Introduction
On paper, e-commerce businesses have it all.
Millions of potential customers? Check. Globalization and the internet turning the tide in favor of targeting an international market? Check. AI and remote teams making 24/7 customer service and an always-on sales model a reality? Triple check.
Sounds peachy, if not for the small hiccup of competing with the whole world and their neighbor.
Add to this the challenge of grappling with staunchly anti-advertisement global consumer sentiment, and you’ll see why e-commerce sellers find themselves backed into a corner.
Cold emails — with their massive reach and exceptional ROI — offer a way out, but just how many ways are there of saying “I promise we’re not going to steal your money” and “Please give our business a chance” without sounding exactly like the competition?
As it turns out, several.
If you’ve been struggling with writing cold emails for your e-commerce audience — ones that get opened, read, and clicked on — you’re in the right place.
Understanding Cold Emails in E-commerce
Before you give in to naysayers who have been trying to declare cold emailing dead for almost as long as it’s existed, look at the numbers.
- 4.5 billion people (a little over half the world’s population) use email.
- 88% check their email daily, 58% of them first thing in the morning, and
- 75.4% of people actually prefer that brands communicate with them over email.
For e-commerce businesses with large markets to tackle, email shouldn’t be just another perfunctory mode of confirming transaction status.
Not when cold emails offer a personalized, scalable way to reach and convert new audiences without burning a hole in your pocket.
How to Write Great Cold Emails for E-commerce
Instead of jumping the gun and scrapping your current cold email templates altogether, dissect them, element by element.
For starters,
Pick the Right Subject Line
To an audience that doesn’t know you, subject lines are the make-or-break factor in making your cold email campaign a success.
If you’ve been battling low open rates, boost them by:
Writing non-generic subject lines
Write catchy, personalized subject lines to stand out in a crowd of uninspired, go-nowhere phrases.
Experiment with a small caps subject line:
‘trying to reach {first_name}’
Or something that sounds like a text to your friend:
‘People keep talking about {pain point}’
Being straightforward
Sometimes, the best way to get your leads’ attention is by telling them exactly what you offer.
In this template, it’s a way to solve one of their biggest challenges.
It gets straight to the point, and gives a glimpse of the no-nonsense, hard-hitting approach you’ll take to get the job done.
Turning it into a question
Even the snooziest subject lines can be improved by tacking on a question mark at the end.
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And you’d be surprised how much personality a few punctuation marks can add.
See the difference it makes when you go from
- ‘Pizza for dinner’ to
- ‘Pizza for dinner?’ to
- ‘Pizza for dinner??!!??’
Being casual
If it fits your brand voice, use acronyms and emojis, like this cold email template.
Make it Personal
Personalization isn’t just good for business, it’s also what you owe to your audience.
Personalize email copy to include the recipient’s previous interactions with your brand: emails they’ve opened, products they’ve viewed, shopping carts they’ve abandoned, etc.
This cold email template uses a personalized video to cut through the noise and give an up-front demo of the value customers can expect on signing up.
To make your template sound even more natural, Integrate merge tags deep inside your copy, instead of the superficial and overdone ‘Hey, {first_name}’.
Use contests and giveaways to collect personal information like birthdays or company achievements and use these milestones to make leads feel seen and valued.
Bonus points if you can provide a relevant resource to guide them on the way forward.
Keep It Short and Simple
There’s a tiny subset of people who, when they open an email, are pleasantly surprised to see a novella instead. Fewer still will read the whole thing.
Unless your target audience consists of these unique individuals, try to contain your emails to a maximum of 2-3 pages.
The more targeted and cohesive your information, the likelier it is to leave an impression and spur readers to click.
Take a look at this cold email template that ends almost as soon as it starts.
A short introduction followed by the main offer. That’s it. No verses upon verses of poetry praising their product, no rambling personal essays on how their product changed someone’s life.
The reader’s already sparse attention is channeled in just one direction — a potential fix for their pain point.
Call-to-Action
Every email should be written with an end goal in sight.
Is it meant to create trust in your brand? Are you promoting a new product? Do you want your audience to follow you on social media?
CTAs build on the momentum created by your email copy, streamline the messaging, and propel readers onward and forward in their buyer journey.
So if your emails are missing a CTA (and these can differ from email to email even in the same sequence), or have too many of them, it can leave readers feeling confused.
First, figure out what your email is meant to achieve.
Then phrase it in a way that compels your audience to take action.
This template includes
- an industry case study
- offers to break down its strategy and
- provides actionable lessons to achieve similar results,
making it tempting for recipients to book a call.
Once they click on the link to your website, you can use a chatbot to walk them through product features or allay concerns.
Show You’re Trustworthy
The primary obstacle between a brand and its cold email recipients is the lack of trust.
Prior exposure and a solid social media presence can help, but they’re both quite hard especially if you’re just starting.
So, if you’re a business trying to win its first customers, or entering a new market, send cold emails that
Showcase your journey
One of the best ways to instill trust is by showing people the faces behind the brand and discussing its philosophy and origin, as this template does here.
Highlight benefits
Take a cue from this template and sell your email recipients on the host of benefits they can secure for themselves by buying your product or service.
Offer a free resource
This template gets the lead’s attention with a personalized opener about their potential leads. It offers them a way to tap into a fresh lead source, backing up its claims with a case study.
The Impact of Follow-Ups
For a successful cold email campaign, tenacity is your best weapon.
Your first cold email might go unread or unanswered. Which is why you should send a second, a third, and maybe even a fourth.
Here are a few ways to follow up without parroting the same pleas for purchase:
Put the spotlight on USPs
Your cold email recipients likely haven’t even glanced at your first email, much less noticed the benefits of your offer. So list them out.
Trigger FOMO
Fear is a powerful motivator. Create some good old-fashioned FOMO, as this template does, and watch as at least a few on-the-fence leads cave in and convert.
Use humor
Not sounding pushy in follow-up emails is easier said than done. But you can take the edge off by inserting humor in your copy.
The Google Drive link (which you can substitute with an in-mail image) opens to this.
Set a friendly tone for the conversation so that even if a lead doesn’t buy from you right now, they remain open to working with you in the future.
Maximize Technology and Tools
Crafting cold emails is one thing. Finding and connecting with an audience that appreciates your offer is another entirely.
For the first to work, the second has to be in place.
And that, for even the most seasoned of email marketers, is a formidable task.
Start by compiling a list of individuals that fit your Ideal Customer Persona.
To find their email address, you’ll need a company website or a blog they’re associated with.
Enter it into the domain field and select your prospect’s name from the ones available.
If you already have their email address, run it through an email verification process to make sure your cold email gets delivered.
You can either run your prospect sheet through the Bulk Email Verifier or install the ‘Hunter for Sheets’ Chrome extension.
Build templates and email cadences for each segment of your outreach audience.
Personalize them with attributes like names, location, company name, etc., and schedule them to be sent out at an optimal time.
Depending on the size of your list and your organization, you can use enterprise software or go with a no-nonsense cold email automation platform like Hunter Campaigns.
The Email Finder and Verifier are both integrated with Campaigns, which helps ensure high deliverability rates.
You can also track campaign stats and automate follow-ups using behavioral and time-based triggers.
3 Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make in Cold Emails
Now that we’ve gone over the do’s, here are the don’ts.
Mistake #1: Making it all about you
Cold emails are sent to people who
- Don’t know you
- Didn’t sign up to hear from you
Instead of talking about
- Your brand,
- Your product, and
- How it’s the best thing since sliced bread,
get their attention by using terms centered around
- Their goals,
- Their pain points,
- And how they can get where they want to be with your help.
Impress upon your audience that you get them like no other business does, and their satisfaction is your top priority.
Mistake #2: Bombarding them with too much information
For cold email audiences whose loyalty and attention you have yet to earn, shorter emails demand less time, are easier to understand, and therefore more likely to be responded to.
Any information you give them should be broken down into small paragraphs and bullet points.
Where required, break up walls of text and provide context with visual elements.
Mistake #3: Pushing too hard for a sale
Nobody wants an email from someone they don’t know telling them ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t buy this’.
Keep your ask small if you don’t want to scare off potential customers. Even better if you can confer a benefit (like a freebie) instead of asking for a favor.
Most importantly, learn to let go. If they haven’t responded to your previous 246 emails, hold off on the 247th one.
Advanced Strategies for Scaling Up
Testing methods like A/B testing help understand which email elements appeal more to readers.
Pick between
- subject lines
- Email copy
- Images
- CTA text
- design, etc.
You can try sending the same email at different times to see whether certain segments show more interest and engagement.
If a segment reads your emails in the morning vs. at the end of the day, modify sending times to maximize conversions.
Study open, click-through, and conversion rates throughout the campaign. This will keep you updated with changes in audience behavior, preferences, and habits.
Use it to identify patterns in segments and classify or reclassify them based on these observations.
Regularly solicit feedback from recipients to refine emails. Ask for their opinion about relevance, frequency, and offers.
Overcome the lack of trust with emails containing reviews and user-generated content (UGC).
In your cold emails, provide easy access to all the social proof leads may need to make a purchase decision.
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Integrate email with other channels like website chatbots and social media for a more finely attuned approach to marketing.
AI can help mass-personalize email content, sift through data and forecast the behavior of future customers, and monitor and detect real-time trends in the making through social listening and emotion detection.
Conclusion
Effective cold email campaigns can help e-commerce brands overcome intense competition and stagnant sales.
Focus on crafting unique subject lines, personalizing content, and building trust with your audience.
Ensure each email has a clear call to action and be persistent with follow-ups. Use advanced strategies like A/B testing and integrating AI to refine your approach.
By leveraging these techniques, your cold emails can convert leads and boost sales efficiently.
