Cold outreach emails are one of the most important lead-generation tools salespeople use to connect with potential customers. Since these messages are a prospect’s first impression of a salesperson, they can make or break the potential relationship.
As a sales rep, you probably have your way with words, but crafting good cold outreach emails can be a very challenging task. It takes a lot of time, skill, and creativity to create copy that is clear, catchy, and relevant to your prospects. Plus, this entire process requires constant testing and optimization to pinpoint what works best for different audiences and goals.
In this blog post, we’ll explore some common mistakes salespeople make when writing outreach emails and share some best practices that can help you improve your results and save time. Finally, we will suggest alternative solutions for writing outreach emails to make your life easier.
Challenges Salespeople Face When Crafting Cold Outreach Emails
Apart from being time-consuming, the process of creating compelling email outreach that will result in positive responses comes with a number of other challenges. Some of them are:
- Writing for different audiences. Salespeople need to write cold outreach emails for different types of prospects, requiring them to adjust their tone, language, and content to match each audience segment’s unique expectations and interests. This versatility is not just about changing a few words — it involves a deep understanding of the varying needs, challenges, industry jargon, and communication preferences of diverse groups. For instance, an email to a tech-savvy startup founder will differ significantly in style and substance from one addressed to a seasoned executive in a traditional industry.
- Adding value. Only emails that provide value and relevance to the prospects will result in success. To achieve this, sales reps have to research prospects and understand their pain points. This process involves more than just a casual glance at a company’s website or a quick Google search. It requires a deep dive into the prospect’s industry, their company culture, recent achievements, and challenges they might be struggling with.
- Standing out from the crowd. Prospects receive dozens of marketing and sales emails every day from various sources, and most of those messages end up in spam or trash. Salespeople need to find ways to cut through all this noise and get prospects to open their emails. This means writing catchy subject lines, engaging opening lines, and relevant value propositions that differentiate their product or service from the competition.
Common Mistakes in Writing Cold Outreach Emails
Writing outreach emails is a skill that requires practice and attention to detail. However, due to their hectic schedules, many salespeople tend to make some common mistakes that can make their emails less effective and hurt their chances of getting a positive response from their prospects.
Let’s discuss some of those mistakes and how to avoid them.
Lack of goals and objectives
Goals and objectives define the purpose and the desired outcome of your email.
They help you focus on what you want to achieve with your email outreach, such as generating leads, booking meetings, or closing deals. Without goals and objectives, your email outreach will miss the mark and fail to motivate your prospects to take action, leading to many missed opportunities and inefficient use of resources.
Besides establishing specific goals and objectives, it’s essential to keep track of relevant metrics that will help you understand how your email outreach performs and inform your future strategies.
Bad subject lines
The email subject line is the first thing a prospect sees when they receive your email, and it usually determines whether they will open it or not. According to research, almost 65% of people decide to open or delete an email based on these couple of words.
A bad subject line is too generic, vague, or spammy. On the other hand, in an attempt to make their subject lines intriguing, many sales reps fall into the trap of being too overhyped or misleading.
Another major faux pas is not including a subject line at all.
To stay on the safe side, you should write clear, catchy, and relevant subject lines that grab your prospects’ attention and pique their curiosity.
An engaging subject line makes the prospect want to open the email and read more. It should accurately reflect your email’s value proposition concisely without coming across as overly promotional or using clickbait tactics that can erode trust and diminish the credibility of your message.
Lengthy copy
Don’t forget your prospects are inundated with emails and other types of personal, business, and commercial messages.
One of the critical mistakes sales representatives make in their cold outreach emails is overlooking this fact and presenting prospects with lengthy and verbose email copy.
Brevity matters more than ever, so if you want recipients to actually read your emails, show them you respect their time and come up with the concise, to-the-point copy. In other words, stick to the optimal email length, which is between 50 and 125 words. This means condensing your message to its essence, conveying the most critical points without unnecessary fluff.
Each sentence in the email should serve a purpose. However, this practice includes more than simply trimming down the word count — you also have to ensure your message is compelling and relevant, as well as that it addresses your prospects’ pain points. Striking this balance can be particularly challenging when conveying complex ideas or solutions.
No personalization
The truth is that most people won’t pay attention to emails they receive from someone they don’t know personally.
That’s why personalization is crucial in making your outreach stand out and resonate with the recipient. Beyond using the prospect’s name, effective personalization involves tailoring the email content to reflect their specific needs, interests, industry trends, and even recent interactions with your brand or business.
This level of customization demonstrates that you have done your homework and are genuinely interested in providing value rather than sending a generic sales pitch, thus making prospects feel valued and understood. When your emails lack this personal touch, they risk being perceived as irrelevant or spammy, significantly reducing the likelihood of engagement and response.
Typos and grammar errors
Sloppy emails can undermine your credibility and professionalism as they suggest you haven’t put enough effort into your communication. When recipients encounter typos or grammatical mistakes, it can distract them from the email’s message. Even worse, it can lead them to question your competence and the product or service quality.
As minuscule as they might seem, such errors can be the deciding factor in whether a prospect chooses to engage with your company or a competitor. To prevent such a scenario, you should proofread and edit your email using grammar checker tools like Wordvice AI, Grammarly, or Hemingway Editor, but bear in mind they’re not infallible, and human proofreading is still recommended.
That’s why it’s often beneficial to have another set of eyes review important emails, as a fresh perspective can catch errors that you have overlooked.
Not following-up
This is one of the biggest mistakes that salespeople make when writing outreach emails.
Giving up after the initial mail can result in losing touch with the prospect and not developing a potentially valuable relationship.
In many cases, prospects don’t ignore your messages — they may overlook or forget to respond to an initial email due to their busy schedules. A follow-up email serves as a gentle reminder of your offer and shows your persistence and genuine interest in providing value to the prospect.
It’s important to carefully plan your follow-ups, ensuring they are persistent without being intrusive or pushy.
Properly timed and well-crafted follow-up emails can increase response rates, demonstrating your commitment to establishing a connection and potentially leading to successful business outcomes.
So, Can Salespeople Write Good Cold Outreach Emails?
The answer to our titular question is yes, salespeople can indeed write outreach emails. However, the real question is not whether they can but whether they should.
We can conclude that writing outreach emails is a skill that can be learned and improved with practice and feedback. However, it is not the only skill that salespeople need to polish in order to succeed in their roles. They also have to excel at prospecting, qualifying, delivering persuasive pitches, and dealing with objections. All these skills require time, energy, and focus to master and execute.
So, given that salespeople need to balance their time and resources between writing outreach emails and performing other sales tasks, they have to prioritize their activities depending on their goals and workload.
The trick is to decide when to write cold outreach emails themselves and when to use an alternative solution, such as copywriting services, which can be quite expensive.
Autoklose Komposer eliminates all these issues because it’s a tool designed to help salespeople effortlessly craft high-quality, personalized, error-free, and persuasive outreach emails — both subject lines and email body. All you have to do is provide relevant information, including the purpose of your message, pick the tone of voice, length, and context, and Komposer will generate 3 different versions of the same message based on your guided input in no time. Finally, this solution is cost-effective and doesn’t require a complex onboarding process, meaning you can start using it right away.
