How to launch cold emailing campaigns

Many startups, entrepreneurs, and established companies are constantly questioning whether to employ outbound strategies such as cold emails. Due to their high rates of return and relative ease of use, they are becoming an increasingly effective option. 

However, these efforts have become increasingly difficult over time. Spam filters are getting smarter every year; even some recipients have already been bombarded with contact emails to the point that they no longer want to hear from them or are simply more critical of what they receive.

Fortunately, if you are interested in employing this strategy you have come to the right place. Skief labs is a company that has been perfecting cold email delivery techniques for years. They are one of the leading growth hacking companies in Miami and other regions of the United States.

But before understanding how we achieve successful cold email strategies, it is necessary that you know perfectly what a cold email is and what is the process of sending it. 

What is a cold email?

This is an email that seeks to establish contact with a prospect or possible client. The intentions of this email can be varied, from a sale, positioning a product in the market, and contacting profiles of interest for our project, among others. But the basis remains the same, to reach a prospect who has not requested information but offers valuable content.

Is it beneficial to use cold emails?

The answer is a big yes. Perhaps the benefit you've heard the most is its high rate of return, with an average of $36 for every dollar invested. However, the benefits are more: direct contact with your prospects is much more effective than a simple online ad, and achieving a personalized message will make your target audience give you their attention. Another aspect to highlight is the response rate, being a direct communication, the one who receives a response increases immensely its probability.

How to start sending cold emails?

Seen superficially, starting to send cold emails may seem like a fairly simple task. Sitting down and writing a text and then copying and pasting it to hundreds of recipients doesn't seem very complex, does it? But this is not the reality of email campaigns, at least not in the case of effective ones.

To start with a good outbound campaign, several aspects must be considered, including the legal considerations of cold email. Skief is a growth lab, therefore the methodology we use is more complex and consequently more functional. It is a focused growth strategy divided into several steps.

How to streamline data acquisition processes for growth campaigns.

Before we encourage you to start sending first contact emails to profiles of interest, our methodology is as follows.

How to define the profile of our ideal customer?

Since it is the starting point, it is also one of the most important. Recognizing perfectly whom we want to address will have a great influence on the effectiveness of our message. You can have the perfect email, which clears all doubts and closes with an infallible call to action, but if it reaches the hands of someone who is not interested, either because it is not their sector or because they do not need the product or service, then everything will be in vain.

Correct communication requires a message that provides value and a receiver who needs that value.

To start defining the profile of your ideal client, start by answering these questions: who is the client? why? what general characteristics define him? what do we offer him? why does he need what we offer him?

Define KPIs and campaign objectives

Once we have established who our target is, it is time to define our goals. At Skief Labs we rely on the security and confidence that comes from defining goals through data and by the characteristics that make up a key performance indicator, we establish our goals by setting out the number of contacts or accounts, open rates, clicks, etc. These data also constitute the objectives of the campaign, which in general terms make up the number of potential customers expected to be obtained.

Creating calls to action or CTAs

It is impossible, unless you improvise, to generate an effective message without knowing what you are trying to achieve. Great novelists know this and that's why they develop their writing from the end. This same logic applies to the generation of cold emails, how will you know what to say if you have not defined beforehand what you want to provoke?

It is a simple but very important step, at this stage we consider what we want our potential customers to do: schedule an appointment or call, fill out forms to obtain data, create a transaction, or push to a landing page, the possibilities are almost endless, but they must be delimited.

Choosing the right channels 

It may seem obvious that in a cold email campaign the main lead generation channel will be... email. This step consists of analyzing your product or service, evaluating your customer base or profiles, and defining whether it makes sense to complement your cold email campaign with other platforms or techniques. 

The best inbound strategies to complement outbound marketing, by Skief Labs

Why should you consider a multi-channel strategy?

There are many reasons, but let's look at it simply by imagining a sales flow. The first step is to contact the prospect, to attract his attention through a message of value. The next step depends on the prospect and is to solve the doubt of who you are, for this is very likely to google you or search on platforms linked to business such as LinkedIn, where he will understand that your value proposition is supported and will solve the easiest doubts to solve before contacting you. Another way of this multichannel strategy can be cold calling.

Choosing a good domain for sending cold e-mails

This is the most technical part of the process. In this part, you have to consider aspects such as reputation and automation tools that will help you to scale your campaign if your intention is to reach a large number of leads.

As an initial process, you have to ask yourself the big question, start the campaign with your current domain or create a new one. You may find it unnecessary to acquire a new one since you already have a certain reputation and it may be logical that when users see a domain like contacto@yourbestoption.com they are more likely to open your mail. But consider that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. This is where reputation and spam traps come in.

If by chance your main domain gets blacklisted, the situation for scaling up will become more complicated, as the deliverability of your emails will decrease significantly. In most cases, the best thing to do is always to take precautions. Don't panic, creating a new domain will not take you away from the personality of your project, there are different alternatives that will help you to keep your brand present. This could be changing the ending to .com .io .co, etc, the decision will depend on the budget and the expected delivery rate.

However, there are also disadvantages to using a new domain for your campaign. Email providers subject new domains to stricter scrutiny because they are more prone to spam. To combat this, email warm-up techniques are used for at least one month or subscriptions are paid to alleviate this oversight.

Once the domain has been defined, set up DKIM, SPF, DMARC

In this part of the process, we take care of setting up the sender's mailbox, and choosing ESP providers, such as Google Workspace or Office 365. The choice will depend on your objectives, however, email marketing experts have consistently pointed out that the Outlook service is more effective than Gmail, having a better delivery rate even when sending emails from Outlook to Gmail emails. 

Email warm-up stage

This process usually covers a period of 4 weeks if you started a new domain, this stage consists of sending emails gradually to create a good reputation on the servers of your provider. 

To achieve a good reputation you must consider factors such as bounce rate, spam reports, and interactions with your emails. There are several strategies that can be employed to warm up an email address, but all of them should consider these three metrics. It can be a time-consuming process, but nowadays there are different auto-warming services available. 

Who will I send my cold emails to? Data acquisition for outbound campaigns

This stage will demonstrate the importance of having well-ordered, filtered, and updated data. Data acquisition can be achieved through market monitoring (customers, competitors, etc.), scraping the web, and LinkedIn. Although a fairly extensive list can be obtained through these means the ideal is always to segment according to our interests, here come into play characteristics such as geographical location, professional titles, company size, etc.

This process is considered data mining and for this, there are efficient tools with which you can achieve large databases, in the sense of quality and extension.

Define responsibilities and people in charge in outbound campaigns

Once the KPI, the campaign objectives, and the tech stack to be used are established, the responsibilities of the campaign are defined, with the intention that every aspect is covered and has someone capable of providing certainty and criteria. This includes data enrichment, email validation, delivery management, creation of effective email templates, and the definition of CTAs and subject lines. 

One of the best ways to manage these processes is by integrating calendars, forms, and even CRM.  They streamline workflow and data management. 

Now that you know the correct process of a cold email campaign it is time to take flight.

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With Skief you can create an outbound campaign that puts you on the radar as a viable and effective option. What are you waiting for? Contact us right now.