Cold emailing may be the single hardest sales technique to master–the one where the littlest things mean the most, where the door is almost always going to be slammed in your face (metaphorically), and the one where victory sometimes feels impossible. But if you master the art of the cold email, you gain a potential for profit that few other sales methods can provide, an in to anyone in any position at any time. That’s a lot of power hidden away in one area of study–so it’s well worth the time it takes to learn. You’ll lose, lose, lose while you get the science, art, and dirty tricks of the cold email down…but once you start winning, you’ll never stop. In this article, we’ll discuss four areas to focus your efforts if you want to be one of the chosen few, the cold emailing winners. 

Pick the Right Targets

90% of cold emailing success comes down to your ability to pick your prospects. When it comes to cold emailing, there will be times when you spend more time generating your lead than you do opening and closing the sale–it’s that important. Ignoring the legal issues of wide approaches to cold emailing, there’s simply more opportunity for success when you pick your prospects carefully. Spending all day finding a few potentials that will eventually close is a far better use of your time than spending that day sending dozens and dozens of messages that will be deleted by uninterested, unqualified prospects. By being selective, you also gain the ability to…

Research Your Prospects Thoroughly

Before you craft the first line of a cold email, you should get as familiar with your prospect as you possibly can. Raid their LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, corporate bio, articles about them, everything you can to familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of their professional life. Personal details that aren’t in the public realm should probably be avoided when cold emailing, but they can prove useful in determining later moves in your relationship–if you have an anecdote that sells well to family men and kills other sales, for example, it’s good to know which in advance. 

You’ll want to continue the process after cold emailing them, refining your understanding of the needs, wants, and idiosyncrasies of the prospect, but that’s past the point of cold emailing, and only relevant in certain forms of sales. If a single email or a few short exchanges usually finish the sale, you’ll only want to gather information for analytics purposes.   

Perfect Your Copy

Bad sales copy doesn’t sell under the best of circumstances. Send a poorly written email to someone who doesn’t know you, or only knows you vaguely, and you’ll be placed in the Spam folder for your trouble. The copy of a cold email should be above all reproach and crafted to grab the attention of the specific prospect you’re targeting in the first line. How much selling your copy can do in your initial cold emailing will vary greatly depending on the nature of your business and customers; experiment and find the golden mean between too soft and too aggressive.

Provoke Investment

Even if you’re going for a softer sale, there’s one thing all salespeople in every field want: A customer with skin in the game. If you can get a prospect to pay a pittance, schedule a phone call, fill out some paperwork, make any investment at all, you’re halfway to sales victory. Cold emailing is no different. What you go after in your first email will depend, again, on the details of your business, but you want to get something from the prospect as soon as possible. Even getting them to fill out a contact form and schedule a return email or callback creates a slight connection between the prospect and seller, which makes the rest of the sale go much easier.