How to Cold Email: B2B Businesses

As a B2B brand, it’s essential to share your incredible products and services with companies that would benefit from your services. But finding new customers can feel like an uphill battle.

The good news is that there are plenty of businesses out there, and there’s a cost-effective way to connect with them: cold email.

Say what you will about email marketing, but it remains one of the most effective ways to stay in touch with your current customers and reel in new leads. And with more businesses being available via email, there’s never been a better time to launch a cold email campaign.

What Is B2B Cold Emailing?

Like other forms of cold email, B2B cold emails are a way to reach out to businesses that you’ve never interacted with before. These emails are used to build brand awareness and bring potential customers to the top of your sales funnel.

There are various ways to craft a cold email, but more often than not, these emails will include an offer or talk about an ongoing promotion. But the key to effective cold emailing is to send messages to a relevant audience rather than just sending out email blasts to everyone under the sun.

B2B cold emails may include a general promotion of business, a partnership opportunity, the chance to promote content, a general introduction, or a request for a meeting or call. What you include in your email should be specific to your brand and the brand you’re targeting. But more on that in a bit.

The problem most people have with cold email is the fact that most people (business professionals included) are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of emails they receive in a day. Think about how many emails you delete without even opening them. Throw scam and spam emails into the mix, and it’s hard to imagine that cold email would even make a dent.

Yes, there are a plethora of spammers and scammers out there, but there are steps you can take to stay out of the junk folder and in your recipients’ inboxes. This article has everything you need to start the most successful B2B cold email campaign your company has ever seen.

Why Is B2B Cold Emailing Beneficial?

You might not be completely sold that cold emailing isn’t a lost cause. We get it because we’ve seen this trepidation a lot. We understand how valuable your time is, and we don’t want you to feel like you’re wasting precious work hours.

One of the most significant benefits of cold emailing is that you can create a few killer templates and use them each time you find a potential lead. Think about it—a couple of hours of work for unlimited return on investment.

Don’t believe us? Sumo used five cold email templates to grow their business to a $5 million company. In other words: it can be done.

In fact, approximately 91% of B2B marketers state that email is their most important channel for content marketing success. The beauty of email is that your recipients can open messages on their own time and respond adequately.

Another perk of cold emailing is that it’s incredibly easy to track how effective your campaigns are. Email marketing offers various key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to analyze and adjust your strategy.

You can monitor your delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate, response rate, conversion rate, and more. And multiple systems will track these metrics for you, so you don’t have to rely on spreadsheet accuracy.

How to Create the Perfect Cold Email

Believe it or not, creating the perfect cold email begins way before you start typing up your message.

Identifying the Right Targets

Remember how we said that cold emailing is most effective when you’re not just taking shots in the dark? The first step to creating the perfect cold email is to identify your target audience.

When you built your business, you probably created customer personas for the type of people who would benefit from your products or services. Cold emailing begins with these personas because cold emails need to be specific.

While customer research isn’t the most glamorous component of marketing, it’s arguably one of the more crucial parts. If you see an email in your inbox that doesn’t seem like it’s relevant to you, you’re going to delete it. And if you’re sending out emails to people who think your content is irrelevant to them (no offense), then you’re going to tank your KPIs.

Customer characteristics to consider include:

Like you, these businesses are probably always on the hunt to gain new customers. If your product or service can help this brand gain new customers, then your content is relevant to them.

Once you know the types of businesses you’re looking for, you can begin searching for the relevant points of contact. LinkedIn, HubSpot, and ZoomInfo are all excellent resources for finding the people you should be sending your emails to.

Warm Up Your Inbox

If you’re planning on sending out a higher volume of emails than you usually do on a given day for your cold emailing campaign, you have to make sure your inbox is warm. Inbox or IP warming is a crucial step for cold emailing that most teams forget about, and it can leave a campaign dead in its tracks.

Email warmup is the process of ramping up the number of emails you send from your account so Internet Service Providers (ISPs) recognize your address.

Why is this important? If you start sending off hundreds of emails a day to people you’ve never contacted before, it sends a major red flag to ISPs. A sudden influx of messages indicates spam, and spam ends up in junk folders. And it’s hard to reach clients when your emails are marked as spam.

Inbox warming slowly but surely increases the number of emails sent from your account each day until you reach the target number of emails you want to send. It’s a tedious process that can take anywhere from six to eight weeks, but it’s a helpful way to increase the chances that your emails will end up where you want them to go.

Thankfully, we live in a world where technology is our friend. Instead of sending out the warming emails yourself, you can use a platform like Warmup Inbox to automate the process. These systems will send out emails on your behalf and generate automatic responses, so ISPs recognize you as a reliable and trustworthy sender.

As you conduct lead research and create your cold email templates, you can let a warming system get your inbox ready for your campaign.

Learn more about Warmup Inbox.

Draft Your Email(s)

Now we get to the fun part: creating emails your recipients will actually read.

Start with a catchy subject line

The first thing a person sees when they get a new email is the subject line. You have a sentence to help them decide whether they want to open the message, so it should be a great sentence.

The important thing with subject lines is to keep it short, sweet, and not spammy. You want it to be intriguing without giving everything away. For example: “Meeting at 3?” is an infinitely more catchy subject than “Are you free to meet at 3pm for a demo?”

At the same time, you don’t want your subject line to be misleading. If someone opens an email because the subject line promised something the body of the message doesn’t follow through on, your email gets deleted. (And worse, you just sent the textbook definition of a spam email.)

Another thing you can do with your subject lines is to make them personal. You can address the recipient by name or say you found them through a shared source. According to Yes Marketing (now Data Axle), recipients are 58% more likely to open an email with a personalized subject line.

Get to the Point

Remember that you’re reaching out to business owners or leaders. They likely don’t have very much free time in their day. The best thing you can do is keep your email on point.

Keeping your email between 75-100 words yields a higher response rate than emails of other lengths. A short email respects your recipients’ time and piques their interest enough to follow through on the call to action.

And since you’re keeping it short, you’ll be able to write in smaller sentences and paragraphs to keep your readers from skimming the content. If they read through every word you’ve written, they’ll feel more compelled to respond or read more.

Keep It Significant and Personalize the Content

Address the reader by their name (not a generic title like “sir,” “ma’am,” or “customer”). Generic emails read like spam, and you want this message to seem like it’s coming from a friend. Quickly speak to their pain points, then demonstrate how you can offer a solution.

Additionally, weaving in opinions or emotions will make your message feel more human. Since you haven’t met this person before in real life, you want your brand’s personality to shine through the screen. Depending on your brand personality, you may want to include relevant images, videos, or GIFs to make your email feel warm.

Include a simple CTA

At the end of your email, you want your recipients to take action. Give them a direct path to the next steps, and they’ll be more likely to follow through.

Don’t fall into the trap of including an excessive number of links or CTAs. Your email is already succinct, and your CTA should be as well. The message should naturally lead into the call to action, whatever it is.

You can ask them to set up a call or guide them to your website—it’s up to you! But you want to open the door for further interaction. After all, cold emailing is all about fostering relationships.

Test, Analyze, and Adjust

Once you have your draft ready to go, it’s time to run some tests before using it on a larger scale. The insights you receive from your tests will guide the adjustments you make so your email stands out from the crowd.

Test everything, including your subject line, body, email design, and call to action. And don’t forget to make sure your message is compatible with mobile browsing, as many people check their emails on the go.

Why Cold Emailing is More Effective than Cold Calling

Some think that cold calling is more effective than cold emailing because you can actually hear the person’s voice on the other end. But cold emailing is actually more effective in the long run.

In the first section, we gave you the statistics about cold email compared to other methods. But since cold calling is one of the more popular forms of outreach to new leads, we want to highlight why emailing is the way to go.

• Easy Accessibility: With cold emails, you don’t have to rely on the users picking up their phones to start conversations. Your message can land in their inbox for them to strike up an interaction on their own time.
• Time Efficient: Cold calling takes a lot of time out of your sales reps’ days. Cold emailing just requires a few personalizations on a template.
• Less Intrusive: Your leads won’t feel annoyed that they’re getting random calls from strangers.
• Easy to Track: If you leave a voice mail, it’s difficult to know if the recipient listens to it unless they call you back. With emails, you can track whether your messages are connected with your audience.
• Brand Awareness: Many people are visual learners, so even if your recipients only skim your email, they’ll still see your logo and business name. This builds brand awareness by helping you stick in their mind if your first attempt at contact doesn’t play out the way you want it to. Who knows? Maybe a few days later, they’ll see your business on LinkedIn and decide to reach out after all.