5 Rules While Reaching Out to Prospects via Email

Cold email outreach remains one of the most popular strategies to establish contact with prospects. This is especially true in B2B, where the average customer value is high and the volume of targeted prospects is relatively low. But given the low cost of outreach via email, this channel often tends to get abused. In this article, we will take a look at five rules that every startup marketer must adhere to while reaching out to prospective clients.

Rule 1 – Cold email outreach is not a numbers game

The average user receives close to 88 emails per day. So unless there is strong reason, your prospect is very unlikely to open, let alone read or respond to your email. Treating cold email outreach as a numbers game can backfire though since the email you send out to your prospective customers may not appeal to them. Bulk emailing could also potentially affect deliverability. There are dozens of mail merge and cold emailing tools available in the market that let users create personalized emails to each of their prospects. But since cold emailing is a gray area, these services tend to use your own email server to send these emails out. The result is that broadcasting dozens of such emails at once triggers the spam filters which block a number of your outgoing messages.

Rule 2 – Establish credibility before sales pitch

Given the volume of emails that a prospective client receives, he or she needs a strong incentive to spend time reading the content of your outreach. In other words, the content in your email is being judged the moment it is opened till it is either responded to, or ignored. Your email should have a strong opening paragraph that establishes your credibility. If the recipient is convinced that you are a legitimate entity and not a spammer, they are more likely to continue reading the rest of your outreach.

Rule 3 – Keep your email short and crisp

Your recipient does not have all day to read through the dozens of junk that get sent to their inbox. A lengthy email is distracting and often fails to elicit a customer response. Emails that get the highest conversion rates are often those that are short and crisp. An email outreach should essentially contain three paragraphs – an opener that establishes the senders’ credibility, a second paragraph that pitches your proposal in less than 20 words, and a final two line paragraph that nudges the prospect for a response.

Rule 4 – Do not clutter the signature area

 Email signatures are a powerful medium to create brand identity and a free medium to advertise your product or service. But they must not, at any point, distract the recipient from the actual contents of the message. As a rule, keep your email signatures clutter-free and minimal. This includes removing any contact data that is not required, embracing white space and using not more than two fonts in your signature.

Rule 5 – Follow up

 Email outreach works like a charm. But this does not happen with just a one-off message to a prospect. For effective return, you must follow up on a regular basis. The number of times you must actually follow up before you give up depends on the type of contact you are trying to establish. According to this report, it is a good idea to not send more than six follow ups to a prospect with whom you are just about to establish contact. But if it’s a prospect you have already gotten an initial response from, then you should not settle until you get a definite response either way.

Email outreach is an extremely lucrative business opportunity. The only reason it has a bad rep is because of the way the medium has been abused. Follow the rules above and keep it legitimate and it’s possible that this medium could soon be the most profitable channel for your business.