Cold emailing

Cold emailing is a marketing strategy that involves sending "cold emails" to generate new leads. These emails are sent to prospects who haven’t shown any particular interest in the company or its commercial offering.

To be able to develop their customer base, businesses can carry out different types of prospecting. Cold calling and cold emailing, for example, are frequently used strategies, especially in B2B.

Both techniques are based on the same concept: contacting "cold" prospects by phone or email.

Cold emailing refers to the action of sending an email to a target without the latter having shown any interest in the company. The email is sent even though no initial contact, such as an interaction at a stand or at an event, has taken place between the brand and the prospect.

Cold emailing is a practice used exclusively in B2B. It can only be sent to professional email addresses, because the law doesn’t require an opt-in, as is the case for personal email addresses.

These emails can be sent to manually retrieved addresses, but most of the time, they’re purchased or rented and therefore not particularly qualified.

Cold emailing is a technique that can bring in new leads, but the unsubscribe rate is often very high.

Most of the time, this type of email is considered spam or abusive advertising, which leads the recipient (or the mailbox) to send it straight to the trash can.

However, there are a few techniques that can be applied to increase the open and response rates of a cold-emailing campaign:

• Identify prospects to contact only qualified targets.
• Personalize the email as much as possible.
• Opt for a short introductory sentence.
• Focus on the prospect's needs, not on the service or product on offer.
• Keep the email short (100 to 150 words).
• Don’t add a vague subject line.
• Don’t send attachments.
• End the email with a call to action.

To implement their cold-emailing strategy, businesses can rely on software designed to facilitate the sending of emails.

Some CRMs are equipped with this function, and if not, there are numerous tools on the market such as HubSpot, Lemlist, and LeadFuze.