According to Marketing at Work, an average company loses 10-30% of its customer base each year. That means to stay in business, you need to constantly be investing in customer attraction and new business opportunities. But the problem is that it costs much more to leverage traditional methods to market and attract new customers.
To get new customers, small and medium scale businesses need to use affordable and effective methods such as social media and email to get new customers. While 94% of prospects are said to be active on social media, it is only 5% of the B2B sales team reported that social media is an effective lead generation tool.
On the other hand, 89% of marketers say that email is their primary channel of lead generation. The exciting thing about email is that it is affordable, highly effective, scalable and can be automated on a very large scale. Apart from the regular email marketing, you can use strategic email outreach to get new customers for your business from time to time.
A lot of people think cold email is dead. But, that’s far from the truth. The fact is that cold email is just the same as a cold call. While cold calling seems to be intrusive and uncomfortable because you are dealing with a stranger, it is still the most effective lead generation system for many businesses.
The problem is not cold emails, but how to use cold email to get new customers and grow a business. When you learn the strategies used by the most successful companies for cold emailing, you will do well. The following are some ways of how to use cold email to get new customers for your business.
- Develop a clear buyer persona
The mistake a lot of marketers make is sending generic mass emails to strangers without knowing who the target customer is. The first step to using cold email to build your customer base is to develop a clear profile of the demographic, geographic and psychographic profile of your buyer persona.
Who is your target customer? What problems do they have? What are their hopes and aspirations? What kind of pain points do they have? What are their dreams? What are their sex and average age? What is their financial and economic status? And when is the best time to contact them?
You have to do your homework first and foremost so that you don’t end up targeting the wrong customer with the right message!
- Research and build the right buyer persona list
A cold email becomes spam when it is not personalized. That is probably one of the reasons many amateur marketers claim that cold email doesn’t work. They send cold email outreach to a generic email address of people outside their target market zone and they wonder why it is not working.
You have to do the research. Look at the client’s website, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook profiles. Learn much more about their business and lifestyle. Go to forums where the decision-makers can be found. You can use tools like an email hunter to get access to emails of the target customers in your buyer persona.
- Learn how to write great cold emails
This is where many marketers miss it. They send poor cold emails and wonder why everything went wrong. The key is to learn how to write a great cold email pitch that converts like crazy. When you have the right email address of a decision market, personalized the email and present an irresistible offer, you will increase your conversion rate per outreach.
Don’t try to sell them. Try to help solve a specific problem. Ensure that the email is about them and not what you do. Generally, consumers are said to be selfish. They care about themselves and how to solve their own problems. Therefore, if your email pitch is focused on creating a connection, adding value and helping them, it will do well.
- Use a personal email with an attractive signature
People do business with people they trust. When it comes to the issue of trust, most people would rather trust a friend than a stranger. To make your email friendly, you have to use your personal or work email. Also, ensure that the email has a signature that tells a lot about you and your offer.
Most marketers don’t even take note of the power of their email signature. However, that’s another great place to entice your target audience with an offer, discount, content or anything that can be of great value to them. A great image or video content link can serve as a catalyst for high conversion.
- Send the email at the right time to the right decision-maker
A great, highly personalized cold email with an attractive offer sent to the front desk of a company can end up in the dustbin. You have to look at the team section on the company’s website and make sure that all the email is addressed to the people who make the decision and write the check.
If you’re targeting the decision-making unit (DMU), then timing is great factor for success. Marketing experts have said that the best time to send an email to a prospect is between 8 am-10 am, and 3 pm-4 pm. During these times, most managers and CEOs are alert, hopeful, optimistic and looking for new ideas to expand and grow their business.
- Develop a follow-up system
The success is in the follow-up. People are busy these days and they don’t have enough time reading competitive emails seeking their attention. Therefore, developing a follow-up system to get closer to prospects is the best way to convert prospects.
In a recent study, the first email saw an 18% response rate while the sixth one had a whopping 27% response rate. The more effective your follow up system, the higher your ability to convert those who did not respond to the initial email. Keep your follow up emails simple, friendly and personalized as possible.
- Scale the cold email outreach
You have so many hours in a day. If you’re intent on generating many clients in a month via email, you can’t depend on a manual system alone. For instance, a spreadsheet and an inbox can be labor-intensive and stressful. You have to consider other email outreach system that can enable you to send and follow up emails.
Using a cold email outreach system like Gmass, you’ll not only be able to get a lot done in a short period of time, but you can track open rates, click-through rates, responses, conversions, and sales generated. This will enable your business to get better results from the cold email outreach.
