Five Personalization Hacks for Cold Emails to Double Your Open & Conversion Rates

As a powerful hack in the sphere of sales and marketing, cold emails play a pivotal role in prospecting and conversion. Cold emails are employed as an outreach platform to build an ongoing relationship with a prospect. Many times the prospect who is a total stranger, has little or no idea about you or your product, which puts cold emails at risk of being marked spam; remain unopened or sometimes even discarded. But when personalized, cold emails can be a favourable medium for communication.

Emails deliver the highest ROI for marketers, making them a solid contender in the sales engagement funnel. Therefore it is essential to capitalize on the advantages of this tool the right way.

Why Personalize?

An average user gets about 147 emails per day. However, not even 50 per cent these emails are opened, forget about being read. On the contrary, personalized emails deliver six times higher engagement rates.

Personalization resonates well with the leads you are trying to sell your product to because it sends out a message that they are important to you, makes them feel valued because they see their name, clear objective of why it is relevant to them thereby upping the chances of considering to respond (even if it is negative).

1. Know your Target

Get to know your leads. Aside their name, learning about their relevance with your product, interests and even their authority in the business will give you a clue to make your content relevant to their needs.

You need to tailor your content around the information you gathered about them so that they don’t feel uncomfortable being contacted out of the blue.

You could get some insights about their interests using the following ways :

1. Read about them on social — Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter — know their strengths, responsibilities, problem points and try to figure a pattern where your product could play a role.
2. Focus on what keeps them up all day — try to provide a relevant solution.
3. Try and find mutual connections that you can mention while writing to them, helping them warm up to you quickly.
4. Reference their work that could make it relevant for you to establish a connection.

By doing any or all of the above, you not only try and lay a strong foundation in understanding your audience but also see fit where your product could be of value, in turn, establishing the personalization factor.

2. Personalize the Email

The key to personalizing your cold email is to start with the subject line. The subject line is the first thing a prospect is going to look at to decide whether it is worthy enough to open. However, know that cold emails with personalized subject lines get 26% higher open rates.

Here is what you can do to personalize the subject line of your cold email:

1. Call out their first name (“Hi Jordan”, “Hey Stephanie”)
2. Address a pain point (“Did you know you could fix………”, “10 ways to manage your daily mailing list”)

(I contributed this blog as a guest post at Smart Selling Tools. Read more: https://smartsellingtools.com/five-personalization-hacks-for-cold-emails-to-double-your-open-conversion-rates/)

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