Cold Email Hacks (What Experts Won’t Tell You)

When it comes to cold email, many people will tell you that they’ve tried it and it doesn’t work. But if that’s true, why do so many sales teams and marketers rave about all the amazing results they get from cold emails?

Well, there are a series of unique tips that may seem small but when implemented, make a massive impact on the quality of your cold email campaigns.

In this article, we’ll be covering all of the unique tactics that you can apply to your cold email campaigns to instantly see better results. Trust us, most of these you’ve never heard of before.

And before we begin, if you're looking for a more in depth resource on cold email, check out our Cold Email Masterclass.

Now, let's dive in!

1. Send Different Variations of Emails

Sending the same email copy over and over again will lead to bad results. Email providers like Google and Microsoft can recognize this and may even punish you for it.

In order to avoid this, we recommend running different cold email campaigns in tandem. Each campaign should have their own unique set of email copy and this will result in your outbound emails look far more human.

In the long run, this leads to consistent results.

2. Constantly Warm Your Email

We all know we should warm up our emails before clicking send. But email warming shouldn’t stop there. You should ALWAYS be warming your email.

If you have ever run cold email campaigns, you’ll know that over time the open rates will fall off. By warming your email in parallel with your cold email campaign, you can avoid this entirely and ensure your cold email campaigns remain effective.

3. Go Multi-Channel

Cold email is great but by going multichannel, you can double or even triple the response rates of outreach campaigns. This means including LinkedIn, website messages, and even calling in your outbound campaigns.

Think about it, if you get a 5% response rate on LinkedIn, your cold email response rate is now closer to 15%. And over hundreds of prospects, this can add up fast!

This might not be considered cold email but it’s so valuable that we had to add it in. If you need help doing this, you can book a call with our team here.

4. Open Rate Doesn’t Measure Subject Lines

The vast majority of people think open rate is directly related to the effectiveness of a subject line. This is partially true but it misses the mark.

Whenever you send an email, most phones open the email to generate a notification. This means if you land in the primary inbox, your email is most likely being opened by someone’s phone.

So, if you have a super low open rate (30% or less), it means you’re landing in the spam folder and likely triggering some spam filters.

In this case, you should check for the below issues:

Spammy language in the email subject or body
A bad domain reputation
Too much HTML code in your email body or signature
Large file sizes in your email

5. A/B Test Subject Lines

Open rates can improve from great subject lines too. So be sure to test which generates the best open rate. At some point, you will hit a wall and find that it’s impossible to get your subject lines performance to improve, in this case, you should focus on the previous step.

6. Use a Simple Signature

It feels good to have a pretty email signature. Unfortunately, well designed signatures come with a ton of HTML and this increases the likelihood that you land in the spam folder.

So make sure your signature is simple and uses minimal HTML.

7. Make Your Emails Surprisingly Short & Casual

We work with tons of customers who want to send essays to their prospects but this does not work. No one wants to read a long professional email.

People like short casual emails. It puts their guard down and it makes the sender feel more human.
A great test is to read the cold email out loud. If it sounds natural, you’ve got a great email on your hands. If it sounds overly professional, it might be time to rewrite your email.

8. Send Fewer Emails

A lot of people will get bad results like a 2% response rate and their solution to it is to scale outreach to obscene volumes. This is the opposite of what you should be doing.

Email services know which emails are sending at an unrealistic level and they punish them for it. This means sending fewer emails increases the odds that you land in the primary inbox.

If you are interested in learning more about this, we wrote an entire article on it here.

9. If all else fails, manually write your cold emails opening line.

If you have tried everything on this list, manually writing the opener to each cold email is a great way to get your campaign performing again. By simply showing that the email was manually written, prospects are 10x more likely to respond because they know you put in a lot of effort.

On the other hand, if the email feels automated, most prospects will be aware.