Cold emailing can be a difficult art to master, even for salespeople with extensive experience in the related skill of cold calling. Even more so than cold callers, cold emailing specialists must take great care to familiarize themselves with the target and craft a message which will not be ignored as unsolicited spam-especially with the legal ramifications inherent to email spam in many jurisdictions. This article will lay out five techniques anyone looking to undertake cold emailing absolutely must know before typing their first word.

Know Your Target

Cold emailing is most definitely not a tactic you should utilize with a one-size-fits-all mentality. Prospects will be inclined to discard your email from the moment they see it-at the very least, the message should be personalized enough to keep them reading. You want an email that mentions specific names, specific positions. That can offer specific solutions to specific problems. That means knowing the target.

To put it succinctly, your email should be written for THE prospect, not ANY prospect. This should be obvious if you put yourself in the prospect’s shoes for a moment, but too often salespeople leap into cold emailing without even considering the demographics of their recipients, much less individuals.

Talk About The Prospect

As with any sales medium, you want to keep the emphasis of your language on the prospect, not yourself or your business. If you talk about their history, their concerns, their problems, what you can do for THEM, you not only reinforce the idea that your email is well researched and relevant to their needs, you create a positive impression and get on the prospects good side-it’s basic psychology.

If you’re experienced with sales in other mediums, this should be familiar-don’t get distracted by the new medium of cold emailing, stick with the basics. Talking about your business may be tempting as a way to establish legitimacy, but it rings false and will lose the prospect’s interest.

Keep It Short

No one wants to read an essay from a stranger. Cold emailing creates a temptation in some sales people to fill page after page with needless detail, but an ideal first email should take less than a minute to get through. You should also follow this advice on a smaller scale-use simpler sentence constructions and shorter paragraphs, to create a message that reads quickly and easily.

Provoke a Response

Cold emailing should be about putting a prospect into motion. Don’t write a meandering email that doesn’t effectively call the reader into action-you might make a few sales just by ‘starting a conversation’ and hoping for a natural escalation, but you’re contacting this individual with a business proposal-that ‘natural escalation’ is a falsehood, one that many prospects will catch on to. Be straightforward, be aggressive, and write an email that demands a response.

That response may be a return email, a phone call, or some other action, but it should require some level of commitment from the prospect beyond an absentminded return email promising to ‘think about your offer’. This first step creates a seed of positive thought towards your business, as people like to think positively about things they have spent time on.

Perfect the Writing

It’s astounding how often sales people overlook the issue of writing in their cold emailing, given the impact it can have on bottom lines. Careful control of pacing and language can pull a reader through longer pitches, deliver more in a short period of time, and convey a higher level of professionalism. Some businesses may benefit from the use of copywriters or editors to perfect their pitches, but that can be overkill. Just be sure to consider the writing itself when crafting a cold emailing strategy.