How to start selling services using cold email outreach

Our inboxes are inundated with poor-quality sales emails. So, how are some people making it work?

Getting prospects who haven’t heard of your business to reply to sales emails (cold sales outreach) is tough. But, if you use a more modern approach it can provide a relatively low cost, scalable way to get new leads.

Our blog explains how to develop your first campaigns and start generating leads from cold email outreach.

What people get wrong with outbound

Let’s start with what to avoid. It’s highly likely that you’ve been sent an email that makes one of these mistakes:

• Bad targeting: The majority of emails are ignored because the service simply isn’t relevant to the person receiving the message.

• Long email sequences: They send three or four messages, checking if you’re interested or saying that they’re “still waiting for your answer”.

• Outlandish claims: The email uses case studies that are clearly exaggerated.

• Narcissism: The email only talks about them.

Poor targeting and a lack of personalisation are hallmarks of an approach to cold email that doesn’t work anymore.

Modern outreach is targeted and highly personalised. That starts with being specific about your target audience.

Understanding who to target

Start by identifying a group of people who have a specific pain point. That means moving beyond targeting job titles to the day-to-day challenges they experience.

Avalanche founder Naeem Alvi-Assinder advises this:

“Lean on your success stories as a starting point. If you have a really strong case study where you helped a financial services company to achieve X, focus on that as a target market.”

So, a social media agency might target heads of marketing at financial services companies in a certain sector whose leadership team doesn’t post on LinkedIn.

Finding data to power your B2B email campaigns

LinkedIn is the easiest way to start developing a list of potential targets (the platform makes it easy to export your connections).

The other key places to look are membership and industry directories and lists of award winners.

Working with this data requires a basic understanding of using spreadsheets, and you’ll often need to find email addresses (try Findymail or Prospeo) and validate targets manually.

Tools like Apollo and Clay can automate the process when you’ve validated the approach and are ready to scale.

Common types of cold email outreach campaigns

Once you have a list of people to target, it’s time to start thinking about the contents of your campaign.

Here are four cold email outreach frameworks Avalanche’s team developed, which you can customise for your audience:

1. Shared commonality: Use things you have in common to establish rapport. Start by mentioning the shared element, and then talk about similar businesses you have helped with a specific, relatable pain point.

2. White paper research: Ask for their perspective on specific questions related to your service, offer to credit their input and use their responses to customise your follow-up approach.

3. Lead magnet offer: Offer to share a valuable resource that addresses their challenge.

4. Invite to event: Invite them to a focused gathering of industry professionals and position yourself as a valuable connector in their field.

Download Avalanche’s email copy frameworks guide to view the email templates for these approaches.

Drafting cold outreach emails that work

Emails need to do three things:

1. Demonstrate genuine relevance: Include something that makes the email feel very relevant to the person receiving it.

2. Establish social proof: Mention something that establishes authority or expertise.

3. Encourage them to take action: Aim to start a conversation, try to think of something that’s high value and low risk.

Test, learn and iterate

Finding an approach that works for your business requires testing different campaigns and figuring out what works for you.

We recommend developing three to five emails with different offers or messages, and sending each version to 10 people on your list.

You can then drop the campaigns that get low reply rates and improve the ones that work. When you hit on a winning approach, you can start to increase the volume of emails you send.

What should you do if your cold email campaigns aren’t working? Here’s Naeem’s recommendation:

“I would look at the targeting first. If you’re not getting any replies, it’s likely you’re emailing the wrong person in the business.”

The next biggest thing is the call to action. Asking someone you’ve never met for a 30-minute call is unlikely to work. Instead, try to think of a way to start a conversation.

Scaling your sales email outreach

Email providers like Gmail monitor the quality of the messages they receive. If a domain (for example, @enterprisenation.com) starts sending “spam”, emails can get blocked.

To avoid falling foul of spam filters, we recommend you:

1. validate email addresses using a tool like LeadMagic

2. remove links and images from your email

3. create thoughtful and well-targeted campaigns

4. stop sending campaigns that aren’t getting healthy reply rates

5. include a clear opt-out in your emails

Companies that send cold emails at scale tend to set up new domains for outreach. If you want to go down that route, it’s worth talking to an expert as going through processes like “warming up” domains is technically complicated.

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