How to Build Effective B2B Cold Emails: 8 Tips You Need to Know

If you make your living from B2B sales, then you know how difficult it can be to craft an email campaign that converts your target audience into new clients. However, studies show that email is still the most effective way to secure new sales.

After consulting with B2B experts, we’ve come up with 8 tips to improve your B2B cold emails in order to gain new clients. Creating the best sales emails can take time can take time, but these 8 tips will start you down the path towards success in sales email marketing.

Learning these tips alone won’t automatically translate into cold email success, though. Be sure to see below the sales email examples with many of these tips put into practice.

Tip 1: Always use your business email and set sender name

It’s difficult to overstate how important it is to your cold email engagement rate. When performing outreach, you want to communicate to other businesses that you are trusted, reliable, and able to provide a type or degree of service that they cannot find from others.

As for the sender name, make sure you’ve set your real name, not a nickname, and the company you are working at.  

“Caroline” sounds way more professional than just a nickname of a person, and the company name increases the chances email will get opened.

As we’ve previously said, 65% of recipients judge by the sender name whether to open an email or not.

As for the business email address, it does credit to you and your email.

One crucial way to achieve professionalism is through the creation of a custom business email, like the example above. While this acts as free advertising in the first place (you’re showing off your brand), it also makes your contact easy to remember and a clear reflection of your commitment to your company’s upstanding business acumen.

G-suite by Google offers opportunities to acquire a business email.

Tip 2: Pay attention to the subject lines and avoid generic introductions

The subject line might be the most important part of your email. If it looks “spammy” or generic, the open rate will reflect that.

An email subject is your opportunity to make a stellar first impression with a couple of words.

Effective cold email subject lines:

• Story idea for Stripo;

• Not sure if you saw this;

• Your better-known competitors are closing your leads;

• Get qualified leads at low prices;

• I’d like to have your opinion on this;

• Could I borrow you for a second?;

• Stripo.email + YourCompanyName;

• Big thanks from YourCompanyName;

• Nice meeting you at Event.

One of the most important things you should consider is the length of the subject line. Try to limit it to 30 characters. This is a time-tested strategy because email open rates on mobile devices are increasing every year.

Additionally, include your recipient’s name in the subject to make it more personal. By doing this, you will let them know you are at least familiar with the company you are sending sales email to.

Ask a question if you like. Asking a simple and short question could arise your recipient’s curiosity.

Avoid subject lines that are in ALL CAPS. In the same vein, never include excessive exclamation marks and jargon. Keep the language simple and get straight to the point.

Also, avoid words like “last chances”, “hurry up”, etc., as they do not work here.

Tip 3: Be a problem solver

Prior to crafting your cold emails, your job is to find the problem this business suffers from. And only then you can come in as the problem solver in your sales email and provide a peek at what the future success looks like in easy to interpret terms.

The above email is a good example of how you can implement this tip. It indirectly solves the recipient’s biggest goal — he’s been looking for investors, and this sender invited him and his team to participate in this event where there were about 150 investors and sponsors.

Tip 4. Personalize emails

Here, we are not talking about addressing by names, as it goes without saying. We mean that you need to make some investigations, conduct some research prior to sending sales emails.

At a bare minimum, this level of personalization should include relevant references to the prospective client’s industry and specialty.

But this team has gone far ahead of the minimum personalization in sales emails. They mentioned they already know a lot about our brand, our features and they have already done us a favor.

Not only are such emails a polite gesture, but also show they are not just another bulk email a C-level executive receives.

Tip 5. Let them know you’ve met

If you’ve met in person — be sure to mention it in your sales emails, as this is your trump card.

Remind the event you had a pleasure to meet the recipient at.

How does it work? People are more likely to communicate with those whom they, maybe even barely, but know.

Tip 6. Send a fortuitous follow-up

Just as your initial cold email should be as rich and engaging as possible, your follow-up emails should follow a similar course while remaining as timely as ever. In general, follow-up emails should come over the course of several, non-successive days in order to ensure that your prospective client sees your message, even if they are temporarily out of the office.

As far as volume is concerned, there isn’t a set number of follow-up emails you should or should not send. While a few follow-up emails are prudent, know that each successive follow-up will have a diminishing return that may eventually result in your emails showing up as spam on the receiver’s end.  If you set a standard number of follow-ups, be willing to break with it if you are seeking a particularly viable client.

In terms of content, follow-up emails should include the same heart and soul as the original cold email with enough variation to inform the reader that it isn’t simply a copy-and-paste job. As stated above, try to play into a fresh sense of curiosity to intrinsically interest the reader.

Tip 7. Add call-to-action

This tip seems quite obvious to be mentioned among the best practices in sales email marketing. But I ran through my email box and noticed that the vast majority of sales emails do not have a clear call-to-action, some do not have it at all.

If the goal of your email is not just to say “hi”, be sure to add a clear noticeable call-to-action button with conforming copy that precedes the very button.

Tip 8. Email design matters

Remember to pay close attention to the sales email design. Of course, it should not be way too bright, yet it does not have to be colorless.

Even those sales emails that look like the plain-text ones, normally are HTML-based.

They have a header with logo, footer, and contact information.

All the aforementioned elements remain unchanged, while the module with text and the value proposition are editable.

For your convenience, Stripo has prepared a compilation of templates to help you write a good sales email in no time.

If you still decide to send plain-text cold emails, then you please be sure to add a professional email signature at the bottom of your email.

Final thoughts

• while it’s always good to be on the lookout for the ways you can improve your cold emails, you should also be mindful that you don’t fall into common pitfalls that will cause your audience to fully ignore your digital appeal. A prime example is the email length. Simply put, if your audience sees that an email is longer than expected, they will immediately ignore it – even if they like the initial appeal.

• next, be sure to talk about more than yourself. Like a bad first date who only wants to talk about their accomplishments, your cold email shouldn’t be jam-packed with information and examples about what your company has done in the past.

• instead, try to leave room for imagination by highlighting a few of your own successes and aligning them with your client’s present or future level of success. Maybe your product got an award for something? Make sure you let the potential customer know. That way, they’ll know that this is a match made in heaven.

• finally, you’ll want to avoid writing copy that sounds too default. This is a comment on how often folks who use email templating services settle for the default language. This language, while crisp and modern, can become repetitive in the eyes of your audience. Don’t forget that your recipients are receiving dozens, if not hundreds, of cold emails weekly. Make yours a standout.

• every cold email should start and end with your audience, so look to your core readers and customers in the future and try to forge a new, personalized method for creating B2B cold emails;

• effective cold email templates should be visually appealing without going over the top. While you can choose email colors that match the mood of the message, your best bet is to choose colors to match your organization (in order to build association) or neutral colors that don’t distract from the message. With a few simple visuals added in, you’ll be well on your way to a visually communicative email template.

Creating sales email templates on your own can be tough when you take both visual and written elements into account. In order to really take advantage of everything templated sales emails have to offer, Stripo can offer you an intuitive email templating tool that requires zero HTML skills.

Stripo also provides a compilation of the dedicated email templates.