Cold Email Campaigns – 5 Reasons Why You Should Do It

Cold email campaigns have been a popular topic in the last few years. Lot’s of companies realized that cold email campaigns work!! But they work if you do them right. With the last data showing the number of emails being sent across the globe and COVID-19 forcing people to work remotely, there are no questions if you should be doing the cold emails or not. You probably should! Or you should at least try as long as your targeted audiences are online.

An automated way of generating leads

Cold email campaigns are one of the best ways to open a new channel of acquisition when you are facing limited manpower. For sure you can find many more effective operative tasks for your team to drive acquisition, but when it comes to automation cold emails campaigns can quickly compete with e.g. PPC Pay per Click “automated” campaigns. The early days require some “hustle”, which means a lot of trial and error, but eventually, it brings you a solid outcome with KPIs you are happy about. You should always test and keep improving your email campaigns but if resources are an issue, find the first best performing approach and run in scale. The email campaigns will never run completely smoothly but at least they are automated. 

After organic reach, the email campaigns are probably the most cost-effective way of generating traffic and leads. As long as you can find enough emails and keep the volumes of sent emails high enough. 

Organic traffic is more dependent on SEO but when it “kicks in” it can provide quite a lot of value in the long run.

Cold email campaigns on the other hand require a bit more work and therefore are not as cost-effective as organic traffic. Nevertheless, once it’s set up, oiled and automated, the cold email campaigns will generate you quite some leads.

The higher the cost of whatever you are selling, the more valuable those leads are to you. 

Let’s compare two scenarios: 

Scenario #1

Product price 30$ / monthly

10000 sent emails, 5000 opened (50%), 250 clicks (5%), 20 leads acquired, 2 closed deals

With 60$ added monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

Two customers joined your portfolio with 720$ in estimated LifeTime Value (LTV) 

Scenario #2

Product price 500$ / monthly 

The same scenario in this pricing range would bring you an extra 1000$ in MRR and let’s say 12.000$ in (LTV) – Probably more since high volume deals have longer LTV on average. 

Considering that setting a cold email campaign will in total cost you 1 month for a full-time employee to learn everything about cold email campaigns and that person’s salary is – let’s say around 3.000k…

With the scenario #1, you’ll be getting your money back after 5 months or so and from that point on earning more and more if you’re capable of investing in improvement.

With scenario #2 you’ll be getting your money back with the first sale. How cool is that?

And everything from that point on is a rocket ship ???.

Learn what type of copywriting works

Col email campaigns are not the only emails you are probably sending. If you are dealing with newsletter campaigns and onboarding campaigns you need to continuously look for best performance options. 

Continuous learning about what type of language in your emails “ticks” with your prospects or customers is very important. Especially when we talk about emails in scale. The more people you reach and convince the more people to convert to become your (better) paying customer. With a high volume of emails, the 1% difference in conversion rate can be huge. You can easily think of it as a resource to hire a new employee or your next raise!

The importance of copywriting in cold email campaigns shows in two main elements:

• Subject
• Content of an email

We are about to mention how are those two elements related to performance metrics in the next chapter. See below.

Performance of cold email campaigns can be easily measured

The beauty of cold email campaigns and email campaigns, in general, is the ability to measure the performance. 

The best metrics to measure with email campaigns are the following.

1. Emails sent
2. Emails delivered
3. Emails opened
4. Emails – clicks on CTA button (Call to Action)
5. Emails with reply (if relevant to your campaign)
6. Emails with an unsubscribed prospect

Read more about metrics on our dedicated blog post.

All of the mentioned can be A/B tested and improved with additional metrics. One of the important ones is to measure statistical significance which brings you to a conclusion that 

you should always have a number of sent emails that are high enough to tell you which scenario (A or B) is significantly better. You can try and play around with number with online calculators.

And just give an example of how the subject and content of the email affects performance metrics; 

1. Improving the subject of the email will increase the number of opened emails
2. Improving the content of the email will help to increase the number of clicks and/or replies. 

Also, make sure to verify the emails you are using to make sure they don’t bounce and affect your campaign performance and sender (domain and email account) reputation. 

Your sales team is going to love you

You can do cold email campaigns for many objectives and goals but the most common goal is to drive sales. 

When you are selling a product of higher value and you can afford the in-house sales team, they will need any help they can get to close those deals. Every marketing qualified lead (MQL) for them is very valuable. If you bring a new stream of leads dripping into their sales funnels, they will appreciate your work. Make sure to measure when those deals are closed so you can take a part of the credit for it!