How To Warm Up Your Recipients’ Inboxes With Cold Email — Best Cold Email Software Solutions

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Cold leads are kind of like the meal you keep in your fridge — If you want it to be satisfactory, you need to warm it up.

Email marketing is a powerful method for reaching out to prospects. With 3.9 billion email users around the world, you’ve got a large pool of potential leads to get in touch with. The average 3,800% ROI that email generates gives you all the more reason to develop a strong email marketing strategy. It isn’t a matter of whether email marketing works, but of what practices you apply.

When you’re sending emails to recipients that subscribed to your mailing list, you’re presenting your business and products to an audience that is already primed. Cold email requires a slightly different approach.

Think of the stereotypical door-to-door salesman. How often do people open their doors to them? It’s the same with cold email — you can’t go barging into your recipients’ inboxes with promotional materials before you’ve properly introduced yourself. You need to build a relationship with them and persuade them that you’ve got what they need first.

In this article, we’re going to cover some of the best practices for sending cold emails and present you with the best cold email software solutions for the job. Let’s start by helping you learn how to:

1. Find the right people to get in touch with

2. Personalize your email content

3. Make customer engagement your primary focus

4. Create compelling email subject lines

5. Use cold email automation

Find the Right People To Get In Touch With

For your cold email campaign to be successful, you have to find the right people to contact. Sending emails to generic company addresses is generally a waste of time. Even if your message doesn’t get deleted or labeled as spam, the chances are that it’ll be forwarded to someone who isn’t a qualified lead.

Your goal is to find the people who are interested in doing business with you. When it comes to businesses, these are most commonly the decision-makers within the companies you’re trying to get in touch with. They are likely to read your emails and appreciate the fact that you’ve taken the time to look them up. 

Speaking of looking up leads, there are plenty of sources and methods for finding email addresses and other crucial lead information.

Personalize Your Email Content

Your email has to stand out in your recipient’s inbox. Most of your prospects receive a large number of promotional emails every day, so you need to make your message promise relevant content from the get-go. Value and personalization are some of the most important aspects your emails need to have.

Generic cold emails most commonly don’t work. It goes as far as the fact that 52% of customers will look for a solution elsewhere if an email isn’t personalized. You can pick a compelling template, but you need to customize it for different recipients. Contact list segmentation can help you do that. You can segment your contacts based on parameters such as:

• Demographics

• Psychographics

• Firmographics

• Behavioral characteristics

This approach enables you to send unique messages to each recipient. Your copy and content need to provide them with a personal user experience, making them feel like they’re more than a number to your business. The best approach is to start your email with the content customized for them specifically.

If you’re contacting a decision-maker in a company, you can start by congratulating them on a recent successful business venture. This will let them know that you’ve looked into what they’re all about before emailing them. Once you’ve left a good first impression, you can talk about your business.

Make Customer Engagement Your Primary Focus

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Email marketing campaigns need to revolve around customer engagement. You can’t send a cold email containing a sales pitch. You need to start by providing materials and resources that your recipients can gain value from. You need to earn their trust before you can start trying to sell them your products. The two most important approaches are:

1. Making the email more about them and less about you

2. Writing a copy that is concise and to the point

Making the Email More About Them and Less About You

The general rule of writing cold emails is making 95% of the message about them and 5% of it about you. This means that, instead of writing about what you can offer, you should let your recipients know how they can benefit from using your product. 

Let’s say that you’re selling email marketing software. You shouldn’t start by listing all the powerful features and integrations your tool has. You can let the recipient know how it can improve their email marketing strategy. Provide them with articles, infographics, and blog posts that they can get valuable information from. 

Writing a Copy That Is Concise and to the Point

You need to ensure that your email is as digestible as possible to the recipient. This means keeping your message short and making your intentions apparent. There’s no need to write about elaborate details regarding your product and company. 

Your goal is to let the recipient know why you’re contacting them and give them an idea of how you could help them. One of the primary focuses of email campaigns is to build relationships, so you’ll have plenty of time to discuss other matters in your follow-up emails after your contact has shown that they’re interested.

You also need to structure your email properly. You should:

• Use short sentences

• Break up your content into concise sections

• Use lists and bullet points

People generally scan emails for crucial information, so you need to make it easy for them to do so. Even if they decide to spend time reading what you’ve sent them, it should feel like a conversation with a friend. 

Create Compelling Email Subject Lines

Before you can get the chance to introduce yourself to your recipient, you need to ensure that your email gets opened. This is heavily influenced by how efficient your email subject line is.

You need to come up with a subject line that stands out. Most of your recipients’ inboxes are flooded with different kinds of emails, so you’ve got a lot of competition when it comes to grabbing their attention.

There are different kinds of approaches that you can take with your subject lines. Some of them are:

Do your research on the recipient before you decide what kind of subject line you want to use. Not everyone will appreciate a particular type of humor. You should avoid sounding overly vague. If you want to use a short subject line, the preheader can include additional information.

Practices such as using all caps and a lot of exclamation points are out of the question if you don’t want your email to be on the quick trip to the spam folder.

Use Cold Email Automation

Once you’ve sparked your recipients’ interest, you can automate follow-up emails to build your relationship with them and move them down the sales funnel. There are two types of email campaigns that you can set up:

1. Drip campaigns

2. Trigger campaigns

Drip Email Campaigns

Drip email campaigns consist of scheduling emails to be sent to your prospects at opportune times. This enables you to maintain communication through emails tailored to every step along their customer journey.

Trigger Email Campaigns

The goal of trigger email campaigns is to provide adequate responses to your leads’ actions. This includes clicking on a CTA, abandoning a shopping cart, visiting a page on your website, etc.

To craft successful cold email marketing campaigns with automated workflows, you need to find good cold email software. We reviewed a wide range of solutions and created a list of the best cold email marketing software for you to choose from.

Sell SaaS

Sell SaaS Homepage

We at Sell SaaS provide a software bundle with an assortment of different tools.

This includes our email campaign creator. You can use it to create customized cold email campaigns in a user-friendly online editor. 

Once you’ve set your emails up, you can automate them both as drip and trigger email campaigns via the tool’s autoresponder feature. You can also track your emails and determine their deliverability rates.

For finding cold leads, you can try some of our email lookup tools, such as:

When you sign up for any of our tools’ monthly paid plans, you can use all of their features with no restrictions.

Mailshake

Mailshake Homepage

Mailshake is an email marketing tool made for creating and automating compelling cold email campaigns. You can connect to your Gmail and Outlook accounts or a custom SMTP. 

You can compose cold emails manually or choose from one of the existing templates. Once you’ve set up your email, you can automate:

• Follow-up emails

• Drip emails

• Click-based emails

You can also automate different email personalization elements, such as inserting the prospect’s name, job title, and company.

Mailshake includes a campaign management feature that allows you to edit and track your campaign while it’s running. You can edit emails, pause sequences, and import additional contacts.

The tool also has a list cleaning feature that you can use to verify email addresses and remove the ones that have a high bounce rate.

Mailshake doesn’t offer a free trial. You can subscribe to one of the two paid plans:

• Email Outreach — $59 per month

• Sales Engagement — $99 per month

The list cleaning feature charges you credits per verified email. If you need to use more than your chosen plan provides, you can purchase additional 5,000-credit packs for $10.

Snov.io

Snov.io Homepage

Snov.io is a robust platform that focuses on cold outreach automation. You can use it to create cold email campaigns and automate triggers and scheduled responses. It provides you with a drag-and-drop editor that makes email customization easy. 

The platform includes a Chrome extension for extracting email addresses from a wide range of sources. You can use the web app to find cold leads based on parameters such as:

• Name

• Domain

• Company

• Social media

There’s also an email verification feature that labels emails as valid, invalid, and unverifiable. You can verify emails in bulk and individually. 

Aside from collecting email addresses, Snov.io enables you to create complete lead profiles by gathering crucial information such as names, job titles, locations, and company information. 

You can export the results to CSV, XLSX, and Google Sheet files.

You can test the platform via its free version that provides you with 50 credits. The paid plans range from $39 to $199 per month, allowing you to get up to 50,000 credits.

SmartReach.io

SmartReach.io Homepage

SmartReach.io is a cold email outreach platform with a variety of features. You can connect it to a wide range of email clients, including popular solutions such as GSuite, Mailgun, Office365, and SendGrid.

The tool enables you to automate email sequences and personalization elements. You can also use the warm-up feature to optimize your sending volumes. 

You can track your cold email campaigns to determine their deliverability rate. There’s also an A/B testing feature that can help you improve different email elements, such as:

• CTAs

• Subject lines

• Headings

• Text layouts

• Images

SmartReach.io includes a list cleaning feature for verifying email addresses. You can also manage your prospects by tagging them and assigning them to different categories. 

You can test the tool by signing up for the 14-day free trial. It enables you to use most of the essential features and contact 200 prospects per month. 

The Standard and Pro plans allow you to reach a larger number of prospects for $99 and $149 per month. The Ultimate plan doesn’t limit how many leads you can send emails to and costs $199 per month.

Woodpecker

Woodpecker Homepage

Woodpecker is a cold email outreach tool specifically designed for B2B companies. It enables you to create and automate personalized email campaigns. You can connect it to your Gmail, Outlook, and Exchange email accounts.

The tool’s automation feature enables you to create automated follow-ups and set up specific conditions. You can also schedule the emails to be sent at opportune times. You can manage teams, A/B test your emails, and track different metrics, such as:

• Open rate

• Reply rate

• Bounce rate

• Click-through rate

Woodpecker also provides a feature titled human-like email sending. It sends your emails automatically based on random frequencies. The goal is to imitate the way a human being sends emails. This is an efficient method for passing spam filters.

The tool also allows you to: 

• Preview your emails

• Detect duplicate contacts

• Verify email addresses

• Track hard and soft bounces

• Blacklist prospects and domains

The company behind Woodpecker provides a generous 30-day free trial for you to test the tool properly. The paid plans range from $40 to $50 per month, with the ability to negotiate the price for the extensive Enterprise plan.

Why Sell SaaS?

What makes our Sell SaaS software solutions special is that you have the opportunity to both use and resell them. You can add your logo, colors, and company name, and create an additional stream of revenue by selling them at a price of your choosing.

At this point, you’re probably wondering — what’s the catch? 

If you’re worried that there might be some unexpected additional fees, we’ll tell you right now — That’s not how we operate. Your only obligation to us is to share a percentage of all your sales. Become our partner and start by getting 60%. If your sales are lucrative, you’ll rise in our ranks and earn up to 80% of the revenue.