How to write a cold email and get a high reply rate?

There are six concepts to master when writing cold emails. They can be mastered by anyone, regardless of whether you’re just starting out or already have experience with cold email outreach.

Once you study and understand the concepts in this section, we guarantee you high reply rates will follow.

Let’s start by analyzing the concept number one, which is…

1- Research your audience

The better you know the person you’re about to email, the more likely is for your email to be score a high reply rate.

Think about it, the world is filled with thousands of emails, meeting requests, YouTube ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn DMs, etc. A big reason why many of them fail is because they’re speaking to the wrong audience and the approach is far off.

Therefore, before you press send, make sure two things are in good check:

• Your audience has a genuine interest in your product/service
• In your research, you've found key info that will help you write a unique email
  

Do this and writing emails will feel like a breeze. 

How and where can you find all this information?

Start with LinkedIn and its robust search algorithm. If you have a Sales Navigator account, great. If you don’t, no problem. Free Search will do the trick too.

See if your prospects are part of online communities and analyze their participation in them. Study their other Social Media accounts too.

Research their company and imagine yourself working there. Anticipate their pains and challenges.

Plenty of sources at the tip of your fingertips.

2- Get your prospects’ contact info

There are two aspects to understand in order to find the info you’re looking for.

First, finding email addresses of your prospects. There’s more than one way to get the job done. You can use Chrome extensions, online databases, do it manually, etc. We wrote an in-depth guide on this that will show them all to you.

Second, email verification. Meaning, you must not send your campaign to invalid emails. Failure to eliminate invalid emails from your list will lead to a high bounce rate. High bounce rate, in return, will decimate your deliverability and email reputation.

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Luckily, we have another in-depth guide in this department for you too. In it, we’ve compared top email verification tools too with all the stats you need to pick the right one for you.

3- Maximize your email deliverability

To explain it simply, email deliverability represents the ability of your emails to land in the primary tab in somebody’s inbox. The higher your deliverability, the easier it is for your prospects to actually see your emails. And vice versa.

The main question here is how can you maximize it so that you never have to worry about promotion tabs and spam filters?

Here’s how, step-by-step instructions coming your way.

4- Create your cold email campaign

Okay, we have everything set on the technical side. We've also nailed our audience targeting. It’s cold email writing time.

Let’s break this section down into two parts.

Cold emails

Before you start typing, remember the rule. The cold email you’re going to send is not about what you need, the coolness of your product, how many clients use your service, etc. What your message should be centered around is on what they need, how your product solves their pain, or how your service helped a client your prospect can actually relate to.

Meaning, your cold email should feel like a tailored-made dress or suit. It needs to fit every prospect on the individual basis. ;)

All cold email elements, from the subject line to your closing argument should be connected together, tell the same story and push towards a win-win scenario.

Leaving you some useful advice here that will hopefully come handy when writing.

Subject line. It's the hook that prompts people to open an email and that sets an expectation in their mind on what they are about to read. A few examples....

Intro line. How you start your cold email is critical because this is what builds the connection with your prospect. Plus, the intro will paint the picture in the prospect's brain about the rest of the email. Tiramisu intro line strategy.

Middle section. This is your transition from an intro to “sales” pitch. Instead of introducing your product or a feature, talk about the pain this feature solves or ask them a question about it. Turn “I” into “you".

Call-to-action. Your final target is to explain what's the next step. Reply to this email, click on that link, book a meeting, watch a video, sign up for a free trial... there are various call-to-actions. As long as the next step is clear and simple, and the email is about them, it will work.

Follow-up emails

Never send a campaign without AT LEAST one follow-up email in the mix. Hopefully two or three. Here’s why.

Follow-ups are guaranteed to give your reply rate a kick up. Because people sometimes forget to reply. They read your first email in a bad moment. They were busy, distracted or not hooked back then. It’s not always because they aren't interested.

That said, don’t spam or be annoying. With follow-ups you can be funny, bring more value with every additional email, add curiosity by telling them what’s coming next… there’s plenty of ways to play this card.

But the biggest takeaway here is to always include follow-up emails in your sequence.

5- Learn how to send cold emails

The objective of a cold email campaign is to get a relevant reply and close as many leads as possible.

Sending hundreds or thousands of emails in a day is a tactic that takes you further away from the objective, instead of helping you achieve it.

The way in which you deliver your messages impacts your results, but also leaves a mark on your deliverability and email reputation.

With all this information, it makes no sense to try to chase shortcuts because it will be a waste of time and effort. It’s much smarter to use every minute available to make every email count.

Remember, no prospect is the same. Their pain points, budgets, company sizes, tool stacks, needs... all different. As a result, your approach ought to be different.

Here’s what we suggest:

Don't send more than 100 emails per day. By slowing down the sending speed, you leave more time to do proper research on your prospects, customize messages, and make them sound more human.

Of course, your list can have 1000s of prospects. That's fine. But there's no need to email everyone on the same day.

Here’s an example schedule for a list of 500 prospects. The plan is to send all these emails in a week. 100 per day, not counting the follow-ups.

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1. Campaign is sent in a 4h time frame
2. Emails get delivered every 2.4 minutes
3. Emails get delivered from Monday to Friday
   

If you want to speed up sending, you either decrease the "minutes" between two emails (e.g. to 2) or increase the time frame (e.g. 1-7 pm). If you're using lemlist, of course.

To slow down the sending, you either increase the "minutes" between two emails or decrease the time frame.

Another important decision to make when sending cold emails is to be careful when picking your tool. Specifically, draw a line between email outreach and email marketing tools

Newsletter tools are built for sending larger quantities of emails, all at the same time. They are usually nicely-designed and are mostly used as a content distribution tactic. They work perfectly for people who have signed up to receive it, are familiar with your brand and are actively consuming it. For the vast majority of people, they land in Promotions tab.

However, you don’t send cold emails like this. So using a newsletter tool for cold outreach will feel like driving a bike in a Formula 1 race.

By using lemlist as your cold email tool, your messages are sent one after the other, thus imitating human behavior, which providers prefer to see. You don't risk hurting your email deliverability and your emails won't go to Promotions or spam.

Is there the best time to send emails?

We've tested some of the tactics on our campaigns. And the biggest advice we can give you is to never follow other people's data blindly. Here are a few things that work for us.

Afternoons perform better than mornings across all metrics, especially open rates. We found out that between 12pm - 16pm works best for us.

We never saw a big difference between reply and click rates across different days. All working days are rolling pretty good.

3) Our typical follow-up schedule looks like this:

• 2-day delay between email 1 and 2
• 2-day delay between email 2 and 3
• 3-day delay between email 3 and 4
  

When you start sending cold emails, analyze if there is a particular time when your emails get opened and replied to. Assess whether your prospects are busy at certain hours. That will tell you if you need to take this into account or not.

But most importantly, use other people’s insights as inspiration, but make sure you test what works for your audience and you.

6- Analyze your campaign results

Finally, your email outreach data. It tells a story. That story is called, “how you can improve your cold email performance”.

Let’s start with some KPI benchmarks you can measure against.

- Your open rate is above 50%

If you see that the open rate is lower, check your email deliverability. It might be that your prospects aren’t seeing your emails, to begin with.

- Your bounce rate is below 5%

If your bounce rate is higher, your list is messed up. Verify emails immediately.

- Your click rate is above 40%

- Your reply rate is above 20% (for targeted, personalized outreach)

- Your reply rate is above 8% (for broader outreach)

If your email deliverability and audience targeting are both in order, but something else is out of tune with your results... in that case, it’s time to A/B test stuff.

Maybe your open rate can be increased with a better subject line. Perhaps your reply rate might be boosted with a more powerful intro line. Or your click rate can go sky-high if you write a better call-to-action.

These are all the things you can A/B test. Let the market tell you which one works best instead of endlessly debating it internally.