Learnings and Re-learnings with my first email campaign
How I applied Blended learning with “Online tutorials” and “Self-Learning.”
As an entrepreneur, you need to learn so many things related to marketing. One of them is cold emailing. I used to cringe whenever I heard this term. It sounded so creepy to write emails to strangers. As we try to build our startups, we need to overcome these emotions of being “stranger-o-phobic”. No entrepreneur can ever ignore cold emails. It is one of the essential steps to finding prospective leads for your business. Hence we should embrace it as quickly as we can. We should reach out to strangers at conferences, Linkedin and these cold emails.
The learning never stops. The more you learn a concept, the wider it gets in scope.
Last week I spent most of the time doing email campaigns. So the learnings and my ignorance about this topic also unfolded in manifolds the previous week.
In my opinion, “Email campaigns” are a mix of email automation and analytics. Few preparatory steps before starting your email campaigns:
Lead Database: List of people to whom you want to send your promotional email — you can find these emails through various means like paid database, search on the internet, etc.
Email message: Specific message you want to send to your prospects to incite them about your product or service
Email campaign software: It is not practical to write each email. It would help if you used these applications to scale up the number of your cold emails
Meta tags: to personalize your email message, e.g., you can use tags like “Dear <FNAME>,” which gets replaced by the first name of all the leads in the list. Or similarly, you can mention the lead’s company name, e.g., “Your <COMPANY> will benefit by using our product.
I had read a few articles about the best practices for cold emailing. I had also taken an online course about this. But actual learning indeed happens by doing.
As I mentioned earlier, I put myself knee-deep into cold emailing last week. I applied a few best practices taught by the experts and forgot a few of them, which taught me an even bigger lesson.
First email campaign — applied these points
• Personalize email by addressing the people by their first name
• Keep the message short
• Captivating subject line to increase the reader’s interest
Second email campaign — I reread a few chapters in the cold email online course and made a few more modifications.
• Added personalization in the subject line. Some people do not open the email. They would not see the personal address in the email body in such a case. Adding a person’s name or company name in the subject line will ensure that the receiver will read it
• Started the email message by writing a few lines about the reader rather than straight away pitching about my product. It will make the reader feel important and seen. It will give them a feeling that the sender is not just focused on selling but also interested in talking about the reader. As a result, they will feel more connected to the email and would most likely spend another minute reading the entire email message.
Here are my statistics for these two campaigns.
This was my first educated experiment with cold emailing. I did it earlier too, but that time it was more focused on learning about the email automation software.
Here are some more ‘Do’s n Don'ts” that I learned in this experiment:
1. Avoid email ids that start with sales@, contactus@, support@. Some email servers forward emails from these ids to secondary folders like spam, promotional, etc. Use some other name that the email server has not learned to filter out. Generally, people use their names or some fictitious names as well. I saw one email starting with namaste@. I found it very innovative as “namaste” is a form of greeting in India. I think email servers will not be able to filter it out as spam.
2. Ensure that the email ids are valid and the emails do not get bounced. I learned a new concept — “email credibility score”. If too many emails get bounced from a particular email id, there are chances that the email id gets blocked by the email servers. I was surprised to find out about a newly launched product in the product hunt, which helps to improve your email credibility score. This application will help to decrease your email bounce rates
3. Last but not least is to keep on experimenting. Keep modifying your email messages and checking how it impacts your key metrics. You can’t just copy and paste someone else’s emails to get your customers. You need to customize and personalize it as per your product needs. If your prospective customer cannot differentiate your email from other promotional emails, they will also not differentiate your products and services.
Wishing everyone a great week. Hope your cold emails turn into hot leads quickly.
