No Cold Email Replies? Here's How to Get a 20% Reply Rate.

Now, before we get started it’s important to ensure you have a great open rate. If you have low open rates (40% or less), it means your email is not making its way to your contact’s inbox and you should focus on deliverability and the subject line first. We wrote an article on how to improve open rates and deliverability here.

Okay, so you have great open rates but for some reason you’re just not getting replies. When it comes to replies, email copy is almost always to blame. So, in this article we'll be covering every best practice that's guaranteed to increase your cold email response rate.

Let’s dive in!

1) Keep Your Email Short

Whenever you’re drafting a cold email, you need to keep it short. The goal is to peak their interest, not to tell them your life story.

This means no more than 250 words.

Even if your service is amazing, you don’t need to pitch all of your features or case studies in the first email. You should focus on the benefits instead.

Bad: “LeadLoft’s CRM software includes outreach automation, deal tracking, and prospecting tools.”
Good: “LeadLoft can help to double your revenue.”

So again, keep it short, sweet, and focus on a singular benefit to make it even shorter.

2) Use Their Name

Opening an email without the recipient's name is the fastest way to get marked as spam. Do your research so you can open your email with their name and if you can find a nickname, that’s even better.

Bad: “Hi there,”
Bad: “Hi Zachary,”
Good: ”Hi Zack,”

3) Stay Casual & Informal

No one likes to be sold to and as soon as it’s overly professional, it feels like you’re selling.

Bad: “Dear Zack,”
Bad: “LeadLoft can help you to 2x revenue through powerful sales acceleration software. Would you like me to share our latest eBook on how this is done?”
Good: “We really focus on helping companies generate more revenue. Happy to share how we do it if you’re interested.”

A great trick is draft emails that sound like normal conversation. You can test this by reading your email copy out loud. Would you speak like this? If not, start over.

4) End with a question

It’s okay to have 1 or 2 questions in a cold email but never exceed 2 and NEVER forget to end with a question.

Here are a couple examples:

Bad: “Let me know if you’re interested in learning more.”
Good: “Mind if I send over a few times?”

Let’s dissect them. The first isn’t even a question so there’s less pressure to respond. It also requires the receiver to think of a response.

The second on the other hand, is a question. The reader knows exactly what you’re asking and even better, a simple “Yes” is all that’s needed to get the conversation going.

So, be sure you end with a question that’s easy to answer.

5) Provide Value

Whenever someone sends me a cold email and it’s “I can do this” or “We can 10x that”, I have to resist the urge to mark it as spam.

When you’re sending an email, you should make a small mention of the value that you can provide on the call, regardless of whether you end up working together or not. After all, the best way to sell is by providing value.

What’s an example?

Good: “At the very least, I’m happy to share our team’s sales workflow so you can copy it.”
Good: “Would love to learn about what you’re working on. Looks like there may be room for us to partner.”

So focus on how you can help them and be sure to mention it.

6) Go Crazy with Personalization

Drafting hyper-personalized cold emails is difficult and time consuming but it works really well. The ultimate goal of a cold email is to make it feel like it's coming from a human and personalizing an email is by far the best way to achieve this.

Bad: “I came across your site and love what I saw.”
Okay: “I wanted to reach out because I noticed you’re also based in Marina Del Rey so…”
Good: “I saw that you’re based in Culver City, I’m actually just down Washington from you in Marina Del Rey.”
Good: “Just came across LeadLoft and as a designer, I loved the modern blue and white design of the site, it’s really well done. I also noticed you’re a designer, were you the one who designed the site?“

You can even add personalization at the end of a cold email with post script:

Good: “P.S. Our office is actually right next to yours in Marina Del Rey. If you're open to it, would love to grab a coffee. Always looking to meet other founders.”

Wrapping Up

Cold email is an art form that takes years master but if you follow the tips above, you’ll be in the top 1% of cold emailers right out of the gate. And to make it easy to get started, I'd recommend downloading our free cold email templates for sales here. Be sure to make them your own but the document will provide a variety great templates that your team can build off of.

If you’re now looking to find and send cold emails, check out LeadLoft. We’d love to be a part of your journey and to help you out along the way.