Guide to Increasing Responses to Cold Outreach Business Emails

Prospects will look at your email subject line and use that as a basis to see if your business email is worth opening. If you want prospects to open your email, use numbers. According to Yesware, subject lines with numbers have an 84.61% open rate. With that said, if you apply this subject line to your cold email, how then can you write a cold email that will make your prospect respond? Learn more by reading our guide below.

Why Should You Write a Business Email for Outreach?

You should consider sending cold emails to prospects to build relationships and generate leads. 

You want them to become a lead, but to do that, you might have to “woo” them. You want to ease them into what you’re offering without going for the hard sell.

In most cases, some would reject you. While others might take time to respond, and you have to follow up. This might further dissuade some businesses from continuing with their cold email strategies. However, conversion rates for cold emails are at 15.11%. It’s not a high number, but that shouldn’t discourage you from discontinuing your outreach strategy.

Despite such, cold emailing can still be rewarding. In some cases, after employing some strategies to persuade them, you might get a successful prospect and turn them into a qualified lead.

But how do you craft an email from that start that will turn a prospect into a lead?

Tips To Sending a Business Email People Will Read

1. Write an Eye-Catching Subject Line

Subject lines are the first thing anyone would read in your business email.

Sending a (no subject) subject line to your leads will be overlooked. They would think this is spam. And you don’t want leads hitting the spam or trash button. What are expert tips in writing an email subject for any cold email?

• Personalize by adding your lead’s first name
• Ask a question
• Include you, us, we
• Provide advice or a suggestion
• Drop the name of your connection or referral

And if you can, try keeping your subject lines short too. Based on Fast Company’s study, their two-word subject line “Quick Question” had a 51.2% open rate than their long-form subject line. Plus, it even had a 66.67% response rate.

2. Keep The Business Email Short

Data showed that in 2016, the average person would read an email for 11.1 seconds. ButLitmus debunked this data and found reading time increased to 13.4 seconds in 2018. In that same study, they also revealed that people would skim emails. Despite the rise in reading time, you have to keep in mind that your lead will skim your email.

That’s why it’s important that you keep emails short. 

Previous studies have shown that you might want to count your words. Boomerang reveals that your email should have 50 to 125 words only. Response rates were at 50%.

Your lead may only spare a few minutes of their time reading emails. You want your business email to be read among the tens to thousands your prospect might receive in a day. Make it count by keeping it short.

3. Find the Formula That Works For You

Writing cold emails is a case of trial and error. If you think about it, not everyone will respond to the same type of cold email. If businesses sent one template to everyone else, it would become repetitive and boring. That’s why you should keep testing which cold email format would work for your outreach efforts.

But which cold email formula can work well for your company?

Here are the best business email formulas you can copy for your outreach efforts.

• QVC (Question, Value Proposition, and Closing CTA)
• PAS (Problem, Agitate, Solve)
• AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action)
• Before-After-Bridge
• Star, Story, Solution

4. Provide a Clear Call-to-Action

Even if you know not every lead would respond, lean towards the idea that people will reply. Sure, you might have written a compelling email about your product or service. But is that enough to warrant a reply? That’s why before you close the email with your signature, you need a call-to-action.

But if you want the lead to consider learning more about you, you may use these techniques:

• Link to a blog post
• Link to a video
• Provide a phone number

Examples of Outreach Emails

1. Hype Them With Something Free

Jon Torrey shared in a Medium article that he received an email from this company called Suplexed. He mentioned that the email subject line was “Hyped Care Package from Suplexed.” The author decided to open his email because it caught his attention. And he wasn’t disappointed with the content.

Why Does This Email Work?

• Casual approach
• Email rep did their research: “Gary V and UVM + Philly guy”
• It made the prospect feel good because they’re part of the hype
• Plus, the email rep showed empathy

Torrey accepted the care package offer. Well, who doesn’t want free stuff, right?

2. Make It Short and Straightforward

Someone from Nutshell received this email from Recurly. The business email goes straight to the point. Instead of explaining what they have in store via text, they provided a link to the video. 

3. Connect With A Story

One of the goals of a cold email is to warm up your lead. And if you want to get into the good graces of your prospects, you will have to do thorough research. Or at least a cursory look on a LinkedIn profile, and know your prospect better. You may also get brownie points for telling a story related to your lead’s past, like this email.

Why Does This Email Work?

• The Subject line is unique to the Quebec experience
• Email rep did their research well and told a story
• Left an open-ended question, allowing the prospect to respond

4. Be Casual

For some, formal = boring. That can be the case when you follow a template copied straight from a template. But you don’t have to sound all formal most of the time. You want to establish a connection from the start, even if it means you might sound informal.

Take a look at how Sumo sent their email to prospects.

Why Does This Email Work?

• Even if the email is written in lowercase, it sounds like they’re talking to a friend
• Talked up their site as an upgrade from another email marketing application
• The P.S. is a nice touch because it gives them insight into their prospect’s current email marketing software

5. Present a Potential Problem

It can be challenging to accept that your business may have a problem that you may not be aware of yet. However, this email by a particular print company pointed out a problem that they could fix.

Why Does This Email Work?

For one, they cited a previous case that could happen to another company. It’s good they provided a quick summary. Plus, they didn’t want to assume the company has any problems. But they want to thwart any possible concerns that the company could experience.

6. Ask for Input

This works well if you have a link-building strategy or want to reach a fellow expert or blogger and ask for insight on a particular topic. And this one by Pandadoc is something to consider.

Why Does This Email Work?

• It’s short and straightforward
• Made a specific request on what content is needed for the blog
• Suggested if they could use this certain article before asking if the prospect had something else in mind