If you’re an early-stage entrepreneur or a newly-turned freelancer, there is one area that you have to improve besides your core expertise, and that’s generating business for yourself!
You’ll likely get a few clients through references but scaling requires you to tap into one of these three avenues -
- SEO - which might take around 6 to 8 months to work for you
- Paid Search - which could be expensive till you’ve figured out your ideal customer profile
- Cold Outreach - which is relatively quick to do when compared to the other two
Unfortunately, Cold emails often witness very low response rates with 91.5% of cold emails getting ignored.
Your cold outreach efforts might not get the desired outcomes if:
- You are messaging ‘prospects’ who are not a part of your Ideal Customer Profile
- Your subject lines are not standing out, hence the open rates are low
- You are talking more about yourself and not enough about your customer’s problems
- You’re trying to communicate too much in the first message
- You’re trying to close the deal without building a relationship first.
- You aren’t personalizing your message to address your prospect
All growing businesses, including us, share these same challenges and frustrations when it comes to cold outreach!
Here are some tips to combat these challenges and help improve reply rates:
Step 1: Use a more specific and personalized subject line
When you use a subject line like, "Hey {firstname}, could I have your five minutes?", it establishes very little context to invoke enough curiosity to get their attention. Unless they know you, you’re very unlikely to get their five minutes.
Don’t make the subject line of your outreach emails generic. It’s your only chance to get them to read the fantastic email you’ve written
Be specific and try some of the following ...
- Hey {firstname}, could this help {businessname} improve D30 retention?
- Would a 9% reply rate on emails help {businessname}, {firstname}?
Step 2: Personalize the email content & introduce a ‘pattern interrupt’
You don’t want your prospect to feel like they’re receiving the message that was received by thousands of others. Personalizing the first couple of lines for every prospect to use as an Ice-breaker, can go a long way.
A promising technique you can leverage to help stand out to your prospect, is to include a visual pattern interrupt like the person's first name in an image/GIF or any information that’s relevant to the prospect (for ex, logo, website screenshot, company name, etc.).
This will boost your chances of capturing your prospect’s attention!
With Nexweave, you can easily create engaging personalized media assets like the one above and share them at scale!
Step 3: Follow-up
If your prospect is a decision-maker, they’re likely to receive lots of emails every day. With 100+ emails to sift through per day, the chances that your single outreach email gets seen, opened, and replied to is pretty slim.
Send a follow-up after a couple of days to take another shot at getting their attention and push through the noise of your prospect’s inbox.
At the end of the day, cold emails are about being consistent and persistent. But the three steps should probably help you get 2X to 5X more replies because even we did!
And if you’re curious to see how we wield the power of personalized media in our cold emails, check out Nexweave - a no code platform designed to help you create engaging personalized and interactive media templates to share at scale!