If you’ve never attempted cold email marketing before because convinced it doesn’t work, you’re missing out on a lot of good opportunities to convert leads into customers.
Cold emailing has been and still is one of the most effective ways to land clients — that is, if it’s done right.
Doesn’t cold email marketing have a bad rep? Sort of, but not really.
Most of the bad reviews you’ve heard about the method are due to the poorly-written emails that employ the wrong strategy or have no strategy behind them.
These emails often come across as borderline if not actual spam — and, unless it’s the edible pre-cooked canned meat type, nobody really likes spam.
Friends, industry experts swear by the effectiveness of cold emailing when it comes to landing clients. If you’re sending cold emails with zero success, then you might have to consider reviewing your cold emailing process.
In this post, we’ll tell you exactly how with 12 actionable cold email marketing tips. Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
What Does Cold Email Marketing Mean?
For clarity’s sake, let’s start with a definition of cold email marketing. A cold email is like a cold call, albeit a little more considerate.
You’re reaching out to a lead you’ve never spoken to before and hoping they’ll be interested in your products and services.
The lead probably doesn’t know much of anything about your company either. They certainly didn’t opt into your email newsletter.
That brings us to another good question: how do you get email addresses for cold email marketing?
Some people aren’t shy about making their email addresses public, so perhaps you saw the email on social media or in a comment on a competitor’s blog post.
Cold email marketing doesn’t only apply to your would-be customers, by the way. If you want to work with an influencer or write a guest post for a blog and you come right out with that request in the first email, this is cold emailing too.
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Why Is Cold Emailing Important?
Cold emailing sounds better than cold calling since you’re not at risk of getting yelled at by a stranger, but is it really something you want to incorporate into your email marketing campaigns?
Most definitely! Cold emailing can be a great means of lead generation. Sure, like with cold calling, most leads won’t be interested, but the ones that quickly go from icy cold to burning hot.
It’s those hot leads you want your sales team and marketers pursuing.
You can also use cold email marketing as a form of networking. How? If you’re mass-emailing a sizable list of people, you’re building awareness both of your brand and your products and services.
So sure, even if the original influencer you reached out to couldn’t help you, maybe someone else can. This creates a unique networking opportunity that you could never achieve through cold calling.
Another great reason to consider cold emailing? Well…
Is Cold Email Spam? What’s the Difference?
Just to clarify, cold emailing is not spam. They’re two different species.
Spam is when someone sends emails to random people without doing any research. It’s non-targeted advertising, which is absolutely a waste of time and effort.
Cold email marketing, on the other hand, requires prospecting, which is the first step in the whole sales process.
Prospecting is where you identify and make a list of people who might be interested in the product or service you offer. In other words, these people are potential customers.
Use web scraping tools to gather data from various online platforms and identify potential leads to send out your cold emails.
Between sending a thousand spam emails and a hundred cold emails, which do you think has more chances of conversions? The answer is obvious!
Even email services, by default, filter out spam emails, which makes them even less likely to reach anyone.
Cold emailing beats spam by a large margin.
Read also: How to Send an Outreach Email That Converts
12 Cold Email Marketing Tips That Will Increase Your Conversion Rates
Your strategy when sending cold emails matter. How you approach this form of emailing can be the difference between acing it and failing spectacularly.
It’s okay if you’ve made mistakes with your cold email marketing in the past. What matters more is what you do in the future.
Bearing that in mind, here are 12 cold email tips to use going forward.
1. Send Personalized Emails to Everyone
Using a template will make cold emailing so much easier, and who doesn’t love easy, right? Yet the problem with templates, as has always been the case, is they come across as a bit generic.
Your recipient can tell. They can feel your lack of sincerity and genuine interest to help them through the structure of your email content, and that can affect their response.
That’s why personalization always wins the day, even if it does take more time and effort to get it right.
EngageBay helps you personalize your emails by adding your contacts’ attributes to the emails
Does this mean you have to compose unique content for each recipient that you send an email to? No, but it does mean you have to segment your audience, create email templates for each segment, and then personalize the details before hitting send.
Your effort during the prospecting process is required to improve your cold email content and increase your conversion rate.
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2. End With a Call-to-Action
Are you including a call to action or CTA in your emails? If not, it’s time to start, and that’s doubly true when cold emailing.
A CTA is supposed to encourage your potential client to take action, so make sure you use decisive, incentivizing language.
Saying something like “looking forward to hearing from you” does not prompt the reader to do anything.
If you want more success in your cold emailing endeavors, opt for other more effective alternatives. Here are a few techniques that may help.
Propose a Scheduled Call
If you’re aiming to set up a meeting with your prospect, providing a date and time for the proposed call at the end of your email could increase your chances of getting a response.
Instead of saying “are you available for a chat?” or “when are you available for a chat?” try something like “are you available for a quick chat on Wednesday the 12th at 10:00 a.m.?” or “Are you available for a quick chat on May 22nd at 10:00 a.m.?”
This strategy makes it easier for your potential customer to decide on a response. In this case, they could readily accept the invitation or set another date.
Of course, there will still be people who will remain unmoved by your effort, but don’t be disheartened. It’s all part of the process. What we’re aiming for here is to increase the response rate.
Ask Relevant Questions
Another good way to end your email is by asking relevant questions that are either open-ended or answerable by a “yes” or a “no.” This can put you on the road to more conversions!
Ask Permission to Share Resources (or Other Email-Gated Freebies)
If you have resources that show how your service can help businesses — like a video or a short eBook — ask if you can share it with them at the end of your email. This move is another excellent conversation starter.
👉 Check out our effective email templates to include strong CTAs in your emails.
3. Tell Them What They Get Out of It
When you’re promoting any product or service to potential customers, you always, always, always have to state what’s in it for the customer.
Your credentials, achievements, and service technicalities can be explained in detail by detail at a later time.
The most important thing you should express during the cold email marketing stage is the benefits your service could bring to the customer’s personal life or their company.
For instance, instead of writing about your technical skills, you can tell them about the improvements you will help them accomplish.
When composing your email, keep this in mind: It’s not about you, it’s about them. This tip will take you far!
EngageBay’s simple drag and drop interface helps you create a template that suits your business need
👉 Leverage our free email templates to create emails that highlight the benefits for your customers.
4. Send a Follow-Up Email
Cold calls end with a lot of rejection, and so cold emails. In this case, though, rejection is being outright ignored, blocked, spam-filtered, or sent to the trash.
If your first email doesn’t get a response, don’t take it personally. More often than not, this message gets brushed aside or unintentionally sent to someone’s spam folder.
When this happens, wait a couple of days and then follow up. There’s a higher chance of getting a reply on the second or third try.
Just a reminder, your follow-up email should be different from your first email. You don’t want your prospect to think that you’re just resending stuff.
5. Write Short First Emails
Here’s a quick question: Do you like reading long emails? Most people would answer no, and you’re probably one of them.
When you’re writing a cold email, make it brief, clear, and to the point. More information can be provided later on if the lead is interested.
At the start, try to make your email as easy to understand and quick as possible to read so the lead can get through the whole thing.
Big blocks of texts are intimidating to anyone, especially someone who didn’t even ask for the email in the first place.
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Want to make your emails more impactful? Check out our beautiful, easy-to-customize cold email templates. Designed to boost engagement, these templates from EngageBay will help your emails stand out. Just customize the images, headings, and CTAs for your brand, and hit send in a few minutes!
6. Write Impressive Cold Email Subject Lines
Did you know that 35% of recipients open an email because of the subject line? So says this piece from Convince & Convert.
The content of your subject line matters a lot — and this isn’t just limited to using catchy phrases and clickbait.
First and foremost, some of us receive over 100 emails a day. Sometimes, the quantity of emails gets to a point where we can’t possibly finish reading everything every single day.
Check out this cool video about how to write killer email subject lines.
Now, if your recipient doesn’t know you, and your email subject line isn’t good enough to catch their attention, there’s a huge possibility that they’re going to skip your email and move to the next.
How do you prevent that?
Sadly, there isn’t really a formula for making subject lines that guarantee clicks. Thus, you will have to test out different styles until you find one that suits you best.
Here are a few tips you can use to get started.
Keep It Short
Writing email subject lines between 20 to 50 characters is ideal. If you go over that limit, your email can be triggered as spam and automatically sent to the spam filter, never to be seen by the recipient.
Avoid Using Multiple Punctuation Marks
One surefire way to trigger people’s spam alert is to use “!!!!!!” or “?????” in your subject lines. That’s not to say you can’t ask questions in your subject lines or exclaim something, but one punctuation mark per subject line, please.
Keep Your Finger Away From the Caps Lock Key When Typing
Don’t use all uppercase letters on your subject line. It’s aggressive to your recipient and it triggers the spam police. Again, if you must use caps, emphasize a word or two only.
Avoid Spammy Words
You’re sending a cold email, not spam, so don’t use words that are often associated with spam emails.
For example, the words “bargain,” “affordable,” “best price,” “success,” and “solution” might send your message to the spam filter.
Be careful!
Read also: Proven Cold Email Templates to Get New Leads in 2025
7. Use an Email Signature in Your Cold Email Marketing
Remember, to your email recipient, you’re a stranger. How do you put their mind at ease? Let your recipient know who they’re receiving the email from through an email signature.
And no, we don’t mean just your name. You want your prospects to feel that you’re offering legit services, and including a signature line at the bottom of your content makes the email look more professional.
Keep your email signature simple. You only need to add the basic things: your name, position, company name, and contact information.
👉 Enhance your email professionalism with our professional email templates.
8. Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
There are many ways to do cold emailing. If one method isn’t working for you, try another. Don’t be afraid to experiment, even outside of these methods.
Remember, there is no one magic formula. If there was, everyone would be cold email marketing. That’s simply not the case.
When testing different variables, always keep track of your metrics. Take note of the differences you’ve made on each template and the quantity and the quality of the responses you get.
Gathering concrete data can help you build a reliable cold emailing strategy for reaching out to clients and getting responses from them.
Below are a few tips to help you with your testing process.
First, you have to always be open to new possibilities. Be constantly on the lookout for improvements you can make to your current system.
The long-term effectiveness of your current strategy isn’t guaranteed in today’s rapidly-progressing society. Here’s what usually happens.
A business starts to test out new ways to do things only after they see a quick decline in their once stellar results. The testing process sometimes takes a lot of trial and error. It takes weeks — months, even!
Doing it at the last minute will put your business in a tough position.
Don’t start your research for improvement after your current technique loses its mojo. Challenge your methods consistently. Make it a part of your business process. Stay updated and competitive.
Note: Be sure to track your metrics as you do this! You have to be able to measure something to determine if it works or not.
Once you’ve started testing, take note of these metrics:
- Open rate or the number of times recipients open your email.
- Response rate — how many responses you get.
- How long it takes for the recipient to respond.
- How many times you were able to successfully schedule meetings with the recipient.
You can see which techniques work best through the results you get.
9. Check for Spelling or Grammar Mistakes
We know this is a basic one, but the fact is many people still don’t check their cold sales emails for spelling and grammar mistakes before hitting send.
This error will not make you look good in the eyes of your potential client, and it certainly won’t help improve your conversion rates.
So, before you click send, double (and triple) check your content, from the subject line to your signature.
10. Be Friendly
Remember how earlier we mentioned that email templates can be great, but you can’t rely on them too much? This is another example of that.
Templates, besides being generic, can sometimes be written in a way that’s almost…robotic. A plain style of language that appeals to just about anyone might work if you haven’t segmented your audience, but of course, you did that.
No matter which segment of your audience you’re reaching out to, being friendly is the way to go. More so than just acting nice, be personable.
Write the kind of email you’d be happy to receive, an email that makes you think or smile or even chuckle. This is a good way to ensure your email breaks through the din and makes an impact on your reader.
11. Give, But Don’t Expect to Receive
Here’s another tip on email language. Maybe you’re guilty of trying to come across as too authoritative or formal, so you said something in your email like “all I require from you is…”
Ouch.
You’re already asking a lot out of a lead who’s reading your cold email. You’re asking them to trust you, at least to an extent. You’re asking for their time and their attention, even though it’s not much of either.
Now you’re asking them to give you something as well? The line has to be drawn somewhere.
It doesn’t matter if what you’re requesting is a sales call or even a verification of their full name. Why would the lead give you anything at this point?
If you do need something out of the lead, it doesn’t have to be in the first email.
Also, when you do eventually ask the lead to set up an appointment or read a document with product specs, you want to make it exceedingly simple for them to do so.
For example, you might say something like “click here to sign up to our email list” and then hyperlink the text. Boom. Done. Couldn’t have been easier.
So yes, while you’re combing through your emails for typos, make sure you check for tone too.
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12. Express Gratitude Whenever Possible
Wow, you got a response to your cold email! As you reply, you want to bend over backward to show your appreciation.
Don’t just say, “hey, thanks,” but “thanks so much for signing up to our newsletter!” or “thanks a million for talking to me on the phone!”
This report highlights the benefits of practicing some gratitude. You could see twice the response rate when you’re grateful than if you’re a little more subdued in your response.
So go ahead, whether it’s Thanksgiving or anytime: be thankful when things start going right. It feels good and your leads will appreciate it.
Conclusion
Sending cold emails might be a little less intimidating than cold calling, but it’s still a daunting prospect.
The good news is it’s easier than you might have thought to start sending the best cold emails your leads have ever received.
With the 12 tips in this article, you can master the art of cold email marketing, increasing your network, building out lead gen, and boosting your conversion rate in the process.
What cold email strategies provide the best results for you? Let us know in the comments.
👉 Have you tried our email templates? Share your experience in the comments below, and let us know how they worked for your campaigns!
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