A Comprehensive Guide to Cold Email

Cathy-Dawiskiba-CMO-at-Woodpecker

This week we have a little special. I’ve been writing about cold emails for over 2 years. Last week I realized that I’ve written over 100 posts on this blog so far. That’s a lot of material. So this week I decided to prepare a kind of a table of contents, so you have a place on this blog where you can easily and quickly find what you’re looking for. Plus, maybe it will allow you to discover some posts you haven’t read before. Check out the collection that makes a comprehensive guide to cold email.

Composition

or how do you write a cold email

Here you will find: cold email 101 or where to start, a step-by-step tutorial to writing a cold email message, what to write (and what not to write) in a cold email to make it work, how to test your emails to improve their effectiveness.

There’s also a few pieces about formatting, pics, links, attachments, opt-outs, and all the things you should (and should not) include in your cold email message. At the end of this section, you’ll find a case study of one of my best cold email campaigns and a tutorial to help you prepare a similar one.

 

How Do I Start B2B Cold Email Outreach? >>

10 Golden Rules of Cold Email >>

What’s the Difference Between Cold Emails and Marketing Emails? >>

 

What Should Be the From Line of My Cold Email? >>

What Subject Line Will Make My Addressees Open My Cold Email? >>

Cold Email Intro, or How Should I Start My Message? >>

Value Proposition – How to Tell My Addressee What I Want from Them? >>

Features vs. Benefits – How to Present Your Product in a Cold Email? >>

Self-Service in Cold Email: What Shouldn’t We Expect from Our Prospects? >>

Perfect CTA, or How to End Up My Cold Email? >>

A Little Big Thing – What Do I Put in My Email Signature? >>

Should I Give My Cold Email Addressee a Way to Opt Out? >>

 

A/B Testing in Cold Email: How to Optimize Our Copy to Get More Replies? >>

How to Carry Out A/B Testing of Cold Email Copy in Woodpecker? >>

Fonts, Pics & Links in Cold Email – Should We Ever Use Them? >>

Attachments in Cold Email: Should We Ever Use Them? >>

Links in Cold Email: How to Add & Track Them Safely >>

 

How I Wrote a Cold Email that Got 50% Reply Rate >>

What Should Go First: Cold Email Copy or Prospect Base? (PDF inside)>>

Should We Use the ‘Most Effective’ Cold Email Templates? >>

 

10 Factors that Make Our Cold Emails Work (or Not) >>

8 Resources that Help Us Learn Quality Cold Emailing >>

Cold Email Clichés, or What Your Prospects Have Seen Too Many Times to Care >>

 

Follow-up

or why should I send more than one email and how to do it right

In this section, you will find a few articles on the difficult art of following-up. I recommend you to read all of them in this particular order, because together they make up kind of a series. I’m planning to write some more on the topic of follow-ups in my incoming articles.

 

Why Should We Always Send Follow-up Emails? >>

What Should My Follow-up Email Look Like? >>

Follow-up Emails: How Many & How Often? >>

5 Rules of Effective Email Follow-up >>

 

List building

or how do you find your prospects

I’d like to make sure you read the first three posts from this list. These are about very important assumption you should make before you go on to search for actual companies, people, and contacts. Then, you’ll find a collection of tools and resources, as well as some reviews of the tools that I’ve had an occasion to test out.

 

What’s the First Step to Building a Good Prospect Base? >>

Who Are Really My Prospects? – Our Way for Persona Development >>

What Does “Ideal” Really Mean in the Ideal Customer Profile? >>

6 Resources to Help You Build Contact Base for Cold Emailing >>

3 Ways to Get a Quality Outbound Prospect List >>

How to Build a Quality Prospect Base for Outbound: 5-Step Tutorial >>

 

15 Places Where You Can Find Prospects, Other than LinkedIn >>

25 Tools & Services for Outbound Prospect List Building >>

Prospect List Building Tools Review: SellHack >>

 

Prospect List Building Tools Review: HeadReach

Prospect List Building Tools Review: Anymail finder >>

Prospect List Building Tools Review: LeadIQ >>

Prospect List Building Tools Review: AeroLeads >>

Prospect List Building Tools Review: FindThatLead >>

 

Personalization

or how do you make your cold emails valuable

Personalization is something that will allow your emails to get to their destination, be opened, read, and replied to. I’ve made a separate section out of this, because it is a factor that will help you increase the effectiveness of your cold email campaigns significantly, aka get more replies. And if you think that personalization is just about inserting your prospects’ names at the beginning of your email, you really need to redefine personalization. Hope these posts will help you do that.

 

Why People Hate Cold Emails & What Can We Do to Let Them Love Ours >>

4 Definitive Reasons Why Targeting Drives Cold Email Outreach >>

How to Warm Up Prospects Before Sending Them a Cold Email? >>

 

How to Make My Cold Emails Personal? Vol.1: Research on My Prospects >>

How to Make My Cold Emails Personal? Vol.2: Copy >>

How to Make My Cold Emails Personal? Vol. 3 Tools >>

Optimal Time for Cold Email Delivery: Vol. 1 Stats >>

Optimal Time for Cold Email Delivery: Vol. 2 Time zones >>

 

How to Use High-Level Personalization in Influencer Outreach? >>

 

Deliverability

or how you help your emails get to their addressees

And last but not least, there’s the tremendously important issue of deliverability. So many factors affect deliverability that this section should actually involve some of the posts from the previous sections. But I tried to refer to as many factors as we can possibly control as email senders in the few posts I link to below.

 

What Can We Do to Boost Our Cold Email Deliverability? >>

14 Deliverability Checks to Carry Out Before Sending Your Cold Email Campaign >>

 

Why We Set up a Separate Mailbox for Outbound Campaigns? >>

How to Warm Up My Domain Before Email Outreach?>>

How to Warm Up My Email Address before Cold Outreach? >>

How to Check & Improve the Reputation of a Domain and Email Server IP >>

How Does Personalization Affect Cold Email Deliverability? >>

What is SPF & DKIM? And Why You Want to Have It Set Up >>

 

Step-by-Step Practical Guide to a Cold Email Campaign That Gets Delivered >>

 

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Hope this list will serve as a guide to our blog. If you find this collection helpful, and those topics interesting, please share the post with your colleagues and friends. Let me know in the comments what other topics would you like to see on our blog. Thanks for getting to the end. 😉