Table of Content

What to expect from Cold Email as a channel?
Cold Email regulations to comply with.

Intro to Cold Emails

Everyone reading would have used Gmail at some point… I guess 🤔

However, the transition from a student to a professional does change the way we use it as a channel.

Anyone who’s not working would use emails to,

Sign up to different platforms i.e. facebook, tiktok etc.
Receive communications from their school or university
Communicate with their friends, acquaintances

Working professionals on the other hand use it for official communication between their office peers or clients.

Another way to use it would be to reach out to people who might be interested in what we have to say or offer them. This is what is known as COLD emailing since we reach out to people who don’t know us.

Here’s what my Gmail looks like.

And I use this channel to book qualified meetings for other businesses in the b2b space 🙂

This guide will go into depth on the entire process that goes into building a scalable email engine which pushes out qualified meetings 💵

How has Email evolved over the years?

But before we move into the technical part let’s see how the channel evolved over the years ❓

Electronic mail, also known as email, started out as a military initiative to enable quick and reliable knowledge transfer between computers connected to the ARPANET network.

It didn’t become available to the public till the late 1990’s when Hotmail, Yahoo etc. popped up.

Here’s what Gmail used to look like at that time. Seems a bit cluttered right?

With the development of G Suite however its capabilities have grown tremendously.

So much so that there is hardly anyone online who doesn’t have an email account.

The current active email accounts tally ~8 billion.

Here’s the year wise email user count by Statista.

This completes a simple backdrop on the channel as a whole.

So now let’s get into the nitty gritty part of how to use it to book more meetings 👏

Wait a minute❗: I heard it’s illegal…..

Reddit is filled with people confused on whether or not they can send cold emails.

From r/entrepreneur subreddit and r/marketing subreddit:

The short answer is NO it’s not ILLEGAL to send cold emails 🥳

Wait a minute, if it’s not illegal then what’s the fuss about?

From an Email Service Provider perspective

Imagine yourself as the VP, marketing at a mid-sized company in the US. You would probably be an ideal prospect for 1000’s of companies.

In such a scenario you would probably be bombarded with 10’s of emails everyday with sales intent thereby, cluttering your inbox.

A cluttered inbox would reduce your user experience as you wouldn’t be able to find important messages easily.

ESPs or email service providers don’t want this to be a reason for users to shift providers which is why they have strict parameters to control spam.

Gmail directs any emails it finds to be salesy or suspicious to promotions or spam.

From the perspective of a country

Citizens in several countries have the right to protect themselves from commercial messages from businesses.

Receiving multiple emails daily from multiple people would obviously be a bummer in your daily life. This legislation gives you the right to make sure companies can’t send you emails without your consent 🙂

Legislations have been passed in countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom to protect users from unsolicited emails.

I have consolidated steps you need to follow below from each of the legislations to help you from not landing in spam, yet if you need detailed guides on each you can access them below:

Steps to follow from each act: Consolidated

From a Country’s perspective:

Avoid misleading subject lines: Your subject line should directly imply what your email is about. It should not bait the recipient into opening the email.
Ensure your recipients can opt out: You have to provide people with a way to stop receiving your emails, it could be with an opt-out link or just a plain text message at the bottom of your email such as “reply with NO to stop receiving further emails”.
Tell them who you are accurately: Your “From”, “Reply-To” address and domain name should depict where the message is originating from accurately.
Include your location in your email content.
Ensure your emails are not unsolicited: You should only email someone if you have a very strong intent for emailing them. For example: Someone selling marketing services in the US should email marketing team decision makers in the US and should contact any other department heads.

From an ESPs perspective:

Authenticate your email: Emails from domains without SPF, DKIM, DMARC authentication will be either rejected or marked as spam.
The sending IP address must match the IP address of the hostname specified in the Pointer (PTR) record.
Web links in the message body should be visible and easy to understand. Recipients should know what to expect when they click a link.
Avoid excessively large message headers.
Message From: headers should include only one email address.
Format messages according to the Internet Format Standard.
Don’t impersonate other domains or senders without permission.
Don’t mark internal messages as spam.
Keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and avoid ever reaching a spam rate of 0.30% or higher.
Marketing messages and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe, and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body for volume greater than 5000 per day.

Difference between unsolicited emails and cold emails?

Let’s think about it from the perspective of someone who runs a marketing agency in california specializing in google ads for b2b businesses.

If the person lets say Steven wants to run a cold email campaign to acquire clients he should be targeting only those people who might have a genuine need for his services.

Which means he could target marketing teams or founders of b2b companies who could benefit from running google ads.

This would not be illegal since he has a reason to email these people.

It becomes illegal when Steven starts emailing everyone who may or may not be involved in anything to do with marketing at all.

So we need to have some specific intent to make sure our emails don’t feel as unwanted or spam.

This is the key differentiator between a cold email and an unsolicited email.

Other factors that would make your emails look like spam would be sending out generic emails to a bulk list. Even if the targeting is correct the messaging also needs to be personalised to some extent.

The subject line should click bait people into opening the emails and the body of the message be relevant to the person you are sending the email to.

For example: if Steven is emailing VPs of marketing for his services with the subject “$500 coupon” for his marketing services then the email would be counted as spam.

The email should be either personalised to the recipient or be direct either way it should hint at what the email is all about.

“Google Ads update” or “Need help with Google Ads” or just plain “Google Ads” would be some basic examples of what the subject should be like since the email would be about how Steven could help them with running their ads on Google.

Hope this helps you get an idea between what a legal cold email would look like 🙂

Expectation Setting: How many emails should I send 😰

For every channel we use to generate leads we sort of plan out the output we need from it.

Email is no exception, it requires a detailed plan to ensure we hit the targets.

Here’s what a basic plan looks like for someone who wants to book 20 meetings in a month.

They book 1 meeting for every 500 emails they send on average. So they would be hitting their target by just sending out 10k emails.

Sounds simple right?

The only trick behind this would be finding the email you need to send to book 1 meeting for every 500 prospects 🤔

The rest is just the technical part which ensures your emails don’t land in spam 😡

Some people take months to find the right targeting and the right message to book meetings on a consistent basis while others get it correct within weeks 🫸

This is all pretty subjective since not all businesses and their offers are the same.

SDRs booking meetings for a $29 p.m product would find it easier to drive conversions than the guy selling a $100k p.m subscription.

It varies with the product, the prospect, the industry, pricing and what not.

However, one thing which is for sure is that continuous experimentation in the right direction would definitely uncover campaigns that drive consistent meetings every month.