How Can I Grow My Small Business Using Cold Mass Emails?

Find out how your business can harness the power of cold mass emails to grow your customer base

One of the most often overlooked yet effective ways to grow a small business is through cold mass emails. If you have just entered the digital marketing world, you might be wondering — what exactly is a cold email. A cold email is a marketing email that is sent without solicitation from the recipient. That is to say, a cold email is an email that just appears in a potential customer’s inbox. 

Cold emails often get confused with spam emails, which are a bit more haphazard and are not a great way to get the word out about your business. Cold email address lists are often carefully researched to achieve the maximum amount of engagement from recipients. So, let’s find out how to craft the perfect cold email to enhance your small business marketing campaign.

Create a Robust and Researched Email List

Before you start crafting your cold mass email, you need to do your research

When deciding to use cold mass email marketing to grow your business, the first step is to conduct an outreach campaign. An outreach campaign involves identifying a specific target audience that you want to influence. Your target audience is often referred to as a “customer persona” in the world of cold emails. To get started conducting your research, let’s discuss a common method for small businesses to create email lists.

Manual Prospecting

One of the main ways that small businesses will create their email lists is through manual prospecting. Manual prospecting involves using common search engines and social media sites. For example, you can use Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Linkedin to manually amass a list of confirmed addresses. This may seem like a rudimentary technique, but for a small business, it is often much more effective than buying large swaths of data. 

Buying data works for some, but for growing companies, your intuition is more valuable than large amounts of data. Manual prospecting also tends to garner more results. 

So, once you’ve identified your target audience and created a list from publicly available information, it’s time to start crafting your email.

Start Crafting An Excellent Cold Mass Email

Writing an effective cold mass email is difficult, that’s why we’re here to help

Now it’s time to discuss the hardest part of crafting a cold mass email — the writing. Before you hit send on your marketing email, there are a few boxes you need to check. Let’s go over some of the key components of mass emails and how you can use them to convert new customers.

Start With Engaging Subject Lines

Subject lines are the first thing potential customers will see in their inbox when they encounter your email, so it’s important to make a great first impression. If you are using an ineffective subject line, you could jeopardize your whole campaign. When you are writing a subject line you should remember these three important points:

1. Be brief – Don’t try to cram all of your essential information into the subject line.
2. Create interest – If your subject line doesn’t grab your reader, they are less likely to open and interact with your campaign.
3. Don’t exaggerate – Your subject line should accurately reflect the content of your email. That means no “clickbait” subject lines or you could be crossing the line into spam territory.

Use the Email Body to Inform Your Potential Customers

Once you’ve settled on a catchy subject line, it’s time to get into writing the copy for the email itself. Just like we discussed with subject lines, it’s best practice to stick to the most essential points you want to convey to consumers. Let’s go over the steps to write a convincing cold email to grow your small business:

1. Identify your goal – You should set out writing your email copy with a clear goal in mind. In this case, you’re likely trying to grow your customer base and create conversions.
2. Convey to the reader why you’re reaching out – Your cold email needs to get to the “why” quickly or else readers will be unsure how to interpret your campaign. It’s helpful to consider how consumers will benefit from your product or service and use those benefits as your starting point.
3. Implement a strong CTA – a CTA or “call to action” tells the reader how they should proceed. Some common examples include “To learn more about our company, click here!” or “Don’t miss out on the best holiday gifts, shop now!” No matter how you structure your CTA, it should clearly state how consumers should interact with your cold email.

Don’t Underestimate the Efficacy of an Email Signature

The last aspect of the email you need to tackle is the signature. Email signatures are often overlooked when it comes to mass email marketing. However, your email signature can really affect how recipients perceive your business. To create an effective email signature, make sure that your recipients have access to all of your most important links and social media. That way, if a reader misses the CTA, there are still other ways they can interact with your content. Once you’ve created your email signature, you’re almost done setting up your cold mass email campaign, there are just a few more things to mention.

Avoid Falling into Spammy Mass Email Habits

If your mass email campaign is using spammy tactics, your emails are more likely to end up in the trash

Finally, now that you know how to craft an email campaign for your small business, the last step is to avoid spamming your base. Here are a few things you can do to keep your campaign looking legitimate and enticing to consumers. 

1. Don’t directly copy a template
2. Keep the email concise
3. Don’t send your emails too frequently

If you follow these rules, your cold mass emails will maintain their credibility and you can retain consumers rather than putting them off by using spam tactics. 

And there you have it, once you’ve written your email, it’s time to find the right application to get the word out there. After that, analyze your campaign to determine its efficacy. Good luck and happy emailing!