Does Cold Emailing Still Work?

I’ve been an email marketer since 2012. I stopped around 2015. A lot has changed since then but a lot of things are still the same. People still build email lists and broadcast newsletters. Companies still buy lead lists and these bulk email lists and send them emails. But the big fat question is, does it still work?

The warm and hot emailing side of email marketing is still fresh and straight. If you run a newsletter or build email lists through services like Aweber or Getresponse, you can still get really good traction. The more value your content adds to your receivers life, the more engagement you’ll have and the more money you’ll make (If you monetize it). The cold side is tricky though. With a lot of recent updates from the email handlers like Gmail, Microsoft and so on, its tough to get your mails delivered in the inbox. Most of them would just go into the spam folder. The inbox to spam ratio on average currently is 10-90%.

So how do you get your messages in the inbox or at least the promotions tab if you’re a business without having your messages land in the spam folder if you’re cold emailing? I’ll list out some things that has worked for me when I recently cold emailed for some campaigns and the results were great.

1. Make sure your domain has good sending reputation: If you’re using a business email, first make sure it goes under someone’s name (matt@xyzbiz.com) and not an obvious office mail (Info@xyzbiz.com or contact@xyzbiz.com). Second, based on the service you use for mailing, make sure it has right TX and MX record for better email deliverability. I used mailshake.com, They have great ways for mail scheduling and follow-ups and great split testing capabilities.
2. Clean your list thoroughly: Its better to have 1000 emails with 10% conversion rate instead of 10k with 0% conversion. Keep only the best emails in your lead list. Remove obvious business emails and see if you can shortlist the emails and keep them for decision makers only. Also run a email verifier from Mailshake to remove non working emails.
3. Setup a frequency: Only a bot can send 1000 emails per minute and mail handlers knows it very well. Set your frequency to 10-20 emails on first day, 20-50 on second and around 100 emails a day by the seventh day. Let the mailing address warm a little bit. It should look like an human is sending all these emails.
4. Make great email copy: This one’s obvious.
5. Secret tip: Personalize your emails for each individual. The more personalized an email is, the more chances you have for a response and closure. It will take time to customize email for each person but trust me, it pays off.

I personally think email will never die, it has been there since the beginning and it will be there till the end. The only thing that will change is how it is communicated.

Artwork: https://dribbble.com/shots/3966641-Mailbox