Cold Email Marketing Trends

by Paiton McDuffie | Nov 29, 2022

The use of cold emails, specifically within the B2B space, has increased significantly in recent years. Instead of blasting a highly designed marketing email to prospects en masse, many businesses are opting for cold emails to communicate with potential customers. Here are the cold email marketing trends we’re seeing, as well as some tips to leverage this strategy in your own efforts.

Cold email trends we’re seeing:

1. Cold emailing is becoming increasingly more challenging to execute successfully.
2. Most users are utilizing cold email software to send emails.
3. Personalized cold emails tend to perform better.
4. Including multiple touch points (creating a sequence of cold emails) is more effective than a single one-off email.
5. Cold email metrics will pale in comparison to broadcast or blast-style emails.

Let’s break these trends down.

1. Since cold emailing as a tactic has become more popular, it stands to reason that it won’t stand out as much in a prospect’s inbox. They’re simply receiving more of the same types of emails, and the likelihood of your email catching their eye decreases. This is where ensuring that you fully understand your audience and their pain points, having high-quality data, and A/B testing will be major factors in the success of your cold email campaigns.
2. Does the thought of manually sending 500 emails to your target audience send chills down your spine? Then you’ll be relieved to know that there’s software for that. Several in fact! We have utilized software services such as Klenty, SmartReach, and MixMax to build multi-email sequences (more on this later) that allow for the entire process to be automated. This is worth taking the time to vet and research the platform that will work best for your organization (and with your email provider).
3. This is likely not a surprise but when your email is crafted in a way that the recipient can tell you’ve done your research, it will always perform better. It can be as simple as including their first name, but including tidbits like their favorite sports team, or congratulating them on a recent promotion will catch their attention and keep them reading. 
4. Follow-up emails are invaluable in the cold email world and in most cases, you’ll need more than one touchpoint to convert a prospect. That’s where sequences come in. Your emails should flow in terms of the information the prospect is receiving, but it will also help to reference previously sent emails in your follow-up content. Don’t forget to include a CTA (call to action) in your subsequent emails!
5. Cold emails are, well… cold. This means that your prospects are likely receiving your email with little to no knowledge of you, your company, or how you can solve their problems. As a result, open rates (and even more so click and reply rates) will not be as impressive as your blast-style emails. Here is a great article that touches on cold email statistics.

So with all these trends in mind, what should YOU do before kicking off a cold email campaign?

1. Research your target audience. The more you know about your prospects and their struggles, the better you can speak to how those issues can be solved with your product or service. You should also have a few facts or interests in your back pocket to further personalize your message. LinkedIn is a great place to start becoming familiar with your audience members.
2. Keep it short. You have mere milliseconds to capture your prospect’s attention and keep them reading. If they open your email and see a giant block of text, chances are they are going to close out of it and trash it.
3. Be human. Even if you opt for one of the automated services listed above, your content should still sound like it was written by you, the sender. Overly formal, robotic, or cliché sales lingo is the perfect way to get your cold email sent to spam. Josh Braun has some great tips and pointers on how to craft cold emails in a human way in his Badass B2B Growth Guide.
4. Determine a test and update your emails based on your findings. Even though these are cold emails (and not your typical blast-style email), you should still find things to test so you know what resonates with your target audience. Think about send times, send days of the week, subject lines, or sender names (maybe your audience is more inclined to open your email when it’s sent from “John at Apple” rather than “John Doe”). Once you’ve run a test, take your findings and update your email content based on the results.

Are you utilizing cold emails in your marketing strategies? Tell me about the trends you’re seeing, the tests you’re running, or the results you’re experiencing on LinkedIn!