Cold email is more than keywords, personalization, and templates.
Cold messaging for outbound sales is hard because your solution and outreach will generate different results based on market positioning, competitors, buyers, sales process, and more.
While templates and formulas are a great way to start a cold email campaign, you’ll gain more control over your sales outcomes by understanding the best practices of outbound messaging.
To help you consistently generate better results with cold email, here is an overview of 5 important elements you should use when building cold messaging.
#1) Focus
The biggest mistake made in cold email is a lack of focus.
Even a qualified, interested buyer won’t take action on an email with too many words, too many concepts, or too much information to process.
Modern buyers are overwhelmed and have to spend their time on emails wisely. Email categorization, filtering, and prioritization is giving recipients more control than ever in the inbox.
Focus is about setting the stage for the conversation and helps make you more understandable, digestible, and memorable in the inbox.
A solution might solve 5 problems for a buyer, but stuffing all 5 concepts into one email won’t increase the chances that recipients will notice, read, or take action on that email.
Instead, dedicate each email to a specific pain, benefit, or theme that can resonate with buyers. If a buyer has 5 problems to solve, which one is the most important or urgent to share first?
With a commitment to focused cold messaging, you’ll have more visibility into what approaches are generating results and have better structure for cold email testing.
#2) Clarity
A message can be focused and still be confusing.
While focus helps define the topics of your email, clarity is how you present messaging.
Buyers expect a lot from sellers. One of the biggest expectations from buyers is that sellers will be experienced, informed experts that can effectively communicate about their industry.
The more words and detail you provide in an email, the more you risk diluting any interest, motivation, and influence you create within the buyer’s mind.
Copywriting is an art: the most effective cold messaging gets attention with as few words as possible and with writing as clear as possible.
Clear and concise writing is about more than just getting attention. Buyers depend on sellers for information and often prefer the more reliable, accessible, and understandable sources.
Instead of sharing everything about your solution or giving a lecture on a buyer use case, get to the point and emphasize digestible messaging that can be understood and remembered.
#3) Alignment
Beyond focus and clarity is how the messaging in an email is structured.
Every sentence in an email impacts how a buyer reacts, so how you present your argument, how you order messaging, and how sentences interact together is important.
Without the ability to keep your emails aligned from beginning to end, you risk being misunderstood, undifferentiated, and not valuable enough for buyers to take action.
Alignment is about creating cold emails with a cohesive, well-supported argument that is consistent from the subject line to the very last sentence.
For example, the 2nd sentence in email would need to align with and support the messaging in the 1st sentence in order to maintain a buyer’s attention and motivate them to continue reading.
The difference between you and your competitors in a buyer’s inbox is determined by the strength, cohesiveness, and persuasiveness of your messaging.
#4) Relevance
Even an industry-leading company won’t make an impact with cold email if their solution and messaging is perceived as irrelevant to their target buyers.
At the end of the day, buyers are people with busy lives and only care about conversations that they find relevant for their life, career, or team.
Relevance is one of the hardest elements to master because it’s subjective: every company, buyer, team, and situation will react to cold messaging differently.
Capturing attention is not enough. If your messaging doesn’t create urgency, influence thinking, and motivate action, then you risk losing touch with your target buyers.
To keep messaging relevant, you have to stay relevant: regularly do research on your buyers, constantly test new ideas and messaging, and learn from the buyer conversations you have.
What do your buyers care about?
Answer this question and you’ll be able to keep your messaging informative, engaging, and relevant enough to keep your brand relevant.
#5) Direction
Your email resonated. After several touches, the buyer is interested, curious, and awaiting your recommendation for a next step to kick off the conversation.
Do you ask for a call or demo? Send a link? Offer to share more information?
The journey you provide and vision you present is essential to motivating buyers to take the actions you want. Without clear direction, even interested buyers won’t take the 1st step.
Direction is the transition from a cold message to an engaged conversation and a buyer moving forward in your sales process. Most buyers expect sellers to guide them throughout the journey.
If your call-to-action (CTA) is too confusing, complicated, or time-consuming, you risk discouraging buyers from responding, prioritizing, or engaging with your emails.
Time is limited, so your cold messaging needs to structure a clear vision with next steps that are easy to do, relevant to buyers, and aligned with the buying process of your target accounts.
Conclusion
Cold email is just one of many outbound sales channels.
Modern buyers have evolved and today’s selling environment is quickly changing in response, which is a big challenge for sellers that rely on past or overused methods to win sales.
Effective cold messaging goes beyond keywords, topics, and personalization.
Without the right best practices around outbound outreach, you risk getting lost in the inbox, turning off buyers, and losing control over the sales outcomes you generate with cold email.
The best cold emails don’t come from a template or personalization tactic. Instead, successful cold messaging is differentiated in how it engages, influences, and motivates buyers.
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