Two Cold Email Marketing Hacks That Work

I’ve sent literally millions of emails since 2001 when I first started in Internet Marketing.

I’ll share what’s worked the best for me, and the answer is simplicity.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci

The digital marketing growth hack investigates a bunch of mini-hacks that have worked for me over the years.

Firstly, try to completely avoid including your logo, images, and too many links in your emails that act as signals to spam filters that you’re sending a business, i.e. commercial email.

Like SEO, EDM Marketing is all about signals, for example, an email needs to be warmed before sending out bulk emails.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with sending out business emails but the point is that we’re trying to eliminate all (potentially) negative signals.

Think about it this way: ISP’s will raise more awareness to emails that contain images, links, and other “tell-tell” signals that commercial email often tends to have.

Text-based emails are written between friends, and that’s the zone we want to be in with our email for better inboxing.

There are certain “rules” that you need to follow when sending an email to achieve a high inbox rate. The two that I’d bet are the two most important email sending criteria are as follows. One, always uses a first-named user handle, for example, henry@example.com will do a lot better than info@example.com.

Henry is a person whilst “info” is a generic nameless, impersonal label.

Sounds obvious but many forget.

As an added bonus to the above recommendation of including the first names in sent emails is to include a photo, something which is particularly easy to do if you use Gmail.

The second vital email advice I can offer is to make the subject short, sweet, curious and, this is important, keep it lowercase.

Why Should This Last Tip Be Important?

When you receive an email from a friend, does it have a subject like this:

“Shall We Meet For Drinks After Work?”

No, it doesn’t, and nor would your friend write in All-Caps or Capitalized-Case.

You see, the more friendly, personal, and ‘human’ you make your email outreach, the more you’ll have success in having your outbound (cold) email read.

I’ve done this for years and have sent millions of emails and I know that text-only emails with between 100-150 words and a short sweet subject field works best.

Now, you’ll likely be thinking, what about including a URL to my offer within the email?

I’d say, sure, try it, but for potentially even more success in the long term I’d advise not including a URL and instead of inviting the recipient to reply to your message for more information.

Why?

Because this creates positive signals which add to your credibility and rating with the ISP’s so you’re inboxing will only get better.

Furthermore, it also encourages you to learn more about your audience and target market.

By receiving an email back from your newsletter you’ll learn about your audience’s hopes, fears, and aspirations and you can adjust your messaging accordingly.

Try it and see!

Also, whilst you’re on this page, you might benefit from my post on the differences between Lemlist vs Mailshake.