To this day, cold outreach remains one of the most effective methods of lead generation, especially when it comes to B2B sales prospecting. However, it has become more and more difficult for businesses to perform cold outreach, primarily because of the high competition as well as the prevalence of technology that makes it harder to reach out to clients.
Nevertheless, every roadblock has a workaround. If your cold outreach efforts aren’t as effective as you’d want them to be, here are the possible reasons why—and what you can do to resolve them:
1. Your sales and marketing teams aren’t in line
In the prospecting process, sales and marketing teams must work hand in hand to ensure that clients receive suitable content depending on which stage of the sales funnel they are in. If your teams aren’t in line with each other, this may be the reason why your cold outreach campaign is failing.
If you can’t figure out what you’re doing wrong, working with a reliable marketing agency might help. They can assist you with creating content for each stage of the sales funnel, as well as help you determine which types of content work best for your specific target markets.
2. Your cold emailing strategy is out of whack
Cold emailing is one of the most common methods of cold outreach. However, it’s not as simple as it may seem; you don’t just send the same emails over and over again and hope for a response—you have to ensure that every email is interesting enough for your recipients to open.
One way to improve your cold email strategy is to personalize each email using your leads’ information. People are more likely to entertain a cold email if it makes them feel like a person instead of just a number on a contact list. That said, avoid sending the same email copy to every contact on your mailing list. Instead, use an email automation tool to incorporate a good amount of personalization into each email, and ensure that the content they receive is relevant to their business, industry, and pain points.
3. You have poor email deliverability
Email deliverability is when your messages reach your recipients’ inboxes successfully—not the spam folder nor the promotions tab. Your prospects probably receive dozens, if not hundreds, of emails each day, and they likely only skim through a handful at most. By landing in their inboxes, there is a better chance of them opening and reading your emails—or at the very least, seeing your brand name.
If your email deliverability is shot, this means that your emails are landing in prospects’ spam and promotion folders—or not at all. Usually, poor email deliverability is due to a high bounce rate, which is the rate at which your emails do not get successfully delivered to the email addresses you send them to. A high bounce rate can be caused by a number of things, such as having a bad email reputation, exhibiting spambot-like behavior, and sending too many emails to unverified addresses.
To improve your email deliverability, here are some effective techniques you can try:
- Use a separate email address or domain for cold emailing campaigns
- Warm up new email addresses so that they appear human to mail providers; you can do this by gradually sending a few emails at a time to verified email addresses
- Set up SPF and DKIM (SPF allows the domain owner to specify which servers they are using to send emails, while DKIM allows the company to take responsibility for each message that they send)
- Remove unverified email addresses from your mailing list to avoid hard bounces
- Use a consistent send schedule; do not send emails too frequently
- Improve the content you send
- Make your email format as simple as possible to avoid looking spammy; take it easy on the HTML as well
4. Your email is uninteresting
For your cold email to be effective, it has to capture your reader’s attention starting from the subject line. Otherwise, your prospects will be unlikely to open your emails, much less read them.
At the same time, the content of your email must be concise yet captivating. Even if you keep your email copy to a few short paragraphs, you will be able to capture your prospect’s attention with the right content as well as good personalization.
If your cold email campaign isn’t working, you are probably doing something wrong. The hard part is finding out exactly where you’re going wrong. It could be one or all of these reasons, but if you still aren’t sure, it may be time to consult a prospecting agency.
