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If your cold email campaigns are underperforming, with low open and reply rates, it could be because of a few common cold email mistakes that you may be making.
But don’t worry. We will help you find these mistakes and fix them.
We have curated a list of the top 20 common cold email mistakes you should avoid to increase the chances of booking more meetings with your prospects.
Let’s check them out!
Cold Email Mistakes To Avoid in 2024: Table of Contents
- 20 Cold Email Mistakes That Could Be Affecting Your Open and Reply Rates
- How Can Saleshandy Help Improve Your Open and Reply Rates?
- Start Cold Emailing The Right Way in 2024
- FAQs
20 Cold Email Mistakes That Could Be Affecting Your Open and Reply Rates
- Not Researching Your ICPs and Buyer Personas Properly
- Not Segmenting Your Prospects
- Not Warming Up Your Email Accounts
- Using Primary Domains To Send Cold Emails
- Forgetting To Clean Your Email List
- Not Using The Right Tools For The Job
- Sending Lengthy Cold Emails
- Not Having a Proper Follow-up Plan in Place
- Not Inserting Unsubscribe Link
- Having Multiple CTAs
- Not Taking Steps To Optimize Your Cold Emails (A/B Testing)
- Using Wrong or Outdated Subject Lines
- Not Setting Up Authentication Records Properly
- Not Knowing When To Let Go
- Sending Generic Emails
- Not Timing Your Emails
- Sending Too Much Emails From A Single Account
- Not Having a Custom Tracking Domain
- Having HTML Rich Elements And Too Many Links
- Not Including a Professional Email Signature
1. Not Researching Your ICPs and Buyer Personas Properly
The most common mistake you should avoid is not putting enough effort into researching your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas.
They are important as they help you pinpoint your next potential buyer and tailor your cold email, making them more relevant.
Sending cold emails without properly building your ICPs and buyer personas is similar to blindly throwing darts.
You’ll hit the board if you’re lucky.
If you want consistent results—higher open and reply rates and more prospects booking meetings with you—do this instead of relying on luck.
- First, clearly define your ICP and buyer persona.
- Then, use the information and create a quality list of leads you will contact.
- Finally, tailor the messages in your email sequences according to the pain points and goals mentioned in your ICP.
Pro Tip: Write your emails in a tone that suggests that you genuinely understand your prospects’ pain and wish to help them.
2. Not Segmenting Your Prospects
Another common cold email mistake that could cause low conversion rates is not segmenting your prospects properly.
Why does this mistake cause you so dearly?
Your prospects might have different challenges and priorities.
If you’re going to target them, you’ll create a cold email draft outlining all the pain points and solutions you’ll provide.
This will make your cold email generic and not relatable to them on a personal level.
Here is what you should be doing instead.
Segment your prospects based on potential contract value, job titles, pain points, and goals.
This will allow you to create tailored copies for prospects they can relate to, leading to more opens, replies, and, ultimately, more booked meetings.
3. Not Warming Up Your Email Accounts
Another easily avoidable mistake most beginners make is not warming up their accounts or giving them enough time to do so.
How does this affect you?
Email warm-up is an essential process that every cold emailer should follow.
It improves the sender reputation of your newly bought email accounts, helps ensure your cold emails land in prospects’ inboxes, and avoids the spam folder.
So, before starting your outreach campaigns, warm up your email accounts.
Pro Tip: Warm up your email accounts for at least three weeks. If you want to automate your email warm-up process, consider using a warm-up tool
4. Using Primary Domains To Send Cold Emails
If there is one blunder that can send you back to the drawing board, it’s using your business’s primary domain to send cold emails.
Why is this a terrible idea?
When you use your primary domain to reach prospects, you risk ruining its reputation.
As cold emails are sent without your prospects’ consent, there is a chance that some will mark you as spam, which will lower your emails and the domain’s reputation.
If your primary domains get affected, your other regular business communication will also be affected.
So reserve your primary domains and emails for onboarding, opted-in marketing communication, etc.
Meanwhile, you should set up secondary domains and email accounts for cold emailing.
Pro Tip: Use secondary domains that closely resemble your primary domain. For example, get alternate domain names like {your_company}hq.com, {your_company}.org, etc.
5. Forgetting To Clean Your Email List
Another common mistake is cold emailers not cleaning their prospect list of potentially invalid email addresses.
There’s always a chance that the information you have could be outdated.
Maybe a prospect changed jobs, which might not have been updated in the business database you use for prospecting. That email address you have might not exist anymore.
Sending cold emails to such addresses could increase your bounce rate and affect the sender’s reputation of your email accounts.
To avoid such a catastrophe, use an email verification tool to clean your prospect list.
It can remove invalid email addresses and help keep your bounce rates to a minimum, protecting your email addresses reputation and deliverability.
Whether you prospect on your own or buy an email list from a service provider, always clean the list!
6. Not Using The Right Tools For The Job
If a screw in your desk comes loose, you use a screwdriver. Perfect for the job!
Use a hammer, and you’ll find yourself in some other trouble.
Similarly, when sending cold emails to prospects, use the right tool to help you streamline your efforts.
With the right cold emailing tool, you can avoid most, if not all, of the mistakes in this blog.
Moreover, it will reduce manual work, allowing you to concentrate on building relationships with prospects and nurturing them into paying customers.
Pro Tip: You can use Saleshandy or other cold email tools to help you avoid common cold email mistakes and improve your entire cold email outreach process.
7. Sending Lengthy Cold Emails
Although this might not seem like a big mistake, a long email is an instant turn-off for most prospects.
Your prospects are busy and have their own priorities. A lengthy email will lower your chances of getting a response.
We agree it’s easy to get super excited and carried away when trying to tell prospects how you can help solve their problems. But, honestly, nobody likes to read an essay.
Instead of trying to impress your prospect with too much value, keep it concise and think of cold emailing as a channel to open up communication.
Remember to cover everything within 100 words when you write your cold emails.
8. Not Having a Proper Follow-up Plan in Place
We noticed a common beginner mistake: Many people send one email and wait for a reply from their prospects.
That is not going to work. Why?
Because your prospects are busy people, and in their busy schedules, they are bound to miss an email or two—more if they are constantly flooded with emails!
So, to get their attention, you have to send follow-up emails.
Consider follow-ups as a gentle reminder to your prospects, letting them know you are knocking on their inbox.
We suggest you monitor your open rates here.
If your emails are being delivered to their inbox but are not being opened, your prospects are either out of office or you’re not standing out enough.
In this case, you should tailor your follow-up subject line more carefully.
On the other hand, if they open your email but do not respond, your messages are not compelling enough.
You can include convincing case studies and different ways to generate more responses with your follow-up emails.
9. Not Inserting Unsubscribe Link
Many cold emailers are still unaware of Gmail’s email-sending guidelines, which have made it mandatory for all bulk emailers to have an unsubscribe link.
Adhere to these changes and include an unsubscribe link to ensure a hassle-free cold email experience for you and your prospects.
By giving your prospects an easy option to opt out of your emails, you show that you value their needs and wants.
Pro Tip: You can use a cold email software to easily add the unsubscribe link. The software will automatically remove prospects from active campaigns as soon as they unsubscribe.
10. Having Multiple CTAs
“The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy so that he cannot fathom our real intent.” ~Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Creating confusion is a common way to get an advantage over your enemy and win a war. But confusing your prospects with multiple Call-To-Actions (CTAs) will get you nowhere.
A well-crafted CTA guides your prospects on what action they should take next. You can use them to ask your prospects to book a meeting, download a guide, or look at a case study.
Whatever you choose to do, you have to make sure you guide them properly.
Having no CTAs or multiple CTAs in place will confuse your prospect, leading to missed opportunities.
11. Not Taking Steps To Optimize Your Cold Emails (A/B Testing)
“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” ~ Winston Churchill
If you want to see your metrics – open, reply and conversion rates keep soaring, always test and optimize your campaigns.
By A/B testing your email copies, headlines, subject lines, and or CTAs, you’ll find the one that resonates the best with your prospects.
You can then use this to improve your engagement with them.
But, many cold emails skip this process because they think it’s too hectic and tiresome. But it doesn’t have to be.
With the right cold email tool by your side, you can easily carry out A/B testing and find what works best for your prospects.
12. Using Wrong or Outdated Subject Lines
We are sure you must have heard the phrase, “First impression is the best impression.”
Well, in cold emailing, the subject line is your chance to make the best impression and get the attention of your prospects.
Unfortunately, many cold emailers use generic subject lines and become just one among the crowd.
Here’s what you should do to be different from the rest.
Tailor your subject line according to the prospects’ goals or pain points defined in your ICP and buyer personas.
You can add humor to your subject lines to see how your prospects respond.
Pro Tip: You should do A/B testing to find the best subject lines for your cold emails.
13. Not Setting Up Authentication Records Properly
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, also called authentication records, will let Email Service Providers (ESPs) such as Google, Microsoft, etc., know you are a genuine sender.
These records help ESPs prevent spam, phishing, and other email-related security risks.
For this reason, Google, Yahoo, and other major ESPs have made it mandatory for cold emailers and email marketers to set up these records properly.
So, to avoid spam filters, set up these records properly before starting your campaigns.
14. Not Knowing When To Let Go
Sometimes, people take following up to a whole other level. They believe too much in the power of not giving up.
Which is good! You shouldn’t give up on your dreams. You should be persistent!
But, when it comes to cold emailing, it’s quite different. There’s a fine line between being persistent and being a pest.
You should know when to give up and let go of prospects who haven’t responded after several follow-up emails.
Instead of following up endlessly, plan a breakup email in your email sequence to close interactions professionally while leaving the doors open for future opportunities.
This will also help keep your sales pipeline clean.
15. Sending Generic Emails
Another common mistake that’s causing your prospects to lose interest is because you could be sending generic emails.
If your email even remotely resembles something like Hey {First_Name}, I hope this email finds you well and continues on about your company and services that could apply to anyone and everyone. It’s not going to make the cut to stand out!
You would look exactly like the 100 other emails in your prospects’ inbox.
But if you want to stand out and create a personal connection with your prospects right from the start, send personalized cold emails.
By personalization, we don’t mean just using FirstName, LastName, or CompanyName.
You should go further and use the research on your prospects to tailor your messages.
Mention specific pain points that could be troubling your prospects and explain clearly and concisely how you can solve them.
You can also use any recent company achievement or any personal achievement of the prospect as an icebreaker.
This is the level of personalization needed in 2024 to get your prospects’ interest.
Pro Tip: To help scale your personalization, you can get cold email software with a mail merge feature.
16. Not Timing Your Emails
To make the right impression, you should consider timing your emails.
Why?
Because if you don’t there is a high chance your emails will land in your prospects’ inbox when they are unavailable.
This can lead to missed opportunities.
Here is what can happen when you rightly time your emails.
Your prospect enters work and opens their inbox to check their email *Pop*! Your email reaches them.
This significantly increases the chances of your email being opened.
The right time can differ based on your prospects’ time zone, so do your research to find the best time to send your cold emails.
Important Tip to Remember: Send your cold email during weekdays during office hours for maximum impact. Also, remember any national or local holidays to ensure your efforts aren’t wasted.
17. Sending Too Much Emails From A Single Account
Another mistake that can permanently damage the reputation of your email and domains is sending huge volumes of cold emails from a single account.
A more safer way to scale your cold email outreach is to get multiple email accounts and spread the volume among them.
This way, you will be able to meet your volume requirement while keeping your emails and domains safe from the ESPs radar.
With this method, you can even send 10,000 emails in a day.
18. Not Having a Custom Tracking Domain
The deliverability of your emails strongly depends on how you are sharing links and tracking your email metrics.
If you are using a tool to get insights on open replies and clicks, the tool is likely using a tracking pixel linked to a shared domain.
This is bound to trigger spam filters as the tracking domain is not exclusive to you or related to your domain in any way.
The algorithm may think that you are sending phishing emails and is likely to mark you as spam.
To avoid this, you should use a custom tracking domain. This will replace the generic, shared tracking domain with one exclusively yours.
19. Having HTML Rich Elements And Too Many Links
When creating your cold emails, you might be tempted to use many fancy images and HTML elements to make them more appealing.
However, you should understand that cold emails and opted-in marketing emails are different.
You are also more likely to trigger spam filters with HTML elements and image attachments in your cold emails.
The same also applies to having too many links.
Try to keep your emails free of HTML elements and links. But be sure not to forget the “Unsubscribe Link”.
20. Not Including a Professional Email Signature
The last common cold email mistake you’ll look at is not having a professional email signature.
How is this a mistake?
Your email signature shows how much of a professional you are.
After the body of your email, it is a courtesy to thank the prospect for reading it.
You can have a very simple signature in your first email, like
Thank you for your time.
{Your_Name}
{Designation}, {Company Name}
Note: Do not include links to your social media profiles. This can affect your deliverability.
These are the top 20 common cold emails, and know the best practices you should follow. The next section will show the best cold email tool to improve open and reply rates.
How Can Saleshandy Help Improve Your Open and Reply Rates?
Saleshandy is a cold emailing tool that can help you create personalized cold email campaigns with automated follow-ups.
You can also schedule your emails according to your prospects’ time zones so that they land at the right time, creating maximum impact.
Saleshandy is designed to be user-friendly. It guides you through the best practices for avoiding common and advanced cold email mistakes.
One of the most important features of Saleshandy is its sequence score. This is a checklist of all the best practices you should follow to ensure the success of your cold emails.
It scores your entire email campaign based on factors like the number of follow-ups added, email accounts connected, authentication records set up, spammy words used, etc.
Saleshandy also has two more features—a content guide and an email preview — to help you avoid mistakes when drafting your cold emails.
The content guide feature will help make sure your emails are prospect and ESP friendly – short, personalized, free of spammy words with no links
On the other hand, the email preview feature will give you a prospectus view of how your emails look.
This will help you proactively spot and correct any mistakes.
A few other features that you’ll find very helpful in saleshandy are
- Email warm-up to warm your new email addresses and improve their sender reputation.
- In-built email verifier to clean your prospect list and reduce bounce rates
- Sender rotation – A feature that helps spread large volumes of emails across the connected email accounts to protect the sender’s reputation and deliverability.
- Merge tags and spintax, which will help you hyper-personalize your cold emails.
- One-click unsubscribe automatically removes prospects from your email list when they opt out.
- Email tracker to give you real-time insight into opens, replies, and click rates.
- A/Z Testing is a unique feature of Saleshandy that allows you to test up to 26 variations in your email.
One of the main advantages of Saleshandy is that it is a highly scalable software that allows you to send large volumes of email.
You can also connect unlimited emails and use the sender rotation feature to efficiently scale your outreach campaigns without affecting deliverability.
Saleshandy also offers a dedicated agency portal to onboard as many clients and team members as possible without additional charges.
With all these features and more, Saleshandy can be the perfect tool for helping you avoid common cold email mistakes and increase your email’s open and reply rates.
Start Cold Emailing The Right Way in 2024
Following these 20 cold email mistakes, I am sure you can set up and launch a perfect cold email campaign with improved opens and reply rates.
If you feel overwhelmed, thinking there is so much to consider when sending cold emails, check out Saleshandy!
Saleshandy will not only save you hours on setting up your cold email campaigns but will also effectively help in landing your emails in the inboxes.
Further, you can also track your email campaign using the software’s analytical abilities.
So, sign up for a 7-day free trial and try it out!
FAQs
1. How do I increase my cold email response rate?
To increase your response rate, make your cold emails more personalized and value-driven to your prospects. You should also do A/B testing to find out what’s working and what’s not.
2. How many cold emails does it take to get one response?
The average response rate for cold emails is about 8 to 10%. This means you will get a response for every 12 emails you send. But, this can differ from industry to industry.
3. What are some of the best tools I can use to automate and scale my cold email campaigns?
You can use dedicated cold email software like Saleshandy to automate and scale your campaigns cost-effectively.
