Drive Traffic to Your SaaS Website With Cold Email Marketing

Website traffic coming from only one source is a mistake. You have to operate with as many traffic sources as possible. Prioritize the ones that require the least spending and provide the most benefits.

Email marketing is one of the cheapest sources of web traffic, and the results it can bring are worth every penny. Some studies show that email marketing can bring up to 42x ROI. 

Typically, email marketing deals with people who have subscribed to your newsletter. In this post, we’ll explore how a different technique, cold emails, can help you with growing traffic.

Maximizing SaaS Growth: The Power of Combining SEO and Cold Emails

The best marketing results often stem from combining multiple approaches. For example, you can create an informed strategy by combining the analytical parts of SEO with cold emails to drive more website traffic.

The Power of Targeting with Cold Email

Unlike emails you might send to your newsletter subscribers, a cold email is sent without prior contact with the addressee. In this regard, it’s very similar to cold calling.

The drawback is that the recipient probably doesn’t know you yet and may hesitate to talk to you. But the upside is that you can take the time to get to know them before reaching out—learn what they do from their social media profiles.

This allows for a high degree of personalization, making cold emails a great channel for attracting new leads to your SaaS business.

How Topics Can Help With Writing Cold Emails

The hardest thing in cold email marketing is finding a suitable topic to start a conversation with someone who doesn’t know you yet. The best way is to do something for that person (like linking to their site from your article) and share it with them. But it’s not viable for more extensive cold email campaigns.

Instead, you can use SEO tools to find a conversation topic that might be interesting for them. For instance, if your SaaS business deals with email marketing, you can take the SE Ranking’s keyword tool, put in “email marketing” as a keyword, and see a list of related keywords, which can be a topic you can discuss with the recipient.

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Go for keywords with a high search volume — these should be topics your potential customers are interested in. You can also try using keywords that are trending as topics. These are the keywords with growing search volume.

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Send over a piece of content on this topic, a couple of suggestions, or offer a short call to talk about it.

In the case of email marketing, based on the research with this tool, you can try reaching out about email marketing platforms or free email marketing tools and templates. The last two can be a great conversation starter if you send over a curated list of free tools with yours included.

The Anatomy of High-Quality Traffic: What SaaS Companies Need

Web traffic is the number of visitors who visit your website; a single user visit is called a session. Traffic is a common way to measure your website’s online audience.

Not all website traffic is the same, though. Users just browsing and visiting your site’s blog for a few minutes are very different from members of your core audience visiting pages discussing the benefits of working with your company.

The latter group is more likely to convert and become customers, which is the goal of attracting traffic to your website.

That’s why even though it’s hard to drive huge web traffic numbers with cold email, it’s a decent method. It will drive very targeted traffic; people in your target demographic are much more likely to convert. It also invites them to come over with a bit of a personal touch, which means they might have a more fond impression of your company.

There are two main ways you can increase website traffic with cold emails.

The first is to reach out directly to your lead list, introduce yourself, and share a page on your site worth visiting. Typically, this involves sharing a case study or content that showcases your strengths instead of going for the sale immediately.

The second is to reach out to influencers your core audience follows, such as frequent LinkedIn posters or blog editors. Share noteworthy content with them, and you might get a mention on their platforms, leading to your ideal customers learning about your company. You can also use a backlink checker to analyze your competitors' content and adjust yours if it needs improvement.

Below, we’ll discuss the steps you need to take to make both scenarios possible.

The Cold Email Journey: From Inbox to Landing Page

Here are the six steps necessary to create a successful cold email campaign.

The Science of Subject Lines

Every email starts with the subject line. It’s the first thing a customer reads, and if it's poorly written, that’s the last thing they will read in your email.

Most SaaS clients are typically decision-makers, so the odds are that they are receiving dozens of unsolicited emails every day. Your job with the subject line creation is to stand out from that crowd and avoid the spam folder.

There are different techniques you can try implementing:

• Personalize. Show the lead you know their name and care about them.
• Address the assumed problem. Cite a problem that you suspect a lead has.
• Evoke curiosity. Ask them a question.
• Talk numbers. Cite results your company delivered for clients.
• Offer value. Mention a free resource that you’re providing.
• Surprise them. Use humor.

The first sentence of the email text will also be shown in the email preview. You can also try including one of the techniques above in the first part of the email template.

Personalization Beyond First Names

Personalization is an important aspect of email marketing, particularly cold email. It’s frustrating for a lead to read a painfully generic email. Most email marketing tools let you personalize emails and add the lead’s name to the email template.

You can go further than that and use some information about the lead or their company to show you care. It can be a short sentence about their latest blog, projects, or involvement in a speaking role.

It takes a lot of time to create these small personalizations, so if you want to do it, make sure your open rate is good; otherwise, you’ll be wasting your efforts.

You could also use soft personalization and include the same phrase that would resonate with all of the leads, such as mentioning a trend or a common problem.

Crafting the Perfect CTA

Personalization and a compelling subject line are crucial to ensure your email gets opened. Once your lead reads through it, you need to motivate them to click the link and explore your website, engaging them with a strong call to action that drives them towards your Website Design.

To create a compelling CTA, show the value for the email recipient and be clear about the action you want them to take. How exactly you formulate your CTA depends on the type of cold email you’re sending. To ensure the integrity of your outreach emails, use a DMARC record generator to protect your email domain from being misused by cybercriminals.

If you’re trying to book a sales conversation, remind them what value your SaaS company offers and suggest a time slot.

To get the recipient to go to your website and read something, tell them what that content is and why they might be interested.

Seamless Transition from Email to Website

The link they follow must match the message in the email. Make sure there are no mistakes when linking to the correct pages. Describe the content on the page accurately, so there are no misconceptions on the reader’s side.

If you’re leading them to a landing page, design it to highlight and explain the main points you make in the email. Make sure to also work on your web application architecture so that the people who visit your website are willing to stay there.

Mapping the Customer Journey

With email templates ready, prepare for analysis. Map out the touchpoints your leads will go through before the conversion. Typically, you’ll have milestones like these.

• Opening the email;
• Clicking the CTA link;
• Scrolling down the landing page,
• Going through with the sale.

Plan on how each stage can be optimized for conversion.

You can use visualization tools like UXPressia or IBM Journey Designer for mapping.

Tracking the Journey

Once your cold email campaign runs, track its performance across each customer journey point. Find where the bottlenecks are and experiment with the email elements to optimize conversions at each stage.

To track user activity, combine your email marketing software for tracking email interactions with Google Analytics or your CRM for tracking website activity.

Scaling Up: How to Sustain Traffic Growth Through Cold Email

One of the most significant drawbacks of cold emails is that the conversion rates can be comparatively small because recipients do not expect an email from you. That’s why most of the initial work lies in improving website traffic growth from your failures and successes.

Segment the email list and use different strategies. Note which ones perform best and use a variation of that strategy for further experiments.

You can also use other marketing channels to help your cold email marketing campaign. You might already be combining content marketing efforts with it to entice readers to go to your site to read the article. You can also use social media to follow up with the prospects and paid ads to retarget your offer to those who have opened the email but haven’t followed the link.

Summary

Cold email is a great sales tool, but it can also drive targeted, quality website traffic.

Think through your value proposition, develop several options for email templates, and find the right audience to target. With a few months of experimentation and tracking, you can establish a decent stream of traffic to your SaaS website and gain new followers, leads, and customers.