Top 7 Strategies & Tools to Fix And Skyrocket the Cold Email Open Rates

Cold emailing is one of the proven best marketing channels for any business.  Emails drive engagement and produce high sales conversion rates. Email conversion is the final step in cold email marketing. The conversion rate is the key to measuring the success of your cold email campaigns. 

Making people open your cold email is not easy. The email user receives nearly 147 emails a day, and half of the emails are deleted. There is no wonder that cold sales emails have only 24% of the cold emails getting opened. 

Cold emailing will be the most powerful prospecting tactic if it has done it right. An effective cold email strategy will increase your opens, CTR, and revenue. Cold email outreach develops long-lasting profitable professional relationships with your targeted customers. 

Cold emailing is changing every day. We shall look deeper into the cold email strategies & tools for an  effective sales email campaign that maximize your open rate and conversions. We shall also find an effective b2b cold email approach to get the most out of it in 2021. 

This article guides you on how your business can use the best strategies and tools to keep your cold email outreach game on the top.  Creating and sending a compelling cold email campaign will boost sales and help sales reps to gain new leads. 

What Is Cold Email Outreach?

Cold email outreach is the most effective and budget-friendly outbound sales prospecting technique. Personalized emails are a great way to begin the connection with your prospective customer (Who you have never connected to before). Once businesses have initiated the connection, it is easier to nurture leads who reply to your cold emails and gradually turn them into your business customers over time. 

Cold email outreach is a method of marketing that’s been around for decades but only recently has become a booming industry in modern business. It uses a calculated approach to send emails to potential customers, with the goal of persuading them to purchase products or services. Cold email outreach is the art of contacting potential clients without their permission. Cold emailing is incredibly effective when you know what you are doing. If you’ve ever wondered what cold email outreach is and how to use it in your business, you’ve come to the right place.

What Is A Good Cold Email Response Rate?

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Before we break down some cold emailing strategies & tools to increase the open rates, we shall cover the cold email response rate. Your cold email response rate is the number of replies you have received against the number of cold emails sent and expressed as percentages. For instance, if your business sent 100 emails and got five email replies, your cold email response is 5/100 = 0.05, displayed as 5%.

Cold email open rates are around 18% industry-wide. It might be higher for some niches and lower for others, but that means that out of every 100 cold emails you send, only 18 people will even open your email, let alone reply to it.

The cold email response rate varies from 5%; some sales emails have 20% or 40%. Higher the response will be better. There is no exact answer for a good response rate. If your response rate is half of your email open rate, it is considered a good response rate. 

The email response rate varies based on the email outreach goals, industry niche, skills, and experience. It would be best to create killer personalized cold emails to boost your email response. 

What Is A Good Email Open Rate For Cold Email?

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25% or more than that are considered as good open rates for your cold email outreach. If your email campaign hits over 37%, it is considered a successful cold email campaign. 

The email opens insights into your cold email campaigns and helps to set realistic goals for your future email campaign based on your average stats. Email open rate is the percentage of the email opened by your email recipients. 

The lower email open rate indicates your subject line is not compelling or descriptive. So perform A/B testing with different subject lines and find the ideal one to increase your email open rates. 

The open rate depends on the timing of your email sent. If your cold email has a low open rate, try sending emails at different times and finding your ideal email outreach time. 

1. Identify And Send Emails To Your Potential Customers

Make sure that your emails are sent to the right targeted person.  Many marketers use the scattershot approach to their marketing, which results in poor lead generation, and relying on the low quality or irrelevant leads list will get almost zero conversion. So the first and foremost thing in the cold email outreach is to have a clearly defined  b2b audience.

Before getting into your email campaign, start identifying your ideal prospect and find your profitable leads. Never do guesswork on cold emailing. Instead, do research and identify your potential customer. Finding the decision-makers or the right person in your targeted company is the key element determining your cold email campaign success. 

You can find your potential buyers in multiple ways.

• Research and identify and create custom B2B lead lists.
• Check prospect's LinkedIn profiles to discover their interest and understand their wants.
• Do Search on the tweets and social media groups where people ask for a solution to their problem. Help them with your brief explanation of how your product or services will resolve their pain points and their current challenges.  
• Ask referrals with your existing clients.
• Using an automation tool to find accurate leads and verify your existing lead list. 

Smartwriter.ai

Smartwriter is also used as an email finder tool where you can find the exact email addresses of the  target prospect or the decision-makers in bulk and perform one at a time. The Lead list and email verification feature help you to find the potential customer email addresses using first name, last name, designation, or any company website URL.

Smartwriter simplifies your process of B2B sales prospecting and allows you to contact the right people. The tool verifies the lead and assures the accuracy of the email address in bulk and individually. So your business can send emails outreach with accurate email addresses that will bypass the spam filter and reduce the hard bounce rate on email campaigns.

Whether you’re a B2B marketer or recruiter, Smartwriter advanced API, or human-readable filters improve your sales prospecting that offers you the correct data before cold emailing. All you need to do is upload the name of targeted leads or business URL to Smartwriter email verification and get the list of verified emails in no time for your B2B outreaches. 

2. Write a Compelling Cold Email Subject Line

35% of the email recipients open an email only based on the subject line. Once your email is delivered, the subject line plays a critical part in email open. The subject line of your email has to convince the receiver that they will get something worthwhile in their precious time. 

A good email subject line has to capture the attention of the email receiver and have to build curiosity. A successful email subject line has to be short and promise the recipient that your email has useful information. Various mobile devices show different characters for the subject line, but having a cold email subject line around 25-30 characters is ideal. In contrast, as per the Return Path research on the email subject line with 2 million emails, most of the subject lines are between 41-50 characters long. 

The desktop inbox displays an email subject line with 60 characters, whereas the mobile devices show 20 - 30 charters. Today nearly 60% of respondents check their business email. In other words, nearly 1.7 billion users check their emails on mobile devices. 

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Smartwriter Email Content 

The subject line needs to be simple, personalized, specific, and it should be more generic or vague. Your cold emails subject line needs to develop credibility or create curiosity. Give a good reason why people want to open your email. Make your subject line concise. With the help of a Smartwriter email content feature, help you to generate a compelling subject line using "Catchy Intro Line" and "Converting Subject Line". AI engine automatically generates a catchy subject that gets more email opens. Here is our best cold cold email subject line that provides 80% open rates. Nail your cold email subject line generation with the AI sales automated tools like Smartwriter. 

Test Subject Tool by Zurb

People decide to open cold emails based on two major factors: subject line, and another one is sender name. Many devices often truncate the subject line that will lead to unfavorable results for your cold email campaigns. If your business wants to send bulk emails with a perfect subject line, then start using TestSubject software. This tool offers an instant preview of your email before you send them. TestSubject is a simple tool to test the email subject line on mobile devices and email clients. 

3. Avoid Email Messages On The Spam Filters

The spam filter commonly uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect unwanted, unsolicited spam messages that prevent reaching your inbox. Even well-crafted emails can all get into the spam filter. 

To avoid getting your email into the spam filter, avoid using spammy words in your email context. At the same time, writing email messages in all caps and using punctuation (!!) will annoy the email receiver, and there will be more chances of getting spam. If your email gets into your recipients, the spam folder will not impact your email deliverability rate, but it will impact the campaign's conversion or cold email response rates. Spam-identified emails affect your overall email open rate.

Make sure the email does not fall on the CAN-SPAM act compliant. Use the following tactics to avoid the spam filter.

• Avoid using ALL CAPS in the cold email subject line
• Don't use exclamations!! on the subjects
• Avoid using Flash, Javascript or video in your emails 
• Avoid large attachments such as .exe,.swf, .zip, and more. 
• Avoid using spam trigger words and phrases like Free, Win, etc. 
• Have a good text-to-image ratio to avoid an overwhelming number of images on the emails. 

Spam Check 

Postmark develops the Spam Check tool. The tool helps to find the overall spam score of your email. The tool is free to use. Your business invests a lot of time and effort in crafting a cold email that gets into your recipient's spam folders, which means it will be a complete waste of time and effort for the marketing team. Use spam check software just by copy-pasting your email subject line, email messages, pre-header text. You can find the spam score and ensure 

which element in the content triggers the spam filter and eliminates them. 

4. Avoid Sounding Like a Template & Implement Advanced Personalization

Cold email templates are a time-saver, but everyone uses the same templates, and your business can't stand out. Using templates in your marketing campaigns will worsen your open rate or response rate. Prospects receive hundreds of emails in their inbox that simply sound like your email. So there are fewer chances of email response. Your email has to be unique, and that has to grab the user's attention. If your business wants to use the template, tweak them and customize it for your  b2b audience. Personalization and customization of your email messages will double your reply rate. 

As per Woodpecker’s research on their cold email campaign, advanced personalization has helped to achieve a 17% reply rate or more. At the same time, the non-personalized email has only a 7% reply rate.  To improve your email open rate and reply rate, then advanced personalization is the key. 

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Smartwriter AI personalized outreach

Try to include the variable in the template that contains variables such as receiver name, company,  geo-location, and more and give a feel of to one email. Have advance personalization using “Smartwriter Personalised Icebreaker Generator '' for each prospect in less time. The AI will automatically search the prospect data online and data from the targeted prospect’s Linkedin data and craft customized email messages in a minute.  Email personalization helps build  1-on-1 relationships with prospective clients with zero effort using artificial intelligence. The tool provides you with 80% open rate personalization for your email outreach. The tool offers a 7 day free trial for all the plans. To access your tree trail don’t require credit card details. Start advanced personalization in your next email campaign and increase your email opens rate. 

5. Clear Purpose And Provide Values On Your Email

Just checking in emails is a time waste for everyone. If you are sending emails regularly and your recipients are not opening them, you need to focus on personalization and cold email tactics to improve your cold email. One of the primary things in cold emailing is having a clear purpose for the email. Suppose your sharing blogs, white paper, guide, newsletter have to provide value to the potential audience.  You need to state your purpose of the email in the early part of the email or in the email intro so that the user will have a clear goal on the purpose of the email and the email intro has to grab the attention of the ready and have to make them read the entire email. So have the valued points that hook the reader. Have your email clear that you have to focus on one purpose or goal throughout the email.

Ensure that your email message has aligned the purpose with the customer's pain point and provide information on the email copy, such as offering solutions to overcome their challenges and pain points through your product or services. This will improve the chances of email replies. 

The good cold email will not mention products or services. Your cold email need not sell. Instead, you have to focus on the benefits or outcomes that the customer can gain from using your product or services. Sharing the customer testimonial, storytelling, case studies so that the email receiver can relate with them and build interest in your offerings. This will also create credibility and trust in your brand. 

6. Sending More Follow-Up Emails Can Triple Your Reply Rate

Sending an automatic follow-up email will boost your reply rate. Your follow-ups can be either through calls, emails, and social media. The Iko System study shows that cold emailing will receive an 18% response rate on the first follow-up email and 13% response in the 4th email follow-up, and the 6th email sequence gains a huge reply rate of 27%.

Many individuals are busy, and there would be chances of missing your initial email, so create multiple touches. Sending 7-10 email sequences will get your campaign more positive responses. Always give way to opt-out of the campaign to the prospect. According to the Woodpecker study, email campaigns with 4–7 email sequences have acquired 3X more replies than those with 1–3 emails sequences.

For sending email sequences, map out the goal of each email campaign. Each email sequence needs to have a particular purpose. The key for a follow-up or multi-step email campaign is to build trust and cultivate interest among your targeted audience. 

Mailshake

Autopilot your sales outreach using mailshake cold email software. Your business can email outreach to your warm lead with autopilot. You can perform outreach through emails, social media, and calls. 

The lead catcher solution on mailshake will help you to find the most engaging potential customer. Your business can reach out to engaging leads or prospects who are interested in your brand. This will help you to identify the ideal prospect that is more likely to convert. 

It is also best to execute multi-touch outreaches. Your business can engage your targeted customer everywhere by email, social media, phone. 

The tool also offers split testing features where your business can test multiple versions on your cold-outreach email and find the right fit. The phone dialer feature simplifies your sales workflow and helps you to make a one-to-one connection through phone dial. 

The tool also offers various native and 3rd party integrations options. The pricing of the email outreach plan starts at $ 59 44 user/month, and the sales engagement plan costs around $ 99 75. 

7. Perform Split Testing to Improve Your Open Rates

Split testing of your campaign can also improve open rates. Implementing the A/B split testing will increase the open rate by 49%. Split testing will help you to achieve the best results by testing a new version with slight variation. 

A/B testing is also known as a split test. It is a process of experimenting with various email copies, determining the customer's experience, and analyzing the result to find the best engaging content. A/B testing enables the business to make data-driven decisions and ensure positive impacts on email campaigns.  

The A/B testing strategy is gaining popularity both on large corporate sites and on small business local sites. A/B testing is the act of testing two different versions of one product to see which one performs better. This strategy has proven that it can increase ROI by increasing sales conversion rates on landing pages, increasing email subscribers, increasing open email rates on newsletters, and increasing app download rates.

The benefits of A/B testing includes 

• Improved user engagement
• Improved content
• Reduced bounce rates
• Improve conversion rates
• Higher conversion values
• Effective depth insight
• Analysis help to make data-driven decisions
• Provides quick results

Many sales engagement and cold email software like Mailshake, Lemlist, MailChimp and more.

Conclusion

Email is the preferred marketing channel for promotion. If you're looking to gain more visibility for your brand or gain more traffic to your site, email marketing is the way to go. There are multiple reasons why you should try it out. Cold email marketing promotes your business via sending emails, increasing your traffic, social media fans, email subscribers, etc. Your email list is the backbone of your online business, so find your buyer persona using the email lead generation software. You want a better response rate. You want more openings. You want a higher response rate and higher conversion rate, then implementing the above cold email strategies & tools will help to boost email open rates &  click-through rate (CTR).