Heating Up Your Cold Emails and Calls | Tips to Improve your Outreach & Outbound Marketing Strategies

Is cold calling really still effective?

In short: yes, cold calling can be an effective technique for reaching your ideal clients. Let’s dig a bit deeper though…

In the days of social media, email and text messaging, it can be hard to see how a company can still opt for the old cold call for marketing purposes. The stats behind it are also not terribly impressive, with analysts reckoning that only 2% of all cold calls actually result in a sale. There’s also quite a negative connotation to the practice now as scam artists use the tried and tested format to trick unsuspecting people into paying over money for nothing.

So, why do entrepreneurs, startups and well-established companies still persist with this method? Despite the low hit rate, many business analysts still believe that it is one of the most effective methods of gaining very loyal customers – if done right. However, that is the key here. Cold calling is an artform that takes practice, preparation and patience.

It’s all about who is doing the cold calling: the salesperson needs to at least be able to act like they are passionate about the product/service and the potential customer.

Next up is doing the research: there’s no point in just randomly calling the next number on a list that’s been bought for you. Look at the list, find out who these people are and make sure they’re part of your target market before you pick up the phone.

Finally, the bounce rate on cold calls is real and it’s very difficult to get that percentage up from two. A good cold caller will be able to keep going with enthusiasm even after 100 “no thank you”: some firm, some polite, and some probably very rude.

Should you be sending unsolicited emails in light of data protection regulations?

While a cold email might seem less invasive to a potential client that you haven’t contacted before, it could actually be a lot worse in the eyes of the law. This is thanks to the strict regulations that are coming into play globally about data protection. These laws relate to how personal information of people is collected and what it is legally being used for. If you do not have permission to use a person’s email address, sending them an email is against the law in many countries around the world.

It’s important to make a distinction between an illegal email (often referred to as spam) and a cold email (also referred to as an unsolicited email to a potential lead). Now, spam is not actually an illegally sent email by the pure definition of the word.

Essentially, an unsolicited message is spam if the recipient’s personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients. Therefore, no marketer or salesperson should ever be trying to send spam as it just isn’t worth your time from a business perspective.

The real question is actually what constitutes a legal mail in terms of data protection regulations. The law tends to side with the fact that it is not considered illegal to send emails to business contacts you have never communicated with, or even those you don’t know. However, it is essential that the cold email honors certain elements, such as:

• The subject line is clear and doesn’t deceive the reader in any way.
• There is an obvious and simple way to opt-out of receiving more emails in the future.
• The email clearly states who is sending it and what the reason for sending it is.

Now that we know we can send cold emails legally, the question of “should we” still remains. The results of a cold email campaign can vary wildly. It all depends (as shown above in the cold calling section) on how the email is phrased and designed, and who it is sent to. Growth Hackers has executed cold email campaigns that fully comply with global data protection laws while delivering high open and reply rates for targeted B2B outreach.

If the database of email addresses is segmented correctly according to your target market, and the message sent to each demographic suits them specifically, you can see an incredibly high open and reply rate. There are a lot of cold email outreach tips out there that will help you improve your campaigns, generate leads, sales calls and build relationships.

The top tools to use to get real leads from cold contacts

The beauty of cold contacting in the 21st century is that you don’t have to go it alone. Before Growth Hackers’ approach, cold outreach was scattered and time-consuming for our B2B clients but after implementing the right tools, campaigns are organized, measurable, and far more effective. There are plenty of software tools on the market that can help you keep track of your new leads, sort them into usable databases and even help you craft just the right message to direct your audience to your basket.

1. Outreach.io

This nifty Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool handles all elements of a cold contacting campaign. It can track emails, calls, text messages, and social media interactions. With this platform, you can actually make calls through the platform. It also allows you to put labels to each contact to show where they are in the process and allows you to pull reports to get overviews of an entire campaign.

2. Mailshake

This is a content marketing tool that helps you to automate so much of your cold emailing campaigns. You can schedule sends to various segments of your database, set up automatic emails to follow up on leads, work out which of your leads are the most promising to keep moving forward with.

The system integrates with a number of different email platforms, meaning your cold email will go through the system but it will look like you sent it from a regular email program. It also allows you to design beautiful emails based on templates that can be customized.

3. Toky

This is a fully integrated phone system that allows you to monitor and manage both ingoing and outbound calls and text messages. It also integrates with a range of other communication tools, such as WhatsApp and Slack, which are regularly used by companies to keep projects on the go. With this tool, you can reach your potential leads with a cold call or text in the format that they are comfortable with.