3 Expert Insights About Cold Email (April 2024)

While the debate continues to rage about whether or not cold email is dead, the cold hard truth (no pun intended) is that – for now – cold email remains a low-cost yet challenging growth tactic.

So that you save time and improve outbound results, here are three expert tactics you can use for your cold emails today.

Emails should look like text messages

According to Justin Michael, “Emails MUST be visual and MUST look like text messages.”

The more an email looks like a text message, the better its results. At minimum, you should see higher open rates if not click-through rates or reply rates.

This is especially true in an era where some rely on long vanilla emails generated by ChatGPT.

How you can apply this

Here’s what you’ll need to keep in mind if you want to apply this insight to your cold emails:

• Stay concise and to the point – Chances are the majority of your texts are short and very direct. Nowadays, your emails should be the same. It has the added benefit of showing you’re not using ChatGPT for generating emails.
• Include visuals when the moment is right – Your first-touch emails should stay textual, but nothing stops you from adding a visual for your second follow-up. Visuals are a good way of communicating info, and for B2B, one of the best visuals is the Venn diagram.
• Keep subject lines brief – For the last 50+ years, we learned that a subject line should summarize the contents of an email. While this is probably still true in the case of inbound emails, you might see better open rates for cold outbound with subject lines that are 1-3 words long.

Figure out your “North Star” metric

As Pawel Huryn explains, the North Star Metric is a single metric that is easy to understand, customer-centric, and capable of helping the team create focus and track progress towards their goal.

For instance, Tinder might use “Matches made” as their North Star metric, while Uber may choose the “number of rides per week”.

But before you figure out your North Star metric, you need to determine the ‘game’ you’re playing. 

How you can apply this

If you want to use the North Star metric for your cold emails, here’s what you should do:

• Figure out the ‘game’ you’re playing – What’s the intent of your email? Common goals include capturing attention, making a transaction, and improving productivity, though this last one is probably not a good fit for cold email.
• Define your North Star metric – What do you hope to achieve with your emails? Do you want to generate leads, schedule meetings, or close deals? Once you have your goal in mind, identify the metric that best shows progress towards that goal. For instance, if you want to schedule meetings with leads who are in the later stages of their customer journey, your North Star metric could be the number of qualified meetings booked. 
• Track results – Now that you have your North Star metric, you’ll want to start measuring your progress towards it. This might involve monitoring various email metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate so that you can get insight into which elements of your outreach could be causing fewer bookings that you expect.

Get to the point asap

As Yurii Veremchuk shares, your cold emails have up to 60-70 words to get the job done.

That’s why you’ll want to skip the introduction, as well as any standard greetings like “How’re you?”

In your limited space, you need to cut to the chase as quickly as possible. By doing so, you grow your chances of a sale.

How you can apply this

To improve the effectiveness of your cold emails, here’s what you should do:

• Focus on value – Skipping the intro and pleasantries allows you to start off with your value prop. You can then use the remaining (albeit limited) space to quickly cover how your solution can solve their pains.
• Tailor the message to the recipient – Rather than introducing yourself, you can use the space for personalizing the email. You can work in mentions of their name, company, or even specific details that show you’ve done your research and understand their challenge.
• Respect their time – Keeping your emails crisp, concise, and to the point shows that you’re mindful of their time, which they’ll likely appreciate and make them more willing to respond.

Send crisp, human-like emails with AiSDR

Using a lead’s recent LinkedIn activity and your HubSpot data, AiSDR creates cold emails that are crisp, to the point, and personalized. It uses sales tactics like the ones above from over 50 sales leaders to enjoy your writing style and tone look and sound human.

The AI also handles automatic follow-ups, answers questions, addresses objections, and pauses and resumes messages according to auto-replies and out-of-office messages.

Book a demo to see how AiSDR crafts emails.