When you want to build brand awareness to effectively grow your brand, it’s highly recommended that you perform email outreach, which is also referred to as cold emailing. Conducting email outreach means sending emails to people you have never had prior contact with but believe would be interested in your brand. Along with building brand awareness, many businesses and brands use email outreach to acquire new leads and grow their social proof. The right email outreach tactic could end in your product being advertised by a very popular influencer.

Keep in mind that there are multiple approaches that can be used when performing email outreach. For one, you could send a mass-produced email to numerous recipients, which would allow you to reach a large number of people in a short period of time. This approach can also be automated, which means that you won’t need to do as much work to cultivate new leads. The only thing you need to make this approach work is an email template that contains a few changeable elements. For instance, it’s important that you change the recipient’s name with each email you send.

While sending mass-produced emails can help you gain new leads, this approach typically results in low response rates. In fact, the average rate of response for a mass-produced email is around 8.5%, which may not be what you’re looking for. To mitigate this issue, you could send a more targeted email when performing email outreach. The following article provides seven tips and guidelines that should help you perform effective email outreach that produces excellent results.

1. Research

The first and possibly most important tip for your email outreach campaign is to perform extensive research. Unless you use mass-produced emails that don’t gain a high response rate, research is necessary to gain information about your audience that can be placed in the emails you send. Keep in mind that your competition is attempting to reach the same customer. You can stay ahead of your competition by performing comprehensive research into your audience before you begin your email outreach efforts.

It’s important to know what your audience wants from your business and what type of experience they would like to have when doing business with you. LinkedIn is currently among the best sites you can use when conducting research. This particular website is useful for email outreach because it allows you to build a connection with potential customers before asking for something. Keep in mind that LinkedIn users don’t receive as many cold emails/messages as members of other social media websites, which should make it easier for you to obtain responses.

You should consider performing extensive social media research, which will allow you to learn more about your audience and what types of brands they do business with. You could even mention a piece of this information when first contacting a member of your audience, which is a great way to establish a connection.

2. Create an Encapsulating First Hook

When you’re creating an email to be used in your email outreach efforts, it’s important to create a compelling first hook that will instantly grab the reader’s attention. Most of the people you send these emails to will receive dozens of emails every day, which means that your email should stand out from the rest if you want the individual to continue reading it. When reading an email, most users have an attention span of eight seconds, which you should keep in mind when designing your next emails.

Pay special attention to the email’s subject line, which can be viewed before the user opens the email. This line can pique the user’s attention enough to get them to open the email. A recent study shows that nearly 50% of users will choose to open an email based primarily on the subject line. While the actual content of your email is important, the only way that users will be able to read this content is if they first open the email, which can only occur if your subject line hooks the user.

3. Personalize the Message

Your next step should be to personalize the message, which is a great way to make your brand seem more personable to the end-user. You should avoid making the mistake of sending the exact same email to different recipients, which can make the email appear similar to spam for many users. Try to stay away from spam trigger words, which are phrases that email providers will immediately flag as fraudulent. These phrases can include everything from “order status” to “earn more money”.

Modern audiences want authenticity from the brands they do business with, which is why personalizing your emails is highly recommended before performing outreach. While you can certainly use a template for these emails, you should make sure that the template you use can be customized. Even small amounts of personalization can make your brand seem more authentic to users.

4. Include Value In the Message

Likely the first thing you should add to your cold email message is value, which is what most modern audiences are looking for when opening any email. If you properly add value to your email, you could create a connection with the recipient at the same time. When you provide users with value, they are more likely to respond to your email. The type of value and data you add depends on the type of audience you’re sending cold emails to.

If you run an eCommerce business and are attempting to bring users to your website where they can be converted into return customers, the value you add could be a product discount or the ability to obtain site membership at a reduced rate. If you manage a blogging website and are attempting to grow your brand by writing posts on more popular websites, the value could come in the form of links with high domain authority.

5. Make Your Messaging Comedic

Humor is a great way to make a connection with your audience. The only way to build a connection is by making the recipient feel some kind of emotion. A serious email that contains no humor will only serve to make the recipient bored. Humorous and comedic emails have proven to be more memorable than serious emails. To that end, consider placing funny jokes, memes, or wordplay into your emails. The jokes don’t have to be amazing. What this humor does is make your emails more personable, which should make the recipient feel closer to your brand.

6. Save them Time

Another key goal when creating emails for your email outreach efforts is to do what you can to reduce the amount of time the user spends reading emails. Surprisingly enough, people spend an average of 2.5 hours per day reading through their emails. Along with reading emails, recipients oftentimes feel the need to respond, which can take up an ample amount of time throughout the day. You can mitigate this issue for email recipients by making it easy for the user to reply.

One method you can use is to add a list of possible responses to the end of your email, after which you can ask users to reply. Each response you include in the email should be tied to a number. Instead of writing out a lengthy response, users can simply write the number corresponding to the response they’d like to give, which should only take a few seconds of their time. You could also send an email that asks for a simple yes or no response. If you want to make your brand more appealing to potential audiences, it’s important that you go above and beyond when trying to gain their business.

7. Follow Up

Even if users are opening your emails at a high rate, this likely won’t be enough to obtain high response rates. Because users have a short attention span, they may not remain interested long enough to reply. A key component of any email outreach strategy involves follow-ups, which are additional emails that follow up your initial one.

Before you send follow-up emails, keep in mind that email etiquette differs with each country. Recipients in Europe may find follow-ups to be too aggressive if you send a large number of them in a short period of time. You can avoid this issue by sending 2-3 follow-ups over a period of 14 days. It’s also possible that a single follow-up would be enough to grab the user’s attention and gain a reply. Make sure that any follow-up emails are short and succinct.

Conclusion on Email Outreach

Email outreach is important to nearly every business and is a great way to improve brand image among people who have yet to become customers. Make sure that you start your email outreach with some extensive research that gives you the information you need to send personalized emails to recipients. You can also add comedy or value to the message to make users more likely to respond. If your response rate is high enough, you should notice an uptick in the amount of business you do and the number of new customers who are engaging with your brand.

Keep in mind that emailing tactics can differ from social media tactics when taking outreach into account. Social media outreach can involve sending more messages to customers. It can also be easier to create a connection with social media users on websites like LinkedIn. However, email outreach is effective because of how simple it is to send emails to hundreds or thousands of potential customers. If you’ve built up an email list, you can tap into this list before your next email outreach campaign.

It can take any amount of time to become successful at email outreach. If you use the tips and tactics mentioned above, you could start gaining high response rates from your first batch of emails. If follow-ups need to be sent, it’s possible for you to become successful at outreach in only 1-2 months. Make sure that you take time to perform research and that you offer value that readers can respond to.