Want to prevent your cold emails from getting a chilly reception? You’ll need to bring the heat if you really want to warm up your leads. It’s no secret that cold outreach is the hardest of them all. But we’ve got you covered with some expert tips that’ll show you how to set up cold […]
Want to prevent your cold emails from getting a chilly reception? You’ll need to bring the heat if you really want to warm up your leads.
It’s no secret that cold outreach is the hardest of them all. But we’ve got you covered with some expert tips that’ll show you how to set up cold email cadences in 2024.
Tip #1 Combine your first email with 2 other touchpoints.
Our first cold email tip is all about coming in hot. For your initial outreach, you should aim to have 3 different touchpoints in one day, according to George Nammour, Director of Sales at Lusha.
His preferred sequence is phone call first, then an email, then reaching out on social media.
“If you’re doing all three touches in the first day, you have a much higher chance of converting people because you’re trying to engage with them in three different ways all at the same time.”
Tip #2 Start with an aggressive pace, then switch to other methods.
Not every day should be that packed with touchpoints, though.
“The first day you’re doing all three at once,” says George, “but after that you want to decrease the steps and number of touches week after week.”
What does that look like for a cold email cadence? “Week number one should be the most aggressive. In many cases, you’re doing at least two to three emails the first week. Week two should still be slightly agressive, and then taper off week three. As time goes on, you want to come off those emails a little bit and increase your calls and LinkedIn outreach.”
Tip #3 Keep it short enough to read in a phone notification.
Everyone knows that best practices for cold emails recommend you keep it short and sweet. But just how short should they be?
George has advice based on the modern attention span: “A good rule of thumb is being apple to click your notifications on your cell phone and read the message while your phone’s locked. You should be able to read the whole email without clicking through into the actual email app.”
Why so short? “The average person’s super busy,” says George. “They don’t have time to respond to their own teammates and bosses, let alone a stranger. So you have to make it short, concise, and straight to the point. Something easy to respond to.”
Tip #4 Send a few emails before you ask for a meeting.
Speaking of keeping things easy for your prospect, keep in mind what kind of CTAs you’re including in your email cadence.
And while every single email needs some kind of call to action, the first few should be very small asks, according to Lusha’s Vice President of Global Business Development, Clinton Patterson:
“What people get wrong is they don’t give before they try to get.”
So instead of going in hard with a full pitch, start simple: introduce yourself and what you do, and offer some information that might be of value like a case study or interesting article. After a few emails sharing valuable information with your prospect (and watching for signs of engagement like click-through rates), then you can say something like, “Hey, would it make sense if we could connect, and maybe I could provide you with more insight into why your competitors are choosing to work with us?”
Clinton has an apt analogy for why you should slowly ramp up your asks:
“If you see someone you like at a bar, you don’t go up and say, ‘Hey, we should definitely get married and live in a house in Connecticut.’ What you say is, ‘Nice to meet you,’ and end with ‘I hope to see you again sometime.’”
“You can’t ask for too much on the first date (or first email) because you’ve got no authority. People buy from people that they know, like, and trust.”
Tip #5 Remember the goal is to sell a meeting.
Speaking of what you ask for in your cadences, keep the purpose of your email cadence in mind to get your messaging right. “People try to sell when they shouldn’t,” says Clinton.
What does that mean? Isn’t the whole point of cold outbound emails to sell your product? Well, while that’s the ultimate goal, your email cadences are just one step along the way. Their purpose is simply to get that prospect to move to the next stage.
“The objective of an email is not to sell the product. It’s to get you to meet with me and have a discussion.”
“So everything in an email needs to be about why we should talk further, not about why you should buy my product. Stop selling and start providing a compelling reason to just take the next step.”
Tip #6 Use genuine, straightforward messaging.
Ok, so, now that you know what the ask should be, let’s get into how you should ask for it.
Clinton’s advice it to ditch the pitch. “So many emails I get just sound like marketing fluff. They don’t sound like an email that actually came from someone.”
And getting that writing right is about more than just preference. “Everybody loves to buy, but nobody likes to be sold to,” says Clinton.
“If an email is pitchy, you’ve just created your first objection, which is that it’s just another sales email. The opportunity is to differentiate yourself from all those other salesy emails and do something a little more honest and direct. I’m more likely to respond to a genuine introduction email because the sender sounds like a legitimate, thoughtful person.”
Tip #7 Personalize automated cadences based on personas.
Now, while you want to create a genuine connection with a prospect, there’s a right and a wrong way to do personalization.
“It’s less about the weather or the college they went to, unless you went to the same school or you’re competing,” says George. “It’s more about their experience.”
For example: “If you’re going after a CTO, your verbiage should be different than how you approach a sales manager for a small 50 person startup or a director of sales at a company like Microsoft.”
The bonus? This kind of personalization can work within automated cadences, rather than one-off emails to single recipients.
“There’s a way to personalize these cadences and add those insights that are important, but will resonate across different people in the same role. So if you’re organized in how you select the type of companies you’re going after, you can find insights that will resonate with all of them and feel personalized. For example, say you’re going after startups in the Austin, TX area within the cybersecurity industry. You can personalize based on those sub-industries and make it relevant while still using automation.”
Tip #8 Continuously test and revise your cadences.
There’s a lot to figure out with email cadences: what’s the best subject line? Should each email in a sequence be about the same length? How long should you wait in between emails?
“The best way to figure it out is to monitor your performance,” says George. “See what’s working, see what’s not, and adjust.”
Clinton has similar advice: “People too often set it and forget it. They forget to invest in understanding and split testing, and it all becomes so out of date.”
“All salespeople wish we could create cadences and messaging and keep them there for a year,” says George, “but you have to make an effort to review them on a quarterly or – if you can – monthly basis. Because even if you can slowly improve the performance, that turns into more replies, more conversions and more meetings. All because you changed a few sentences or tweaked a subject line. It’s important to do if you want to be results-driven and hit your targets.”
“One of my favorite sayings,” says Clinton, “is if we have data, let’s look at the data. If all we have is opinions, we’re gonna go with mine. But my opinion is just another opinion, so show me the data.”
Tip #9 Know when to give it a rest.
“One thing that kills salespeople is we spend too much time trying to talk to people who don’t want to buy from us,” says Clinton. “So setting up your email cadence is not just about figuring out how many days go between actions and what you’re going to say. It’s just as important to know when you need to stop.”
So when is that, exactly? Well, based on the tip above, that’s something you should test with your own cadences and see what works best for you. But the industry standard is about six to nine touches.
“If they still didn’t engage with you, give them a rest period. You have to stop because at some point, you have diminishing returns. That person is not in market, because they’ve given you no signals, so you need to move on now.”
Tip #10 Balance your emails with phone and social outreach.
If you want your email cadences to perform well and get you those meetings, then you should combine them with other forms of outreach as well.
“In warming up a prospect, engagement is exponentially better when you interweave emails with telephone calls and emails,” says Clinton. “Email alone will give you a small percentage of engagement. And if you add telephone calls, that goes up. If you add voicemails to your telephone calls, it goes up again.”
George agrees: “When you send five to six emails, you should also pair that about the same amount of cold calls and a few social media touches.”
Bonus tip: use Lusha
You probably sensed a theme here: when you’re going cold, you need multiple touch-points to warm up your cadence – not to mention accurate email addresses to send those cadences to. With Lusha, you can get the direct contact information you need, whether that’s finding someone’s email or getting a decision-maker’s direct phone number. As a sales intelligence platform, Lusha provides you with tons of filtering so you can narrow down your email lists based on persona and personalize your messaging from there.
And if you hadn’t heard the news, we also have an email sequencing tool you can use to build your cadences right from the same place you do your prospecting. Add prospects directly from the Lusha platform or extension to relevant cadences with just one click. You can also track engagement to edit and optimize your live sequences.
The best part? You can start for free.
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