If you’re sending a hundred cold emails and you’re getting zero responses, it’s likely you and not them. In this article, I’m going to share with you from my personal experiences of sending hundreds of email campaigns, the mistakes that people often make when it comes to cold email as well as the ways that you can avoid making the same mistakes.
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Mistake #1: Bulk sending everyone one message
When was the last time that you responded to an email that was sent to you that was clearly sent to a thousand other people? Exactly. So the reason why you want to avoid making this mistake is because it will lead to you burning through your lead list, as well as impacting your future email deliverability.
The days in which you could just send out thousands and thousands of emails and get responses to open up new opportunities for yourself are largely over. The main solution to this is to adopt a personalized approach to your cold emailing. If you need help on that, check out the cold email template that I’ve shared in recent videos on my channel.
Mistake #2: Sticking to what doesn’t work
The second big mistake that I see people always make in cold emailing is sticking to what isn’t working. What I mean by that is if you’re sending a campaign to a hundred people and you’re getting zero or a handful of responses, then you need to be optimizing your message even further.
To do this, you’re going to want to create a batch of 30 to 50 personalized emails that you can send out to test out your messaging and see whether your messaging inspire somebody to respond to your cold email. The reason why you want to make sure you send this out to at least 30 people is because that makes it statistically significant. In other words, the results that you’ll get from that campaign are actually meaningful enough to draw conclusions from the data.
Mistake #3: Messing up personalization
The third mistake that I see people often make is messing up when it comes to personalization. Sometimes people actually do a great job at personalizing their emails, but then they address it to the wrong person or make some sort of typo in their lead list quality. This is one of the easiest ways to turn off a lead from engaging with your cold email. To fix this, you can create systems to help you combat these challenges.
For example, you might have one virtual assistant of yours check through the emails to make sure that they are valid and another virtual assistant checking through the names and the salutations to make sure that they match the gender of the person that you are emailing. You also find it helpful to send test emails to yourself. There’s no better way to see how your cold email actually looks to your recipient, then to do this and test it multiple times.
Keep sending yourself test emails until you have an email that you yourself feel like you would personally respond to if you were on the receiving end of your cold email. I’ve personally been guilty of making this mistake in the past. And typically, I’ve noticed that it happens with androgynous names like Alex, where it could be both a man or a woman. So as much as possible, try to create systems that combat these sorts of errors from happening
Mistake #4: Buying everything you’re told
The fourth mistake that I’ve seen people often make when it comes to cold email comes after a prospect actually engages with you and it’s buying everything that a prospect tells you. The reality is that prospects lie. And until you build up your BS radar, in terms of the prospects that are truly interested in what you’re offering and the prospects that are just pulling your chain, you’re going to make this mistake over and over again.
The clearest example of this that I can think of are the prospects that tell you that they’re interested in the offer that you have for them. However, they never actually get around to booking a meeting or a call with you. You need to build up your experiences as quickly as possible to help you filter through the qualified and the non-qualified leads of the people that respond to your campaigns. One of the best ways to do this is to challenge your prospect.
For example, if they say that they’d like to hear more information, you want to ask them, what sort of information would you like to receive? Or if they say that they’re free next week, you might want to say, Tuesday or Thursday looks good for me, what times would work for you on either of those days? In the case where your prospect is still beating around the bush or not giving you a solid answer, it’s just like dating in that it’s time to move on.
So remember, stick to prospects that are truly engaged with you and actually interested in what you’re offering. Sometimes people just aren’t very confrontational or they just don’t want to tell no to somebody. So as a result, they beat around the bush and never give you a direct response.
Mistake #5: Failing to answer WIIFM
The fifth mistake that I see people commonly make when it comes to cold emailing is failing to answer WIIFM or what’s in it for me. What I want you to do is to read through your email as if you were the recipient of your cold email and then ask yourself if there is a reason for you to reply to this email. If the answer is no, then you need to be more specific as to what’s in it for the reader.
I’ve mentioned this point a lot of times in my recent videos on cold emails.
Essentially, if you are not talking in what’s in it for me, then you will be ignored. You want to make sure that your cold emails are so good that you cannot be ignored by your prospect. This ultimately means two things. You want your personalization to be so good that they know that they are the only person that received that particular email and that what you’re offering to them is so good that they want to engage with you because you will lead them to better outcome or better result in XYZ way.
Stop giving your elevator pitch before you’ve made it clear what you can do for them. State the reason why you’re reaching out as well as the results that you hope to achieve for the recipient.
Big takeaways
There are two things I want you to remember from this article:
- The first one is that I want you to focus on just connecting with another human. What I mean by that is stop thinking so much about how much money you can potentially make from these prospects that you’re cold emailing and instead, focus on delighting the recipient of your cold email or making such a clear offer that they want to engage with you.
Oftentimes, I find that people that cold email are trying so hard, that they forget the basics of just recognizing that there is another person on the other end of this email that they need to inspire or motivate to get a response from. - The second big takeaway is to make sure that you are testing, testing, and testing over and over again. The reason why you want to do this is because until you have that magic message that you know works with your prospects, you can always be improving and iterating on your email campaign.
If you found this article helpful, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might also benefit from learning how to send cold emails to find partnerships or collaborations.