Cold outreach email study

Sending ‘cold’ emails to prospective clients has a bad reputation. Mainly because of the sheer volume of such marketing attempts and also because of poor execution. It’s therefore understandable that we are reluctant to contribute to the noise but it can be a powerful tool when executed effectively.

Getting cold email outreach right.

The ultimate goal of a cold email is to create a connection with someone. Taking the ‘hard-sell’ approach rarely works particularly in the case where you are looking to establish a long term relationship with someone new. Try focussing on what you can offer them, rather than what you want from them. Consider such things as opportunities for collaboration or access to information they would value or are interested in.

Make your story compelling.

Highlight your (or your company’s) reputation, add examples of your prior successes, anything to assist engagement that demonstrates your value proposition. But don’t overdo it. The goal is to get an initial connection, not get them to accept a marriage proposal.

Wouldn’t it be great to know what works and what doesn’t?

Good news! Brian Dean from Backlinko has recently published an informative article outlining the results of an analysis project covering 12 million email outreaches. Below is a summary of the findings. I encourage you to read Brian’s full post for complete information about the the analysis project that will be valuable to your business when you decide to start a cold email outreach campaign.

1. The vast majority of outreach messages are ignored. Only 8.5% of outreach emails receive a response.
2. Outreach emails with long subject lines have a 24.6% higher average response rate compared to those with short subject lines.
3. Follow-ups appear to significantly improve response rates. Emailing the same contact multiple times leads to 2x more responses.
4. Reaching out to multiple contacts can also lead to more success. The response rate of messages sent to several contacts is 93% higher than messages sent to a single person.
5. Personalised subject lines boost response rate by 30.5%. Therefore, personalising subject lines appears to have a large impact on outreach campaign results.
6. Personalising outreach email body content also seems to be an effective way to increase response rates. Emails with personalised message bodies have a 32.7% better response rate than those that don’t personalise their messages.
7. Wednesday is the “best” day to send outreach emails. Saturday is the worst. However, we didn’t find an especially large difference in response rates between different days that messages were sent.
8. Linking to social profiles in email signatures may result in better response rates. Twitter was correlated with an 8.2% increase, LinkedIn an 11.5% increase, and Instagram a 23.4% increase.
9. The most successful outreach campaigns reach out to multiple contacts multiple times. Email sequences with multiple attempts and multiple contacts boost response rates by 160%.
10.  Certain types of outreach get higher response rates than others. Outreach messages related to guest posting, roundups and links have an especially high response rate.