How do you craft emails that are engaging to readers?

Are you struggling with cold emailing? You are not alone. With over 118 billion consumer emails being sent and received daily, it is not surprising for your cold email to get lost in the crowd. The fact that 80 per cent of emails get deleted under 3.2 seconds on an average doesn’t help your case either.

But even in 2019, cold emailing is considered to be a cheap and effective method of acquiring customers and driving revenues. Email is an essential marketing activity to be undertaken by businesses to sustain in a competitive market.

However, writing the perfect cold email is an overwhelming process. For starters, businesses can’t be successful at it unless they conduct in-depth research on their target customer base. With less than 24 per cent of sales emails being opened, it further proves that some businesses are not doing a great job.

Only when that’s sorted should they move forward with writing. Here are five elements that constitute the anatomy of a perfect cold email:

1. Hook

The average attention span of a human being is approximately eight seconds. Therefore, when writing an email, strive to have their focus in the first two sentences. Give them something that makes them want to read the rest of your cold email.

Also Read: How engaged are different devices with emails?

This is where your research will come in handy. LinkedIn and Twitter are two powerful tools to get both professional and personal information about a target customer. You could start your email by mentioning a hobby you share or a common point of contact.

When you put a bit of an effort in personalizing the email, your credibility gets a boost, and your target customers see you as a trusted resource.

2. Pain points

Cold emails comprising a long list of product features or service offerings don’t perform anymore and immediately get deleted. Your prospective customers don’t want to know what you do in general. They can mine that information by visiting your website. Their primary interest lies in understanding how your business can reduce their pain points.

3. Call-To-Action

Cold emails that request an explicit, specific action get a much higher response rate than the ones that don’t. Therefore, if you don’t finish your email with a question, request or instructions for the next step, the chances of it getting ignored increase.

4. Length & tone

Just because there’s no word limit doesn’t mean you should type a 1000-word email. Your target customer will immediately hit the Trash button on seeing the length. A Boomerang for Gmail study reports users prefer to receive shorter emails since they are much easier to process.

Jot down a few points you’d want to highlight, and then draft your message without jeopardising your value proposition.

Also Read: 7 practical ways to design accessible emails, so that everyone can read, reply, and act

Additionally, being overly enthusiastic or negative on email can also have an adverse impact on the response rate. Your target customers should feel good after reading your email. Strive to achieve that.

5. Subject line

Successful cold emails have fantastic subject lines! Get creative while picking the most appealing of them from the lot. Avoid using spammy or sales-centric words like confirm, limited offer and invite in your subject lines.

Instead, pick words like demo, opportunity, conference, payments, and connect as they resonate better with the users.

Hire an expert writer for better results

Conduct writing workshops for your sales team to help them better their email writing skills if your budget allows. But if that isn’t possible, seeking professional help can benefit your business immensely.

A writer who has a knack of grasping the know-how of your industry can easily churn customisable cold email templates efficiently for you, and save your time. You can always get in touch with me to see if I am the right fit for your business. I am just saying!

Endnotes

The number of email users is expected to reach 2.9 billion worldwide by the end of the year, with 61 per cent of online adults using email on an average day. The bottom line is cold emailing can be impactful when done right. Are you ready to write effective emails?

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Image Credit : Aleksey Boldin

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