Email marketing can be a potential goldmine for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
This rings true whether we’re talking about any combination of the following, by the way:
- Cold email outreach to prospective
- Asking for referrals from current clients
- Responding to leads who’ve reached out to you.
The problem? Many business owners and solopreneurs sabotage their email efforts because of poor attention to detail.
Thankfully, fixing a broken outreach strategy is a lot easier than you might think, granted you know what to look out for.
From poor messaging to minor errors, sometimes it’s the seemingly smallest yet significant touches that ultimately sink your outreach emails. To help you out, we’ve assembled a list of five completely avoidable ways that businesses mess up their outreach efforts and how you can avoid them yourself.
Targeting the Wrong People
Although this might seem glaringly obvious, your messages are going to fall flat unless you’re sending them to the right people.
Bear in mind that contact info you see on sites can be outdated and likewise faulty. Meanwhile, it’s hard to tell if you’re actually getting anywhere with contact forms on-site.
But what are you supposed to do if your prospects’ contact information is outdated or is otherwise hidden? Start by looking into off-the-wall strategies to find the right email including LinkedIn searches and third-party plug-ins. Especially if you already have social contact with someone, asking them for their email directly is fair game, too.
Messages That Lack Personalization
Reality check: one-size-fits-all outreach isn’t going to produce the best possible returns.
Automation is ideal for email announcements and follow-ups, not when you’re introducing yourself.
When speaking to someone for the first time it pays to bring up something to prove that you’re more than just a bot. Based on some of the best personalized email examples, small touches such as your prospect’s’ name, most recently published article or reference to a social ,media post are all good starting points.
Making the Wrong First Impression
Cold emailing doesn’t have to be ice cold.
For example, you can follow someone on social media or otherwise comment on their blog to create the sort of icebreakers noted above.
Remember: people are busy and receiving an email out of the blue can indeed be awkward. If someone has seen your name a few times via social interactions, the conversation feels much more natural. In other words, don’t just hammer into someone’s inbox and expect them to be friendly. Instead, strive to make a positive first impression.
Emails That Are Way Too Long
Speaking of prospects being busy, consider the benefit of keeping your outreach emails short and sweet. Seeing a giant wall of text can be a totally understandable turn-off.
The ideal length for an email is often cited as being 200 words or less. As long as your message is scrollable, sticks to short sentences and can be understood as a glance, you’re likely golden as far as formatting goes.
Cliche Pitches
You’re not the only person conducting cold outreach. As a result, stay away from templates or copy cliches such as referencing former communications or conversations that never happened. Simply being genuine and offering actual value via outreach is way better than trying to trick someone, you know?
You don’t need to be some sort of email wizard to step up your outreach game. If you’ve been struggling with your outreach efforts or otherwise haven’t been getting the response rate, consider how any combination of these mistakes might be holding you back and how you can fix them yourselves.
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