are. High open rate and low replies is an indication that you need to work on improving the CTA or the main value proposition of your message.
It’s important to track clicks, but beware of click-tracking features. Email service providers are catching on to click-tracking techniques, so including them in your messages can cause your emails to get caught up in spam filters.
“Always be testing” and use the data to your advantage.
A/B test your messaging whenever possible and follow the template that performs better for you. Each time you launch a new round of emails, replace the underperforming message with an updated version of the top performing version.
And lastly, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! At a certain point, the metrics won’t budge any higher.
X number of leads = Y number of responses = Z number of opportunities = predictable revenue.
We hope you have enjoyed and benefitted from this five-part series. A personal, cold email follow up is a powerful tool for building a predictable revenue engine.
Cold Email 101 Index:
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 4: Discover how to set up a cold email campaign.