Email is nothing more than a digital channel for communication.
While you can use cold email for outbound sales, there are countless other ways you can apply the email channel to different parts of your life or business.
Whether you’re an employer, employee, entrepreneur, or freelancer, the skills of effective outbound email communications can have a huge impact on your career.
To shed light on the many diverse ways to use email, here are 11 unique situations where cold email skills can be incredibly useful.
1) Outbound Sales
Buyers everywhere will eventually see a gap, search for solutions, and purchase. The job of an outbound seller is to be the first among competitors to contact and influence these buyers.
Email is invaluable for outbound sales because it’s digital: cold emails can be customized, sent at scale, and automated much easier than other outbound channels like cold calling.
With the right targeting and messaging backed by research, you can use the email channel to consistently generate revenue for yourself or your business.
2) Recruiting
Thousands of people across the world are looking for employment, hoping for a new job, or searching for bigger career opportunities.
Many recruiters rely on the email channel for both themselves and their clients, unlocking the scale and visibility needed to quickly fill job positions.
With the rise of freelance marketplaces and a growing recruiting industry, email is giving recruiting businesses the opportunity to stay competitive and grow.
3) Job Hunting
Looking for a job?
You don’t have to be a business or an employee to get value from the email channel.
With a list of potential employers and a few outbound emails, you can quickly build new relationships, start conversations, and find job opportunities.
Even if you’re not a fit for some of the organizations you contact, you might be the perfect fit for one of their clients, partners, or someone else in their network.
4) Search Marketing
Search marketing requires a lot of coordination and communication: backlinks, guest posts, off-page SEO, co-promotions, social reach, and more.
By using the email channel for SEO, you gain more control over your search rankings and can build marketing relationships faster.
Digital growth in today’s overcrowded environment takes the people and resources to drive momentum. Email unlocks the scale needed to manage full-scale search marketing initiatives.
5) Customer Discovery
As a new consultant or startup, one of the hardest challenges is identifying who will happily pay you and what solutions these paying customers need.
Customer discovery is about interviewing real buyers about their environment, problems, and the missing pieces that would be worth fixing with a solution.
In the past, customer discovery was often conducted as a large in-person or phone-based survey. With email, you can gather intelligence, share information digitally, and categorize your conversations to make it as easy as possible to extract customer insights.
6) Alliances & Partnerships
Hundreds of companies share complimentary audiences, create mutually-beneficial content, and collaborate on a variety of growth initiatives with partners.
Partnerships & alliances can create huge advantages for your company and help empower your ability to market, sell, and grow.
The email channel gives you instant access to new conversations, so a few emails to the right list can build a powerful partner network for co-promotion or collaboration.
7) Referrals & Affiliates
While partnerships can arise for a variety of reasons, one of the most profitable types are affiliates and channel partners that are focused on generating revenue.
Because referrals are focused on profitability for both sides, it’s much easier to generate interest for a referral partnership via email than selling a solution.
Rather than converting 1 sale with a cold email, you can target partners that can potentially generate hundreds of customer referrals.
8) Events & Conferences
Somewhere out there, an event is happening that could change a person’s life.
In today’s era of social distancing and working from home, events and conferences are going digital and creating the perfect environment for event-driven email content.
Whether it be a social network meetup, live digital conference, or a pre-recorded video course, there are countless ways to bring a digital community together and generate value for everyone.
9) Re-Engagement & Nurture
Life is busy. Relationships, conversations, and initiatives take time.
Whether you’re selling or building momentum towards a collaboration, it’s unlikely that you’ll motivate action and move things forward on the 1st touch.
In fact, data analysis from Quickmail on 1+ million cold email replies found that only 33% of replies come from the 1st email. The remaining 67% of replies come from a follow-up.
Emails can be sequenced, automated, and managed at scale, which makes it an effective channel for nurturing conversations and staying top-of-mind.
10) Customer Testimonials & Reviews
The experiences and stories of your customers are invaluable. A brand’s reputation and authority is largely dictated by the perspectives your customers share.
In the past, companies were limited in the ways they could utilize and broadcast customer experiences. With the advent of social networks, review sites, and so many digital mediums, it’s now possible to use customer stories as the foundation of your brand & messaging.
Email is often used to communicate with customers, so using the same channel to learn about their experiences would naturally generate higher engagement than unused channels.
11) Personal Branding & Networking
How much value would you get from 50 conversations every month? What would it be worth to hear advice from an experienced veteran in your industry?
Relationships are at the center of growth and career development. As you grow your personal brand and network, the potential value of your future multiplies.
Before email existed, you needed to know the right people, have access to the right information, and be at the right places to grow your network and brand.
Channels like email now give you access to any person with an email. Whether it be connecting with a mentor, potential colleague, or Mark Cuban, email gives you the ability to connect with anyone in the world.
Conclusion
Email has the power to change your life. It all depends on how you use it.
Regardless of where you are in your career, email communication skills can help give you more access, more influence, and more reach in a world of digital networking.
There are countless other ways to use the email channel that go beyond these 11 examples.
How do you use email? Let me know in the comments below!
[Generating outbound leads? Check out our new free video series The Cold Email Playbook to get insights and content from 7 outbound & cold email experts!]