Cold email outreach: 7 tips

How to do cold outreach

This practical piece is about benchmarks of cold outreach and how I achieve them.
Generally, cold outreach aims to get positive replies. That’s it. Lead scoring, qualification, other stuff — it all goes later.
Which tool works best for cold outreach? Just pick any. Most of them work with the same principle, the difference is in small features making your life more comfortable. I prefer Lemlist, but I’m quite okay with Reply.io, Outreach, Woodpecker, or Outplay. 
When you brainstorm and score the outreach hypotheses (ICE or RICE), you should have a data-driven statement of what means your test is booming and needs to scale.
“I have the confidence to proceed when reply rate is…”
That’s, for instance, how a successful hypothesis looks like for me:

Open rate, reply rate, bounce rate: what are the benchmarks?

Open rate >65-70% - means that my domain is warm and lovely, and my emails mainly reach the inbox. But generally, I achieve an 80-90% open rate for a few steps.If the open rate is <50%, it means my emails might go to spam. In this case, I stop all outreach campaigns and begin domain tests.
Reply rate >10% - depends on the audience; for some challenging audiences, I can target 5-7%, but honestly, 10% is the minimum which gives me a reason to test similar hypotheses.
Unsubscribe rate <5% - if I see an unsub rate is more than 5%, I can cautiously assume that these people are generally open to such cold communication, but this particular offer is not relevant to them (at all).
Bounce rate <3% - I carefully validated all emails and sent the campaign to only verified ones. 
I’ll simply tell you what I do to achieve those benchmarks. I consider them a bit above the usual industry numbers, but only because of my experience.

Tip 1. Small batches

It should be enough to make an initial validation of the hypothesis. If your open rate is 70%+ and you still don’t have any positive replies from 100 contacts, there is a problem. I can adjust the message and send 100 more, but if there are still no results, I consider this hypothesis failed.When I have 5-10 positive replies out of 100, I can send out 100 more. When I understand that it works (we have the responses, and we can convert these replies to SQL), I can continue this at scale.Small batches to test, then scale.

Tip 2. Maximum 3 steps in one offer

Here I start with some logic. If my domain is well-set, I should target an 80-90% open rate for three steps. So it means the vast majority of contacts will eventually read my message. If I couldn’t show the value in my letter, there is a problem with the message, not a lack of perseverance. 

Tip 3. No templates, please

I'm not sure I should emphasize it, but using templates is like cheating off someone’s homework. You can use the templates for inspiration to see how people build emails, what they describe, and how they address their UVP.
But usually, the template is a lucky shot, given without the context. And sometimes, I look at the templates that work, and they make me cry because I honestly don’t get how it could happen.
Your own hands can write the best cold outreach emails. I always craft texts for each campaign. Additionally, I should send as many different emails as possible within one batch. I use personalized sentences and Lemlist’s liquid syntax.
The templates of your UVP and your marketing guide are the only templates you can use. But I would not suggest making simple copy-paste from the marketing materials; in tip 7, I’ll tell you why.

Tip 4. One hypothesis - one entry point

Some entry points work better than others within the same ICP. So I prefer to test different entry points rather than “find CEO&CTO contacts and write to them.”
If I have buyer personas and marketing materials developed correctly, I can adjust company value with the value for this particular position. Two people - it's okay: "I am not sure that it's your area, so I also wrote to your colleague..." But if you send the same email to 3-4-5 people from the organization, you increase the possibility of being sent to spam. Because it is spam.

Tip 5. Add a warmup tool

I use Mailwarm to warm up my mailboxes; I can set the number of warmup emails and the reply rate there.Usually, the goal is to make it consistent. When I don’t have a campaign running in the particular email account, I typically set up 40-50 emails daily with a reply rate of 30-40%.

When I start the campaign, the reply rate on Mailwarm is up to 100%. That’s how I adjust the total reply rate of the domain. 

Be careful with the warmup tools; they are all kind of the same, but watch them - I heard some cases when the warmup tool caused increased spam rates.

6. Stop the campaign for the company when someone responds

If I target two people from one company (rarely, but it happens), it makes sense to stop the campaign for the second company contact when I have a positive reply from the first one.

Usually, I divide one batch into two touches, for instance:

7. Cold outreach is not the TOFU

Some companies start outbound activities already having marketing guides and materials, where they usually state their vision, mission, UVP, Jobs-to-be-done, and buyer personas.
The first thought is to copy-paste these statements “as is.” Still, if these marketing materials are created correctly, they usually appeal to the very top of the funnel: Facebook advertisements, texts on the website, etc. That’s how you get the attention of the broader buyer persona.
If we do cold outreach, we suggest (or we’re pretty sure) that the particular company has these particular problems we can solve in a particular way. So, instead of chanting marketing slogans, I prefer describing how exactly we can help.
Happy emailing!