Top 5 Cold Emailing Trends Every Marketer Must Know In 2023
Introduction
Cold emailing is one of the most successful marketing outreach tactics. It is the first email sent to a potential customer to win their attention and loyalty by providing solutions or other benefits. In simple words, when businesses email prospective customers to market a specific product, service, or solution, they are engaging in cold emailing. These emails seek to establish a rapport with potential customers and advance them in the sales funnel. It also allows marketers to network with potential customers whom they can’t meet in person or have enough information to present a sales pitch over a phone call. Cold emails are very successful; odds are you have a dozen of them sitting in your inbox right now!
Despite the challenges involved, cold emails have shown a better return on investment than cold calls, webinars, or social media messages. According to OptinMonster, 58% of individuals check their email first thing in the day, compared to only 14% who check social media messages. Hence, timely cold emails can help your business make a great first impression and break the ice with prospects. Yet, the most significant advantage of cold emailing is that it is highly targeted. Marketers focus on sending cold emails only to an audience who is already interested in their business’s products and services. This makes cold emails an effective tool for getting your foot in the prospect’s door. However, it is also critical to understand what the prospects really want. Getting your foot in is only half the work; you also need to follow up, build a genuine connection and cater to the prospects’ needs. Understanding their pain points, expectations and preferences can enable you to craft more relevant and persuasive cold emailing campaigns.
So, here are the top 5 cold emailing trends of 2023 that should influence your campaigns so you can move with consumer demands, market changes, technological advancements, and other factors. By being aware of these trends in the world of cold email marketing, you can deliver top-notch cold emails to your prospects and improve campaign performance. This will lead to higher open rates, better targeting of audiences, increased rate of replies, and ROI. Isn’t that what every email marketer wants?
Trend 1: Personalization Will Continue To Define Cold Emailing Strategies
A core aspect of cold email marketing has always been to create more personalized and tailored email campaigns. Yet, with the increase in market competition and audiences being targeted by multiple businesses, the personalization of cold emails will remain a major trend for email marketers in 2023. A digital marketing report by WebFX shows that personalization improves open rates for cold emails by 42% and the average clickthrough rate (CTR) by up to 14%. However, some marketers believe in an outcome-based approach. If you’re one of them then you should note that using personalization in cold emails directly correlates with the business outcomes since personalization can increase conversions by 10%.
Personalization will remain the key aspect in grabbing and maintaining your audience’s attention. For example, you can get them to open your cold emails by using personalized email subject lines. Marketers can personalize email subject lines by using their prospect’s name or tailoring it to their specific interests or pain points. After all, your subject line is the first thing every prospect reads, and personalizing it to grab their attention is a successful tactic. WebFX reports that personalized subject lines can increase the open rate by 26%.
Source: Saleshacker
Further, when prospects receive non-personalized or irrelevant emails, 68% of them delete them while at least 54% unsubscribe from the sender’s email. Hence, marketers are expected to focus on email hyper-personalization in 2023. This will include sending sequences of follow-ups based on prospect behavior, personality insights, etc. to craft highly tailored email experiences that will help in differentiating your cold emails against the hundreds of other emails being sent to the same prospect.
Trend 2: Marketers Will Look To Forge Authentic And Meaningful Relationships
Another goal of cold email marketing is to forge genuine connections with prospects. This improves the likelihood of them responding favorably and becoming loyal, repeat consumers. Naturally, the higher the conversions, the better ROI your cold emailing initiatives will have. This year, email marketers will aim to develop honest and meaningful relationships with prospects through various strategies. According to Jill Konrath, a renowned sales strategist, top sellers who use cold emails spend 6 hours each week on average using LinkedIn. This enables them to understand better the prospect’s pain points, beliefs, desires, likings, etc., and develop a truly authentic relationship with them.
The fact is, if your prospects don’t feel like you are mass emailing them, they will be more likely to respond and interact. No one wants to talk to another salesman when they feel like just another name on a long list! Hence, apart from personalizing cold emails, marketers need to tailor the entire experience end-to-end to create authentic and lasting relationships. The connection grows stronger if you can help them solve their issues and pain points.
Mealfan, a meal delivery service, used cold email marketing for developing genuine relationships with new audiences and converting prospects who disliked “the hassle of meal preparation or drive-thru orders.” They started curating information regarding the top food brands to inform prospects of their meal delivery service. Eric Sornoso, a marketing expert, said that they used two to four cold emails per prospect, but that it worked in establishing a long-term relationship with their consumers. Although it may take a lot more effort, this cold emailing trend highlights that marketers must focus on creating a working relationship with their prospects before asking for anything. Scheduling multiple follow-up emails seems to be an excellent strategy as cold email campaigns with 4 to 7 emails per sequence can get up to three times as many responses compared to campaigns with less than 4 emails.
Trend 3: Cold Emails Will Need To Highlight Their Value More Than Anything
Every cold email intends to offer some value to prospective readers. Yet, cold emails can be notoriously hard to perfect as prospects will only reply if they see value being returned for their time or money. According to a study done by SuperOffice, one in three cold email recipients chooses whether to open an email based on the subject line alone. If your subject line does not persuade or convey prospects about the value of the email, chances are they will delete it. Even if the rest of your targeted prospects open the email and read it through, they need the incentive to respond. This can only be done by offering true value to them – no shortcuts here. This year, marketers will aim to refine their messaging and gain the prospect’s attention by convincing readers how valuable their solutions or products are.
This trend primarily focuses on eliminating the frills and talking more about how you can offer the greatest value to the reader. Marketers heeding this trend will be required to invest in research about their target audience and demographic. Only by doing real homework about the issues, challenges, and limitations faced by prospects can they begin to refine their messaging. These cold emails will not only catch the prospect’s attention but (more importantly!) deliver valuable and actionable information, not just another sales pitch.
The fact is, most prospects care about how much value you can add to their lives, rather than how personalized your cold email is. Personalization is also critical as it gets your foot in the door. However, even the most personalized cold emails can be saturated with irrelevant and unhelpful information. Prospects want you to get to the point where you explain how your business can help them. This is what gives them the motivation needed to respond; not whether you know about their favorite movie genre! Marketers who can highlight the value offered to prospects in their cold emails will find success.
Trend 4: Artificial Intelligence And Automation Will Be Inevitable
Artificial Intelligence and automation have revolutionized almost every industry. Email marketing is no different. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will continue to develop a strong presence in email marketing initiatives as it helps marketers to make better decisions using campaign data. The way the wind is blowing, AI will soon become a critical component to help cold email marketers deliver more relevant campaigns. AI will enable marketers to extract the most relevant and meaningful insights from previous campaigns, and use them to shape their future cold emails. This will create more personalized, persuasive, and tailored cold emails (remember trend 1?). A survey conducted by Gartner in 2018 reported that marketers who used Artificial Intelligence for cold email personalization reported a 41 percent increase in revenue and their CTR was higher by 13.44 per cent. In 2023, advancements in AI algorithms will further improve these metrics and we will see more marketers adopt this technology.
Since marketers are still hesitant to use Artificial Intelligence, it is important to remember that AI isn’t meant to replace email marketers. Being an augmented intelligence technology, it will optimize workloads and help scale email marketing efforts by streamlining analytics and other manual tasks. This also correlates with another technological trend that email marketers will invest in this year – automation.
Most dedicated cold emailing software have automation features that do the heavy lifting. Automation will soon be used to handle several repetitive, labor-intensive tasks, resulting in increased productivity and ROI. Email marketers will use it for tasks such as curating mailing lists, personalizing mass email campaigns, scheduling follow-ups, and executing campaigns with multiple email sequences. According to a study done by Campaign Monitor, automated emails generate 320% more revenue than non-automated emails in general. Hence, marketers will invest in both technologies to scale operations while improving personalization and customer data analytics.
Source: Mailmodo
Trend 5: Email Marketers Will Focus On Quality Over Quantity
This trend has been in the making for a long time. With prospects being targeted by multiple businesses, they are no longer impressed by statistics and numbers. Rather, they want to hear about achievements, customer reviews, and success stories. Hence, an improved cold emailing experience for prospects will mean that marketers should focus on showcasing quality over quantity. This trend will shift the focus towards sending a lower number of high-quality, targeted emails over conventional cold emails and follow-up strategies that aim to convert prospects over several weeks.
Naturally, creating high-quality cold emails necessitates an understanding of what persuades the consumers to open emails or respond. For example, only 5% of prospects remember individual statistics from a cold email, while over 60% of prospects can recall stories. Hence, according to marketers Chip and Dan Heath, using fewer statistics and more storytelling will create compelling cold emails. Marketers need to focus on the quality of their messaging, rather than its quantity.
It will also translate to improving the quality of prospects by making investments in tools that clean prospect data. Rather than mass emailing to a list of uncontacted contacts, filtering the lists before you cold email them will lead to better open rates and responses. Addressing your cold emails to prospects who perfectly match your ideal customer profile (ICP) will make it easier to craft tailored and relevant emails. Moreover, marketers will be able to build more genuine relationships with the recipients if they perceive the cold emails as credible and valuable.
Conclusion
Cold email marketing goes beyond reaching the prospect’s inbox. It is about reaching through to the reader and addressing his/her pain points, challenges, or preferences. Yet, most cold emails remain ineffective as they fail to consider the needs of the prospects. By understanding and applying the most significant trends in cold email marketing this year, you can craft cold emails that will boost your campaign performance, rate of response, and business revenue.
Happy cold emailing!
