What is cold email? A comprehensive guide for beginners

Oct 26, 2023

Frank Jenkins

You recently learned about the term “cold email” and are wondering what exactly it is and how to do it?

Well in a nutshell, cold emailing is an outreach marketing strategy that helps you connect to potential leads. It is the act of sending an email to someone that hasn’t heard from you before (That’s why it’s “cold”) with the purpose of starting a conversation to convert the recipient into a potential lead.

What is cold email?

Cold emailing is the act of sending emails (usually at a high volume) to potential prospects that have never heard of you or your services (That’s why it’s “cold”). The goal of these emails is to start a conversation with the prospect and convert them to a potential lead, to then have them go through your sales pipeline.

What’s the difference between cold email and email marketing?

Even though both are a way of marketing and rely on email as a channel, their main difference is in the awareness stage the prospect is about your company/services:

• In email marketing, the prospect already knows about you and your services and has explicitly given you permission to send them emails with offers, information, etc.
• In cold email, the prospect doesn’t know about you or your services. You are reaching out to them via email to start a conversation so they know about your services and how you can help them.

The approach to each is also very different, as in email marketing you already have a list of emails. All you have to do is write emails with the information/offers you want.

While in cold emails, you have to scrape prospects’ emails, filter them, and write a cold email script which is totally different than offering something straight away.

Is it legal to send cold emails?

Cold emailing is legal as long as you comply with the regulations of the country/region you’re operating. For example in the U.S. the CAN-SPAM Act sets the rules and requirements for sending these type of emails. Which among other things requires you to have clear opt-out mechanisms, accurate information, etc.

How can I start cold emailing?

If you want to take your lead generation to the next level and are ready to start a cold emailing campaign, you’ve come to the right place.

Don’t worry, it’s relatively easy to start.

1 - Create an email list of your prospects

The first step is to generate an email list to which you’ll send your cold emails. Make sure this list is targeted towards your ICP as you only want to be sending your offers to people that would be interested in your services. No use on sending emails on people that won’t care about what you have to offer.

For this, you can make use of various prospect scraping tools out there. Some of them are:

• Apollo
• Crunchbase
• BuiltWith
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator

There are many more, depending on your niche and ICP there may be better options. Make sure you research which is the best with validated emails.

2 - Craft your cold email script

Now that you have a potential prospects list, it’s time to write the cold email script. Most people believe this is the most difficult part, but if you know what you’re doing it shouldn’t be difficult.

A good cold email script has:

A good, curiosity-provoking subject line: The subject line is what will make or break your campaign. It is the thing that makes your prospects open your email. So spend time on this. We have a guide on writing good subject lines

A personalized icebreaker: Personalizing each cold email is essential for success. No one will reply or even read an email from someone they don’t know that looks like a generic message.

Lucky for you, eCold.ai is a tool that lets you generate 100s of personalizations in seconds automatically with AI. You can start for free, so we’ve got you covered.

A clear CTA: A good clear CTA is essential. If your cold emails is really good but you don’t clearly tell your prospects what the next step is, it’ll be all for nothing. So make sure you include a clear CTA like “Want me to send over more information?”

3 - Start sending your cold emails

For this step, you have to set up alternate domains and inboxes so you can send a high volume without the risk of being tagged as spam. We have a guide to do so here.

Once you have your domains and inboxes, you can connect them to your cold emailing tool of your choice. There are many of them all with their pros and cons. So choose whichever suits you best. Some examples are:

• Instantly.ai
• Lemlist
• MailShake
• QuickMail

After that, just import your prospect’s list with their personalizations, paste your script, and start sending your cold emails.

Conclusion

Now you know what cold email is and how to do it. It is a great marketing strategy that can consistently generate leads for your business if done right and with the right volume. So make sure you leverage this opportunity as it has a very low cost and a huge ROI.