Email Marketing: 7 Tips, Tricks & Truths About Cold Email Campaigns

In a recent consumer study by Twilio, 79% of respondents said email is their most preferred channel. Email surpassed SMS, What’s App, and social messaging apps by a wide margin, proving that marketers should continue to view it as an essential channel for engaging customers and prospects.

Looking at it from a generational perspective, only 70% of Gen Z respondents said they prefer email, compared to 77% of millennials.

No matter how it stacks up across generations, email's still got it, and marketers need to know how to use it to their advantage, especially when it comes to “cold” email campaigns, which can be tricky. Designed to reach and engage new prospects (not existing customers), these campaigns—also known as customer acquisition campaigns--require specialized knowledge due to their many nuances.

Our team of email marketing experts has shared these timely tips, learned through years of success with our Fortune 1000 clients, to ensure flawless campaign execution

1. Use the Right Email Platform: It’s common for CRM platforms to follow strict guidelines for data privacy and reputation management, with many not allowing the use of third-party data. Sending “cold” acquisition emails through a CRM is not only potentially against the platform's policy, but it can also result in significant deliverability issues and lower open rates. Acquisition email platforms have different standards for white-listing, reputation management, and IP address cleanliness, making them ideal for third-party data campaigns. So as you plan your campaigns, start with planning for the platform you will use.

 

2. Keep It Clean: The email list you used last year, let alone last month or even last week, is no longer what it used to be. Data decays at an alarming rate – as much as 70+% each year. Don’t underestimate the impact of bad data on your acquisition campaign results. The pros know that ongoing database cleansing is a must. We support many Fortune 1000 clients with not only acquisition email campaign management but also third-party marketing data and database cleansing. As leaders in their respective fields, these clients understand that clean data doesn’t happen by accident. They turn to OMI for professional, automated data cleansing at scale. They also know they can count on us for quality business contact data (featuring a 30-day 95% email validity guarantee) to augment their own databases and identity graphs and fuel more effective omni-channel campaigns. Find out more about the OMI Living File® B2B2C database containing 145 million contacts (with email addresses) here.

 

3. Warm It Up: We recommend “warming up” contacts by sending the first “cold” email through an email prospecting transmission platform. We do this for our clients at OMI using our own platform. From there, we can transfer any contacts that open or click the initial email to a client’s CRM platform for ongoing outreach, such as sequenced nurture emails and automated follow-ups.

 

4. Take Steps to Know More About Your Audience: Whether your acquisition marketing is of the B2B or B2C variety, it's valuable to get to know your prospects better to target and engage them more effectively. When building custom audiences for clients’ cold email campaigns, we use a B2B2C data strategy to gain a more complete personal-professional view of each prospect. This approach involves layering demographics -- such as marital status, children, income, gender, and age – into your audience profiles. It also entails overlaying consumer audience data with business information such as job titles. More insight into your prospects’ business and personal lives allows you to boost the relevancy of your content and reach recipients where they are -- via their work or personal email (or another channel, such as targeted ads).

 

5. Mix It Up: One of our differentiators as a performance marketing agency lies in our "one-two punch," which combines email with triggered programmatic, social media outreach or both. By strategically placing programmatic ads in front of users who have previously engaged with email content and vice versa, you maximize the chances of conversion. Using a tailored approach to triggering, you gain increased efficiency, scalability, and targeting capabilities. There are privacy laws to consider, making execution of this approach complex, with specialized expertise around anonymized data and other factors a requirement. Our OMI team has that expertise.

 

6. Level Up Your QR Code IQ: Marketers like QR codes due to the customer insights they provide but, surprisingly, we’ve found that some email recipients won’t use them because of factors like age, device, location, or industry. We’ve seen higher conversions and improved campaign results overall when a phone number or URL is included in the content alongside the QR code. We also recommend scaling your acquisition campaigns first with multiple verticals and, from there, segmenting audiences into smaller groups based on insights into those more likely to use a QR code.

 

7. Find Ready-to-Buy Prospects: Digital intent data provides a fast track to identifying relevant, down-funnel digital prospects. It puts marketers in position to get in front of warm prospects--decision makers who are in-market for your solutions right now-- before others have the chance. It works by anonymously monitoring, capturing, and analyzing potential buyers’ digital activity (such as browsing or content downloads) to uncover purchase intent signals. A strategy we use to double down on results is matching intent insights to contact data from the OMI Living File®  B2B2C database. This gives marketers the capability to scale their email acquisition campaign reach to more custom audiences that are in-market for their offers while remaining in compliance with privacy requirements. Read more about our intent monitoring services here.

 

From our perspective, a simple truth about the state of cold emails today is this: They have the potential to become more like warm emails because of the data capabilities now available to ensure you’re delivering timely, relevant information directly to targeted prospects who, in some cases, are already looking what you have to offer. Reach out to our team today to find out more. Go here for our acquisition email case studies.