Eight Tips for Integrating Cold Emails in B2B Marketing in 2024

Guest post by Nina Petrov.

When done properly, sending cold emails—that is, messages to people or companies with whom you have no prior relationship—is still one of the best tactics for B2B lead generation or making direct sales. Moreover, they can complement your other marketing strategies in substantial ways.

With this in mind, here are eight helpful tips to guide your strategy toward not only delivering your messages to the right people, but also resonating with them.

Without further ado, here are eight vital steps.

1. Identify Your Ideal Recipients

Cold emailing is only effective if you target the right audience. So, do your research.

First, you’ll need to pinpoint the ideal buyer persona: basically, a representation of the kind of customer you’ll be addressing. For this purpose, gather data from various sources, such as:

• Website interactions: Page views, time spent on pages, general user behavior;
• Social media analytics: Shares, likes, comments;
• Existing customer data: Feedback, purchase history, response to campaigns;
• Industry trends: Technological advancements, regulatory changes.

Then, process it using data analytics. Try to answer questions such as which demographics have engaged most with your emails or what content has performed best.

Once you have the ideal customer persona, it’s time to actually find those people. In B2B, your audience will most often be those individuals who make or have a say in the company’s purchasing decisions.

Use LinkedIn, company websites (look in the “about” or “our team” section), and attend industry events to get to the right people.

The importance of careful targeting is hard to overstate. If you misfire, recipients are likely to tag your messages as spam, reducing your overall email deliverability rate.

Remember, though, that you don’t have to pitch to them. Instead, you can gather opinions related to your products/services through surveys, and then utilize them to adjust the overall marketing campaign accordingly.

Or, you may use cold emails as part of multi-channel campaigns. For instance, if you’re running a webinar or participating in an industry event, use cold emails to invite the targeted audience. Coordinate cold emails advertising a product launch or special promotion with other forms of marketing.

2. Tailor Your Messages to Meet Specific Needs

Whatever the purpose of your cold email, you should segment the audience based on industry, company size, job title, and other relevant criteria. Based on the criteria you’ve used, tailor your messages to address the unique needs of the people you’re emailing.

It really helps if you first work to develop a deep understanding of those operational challenges to propose a solution that will address them in the most direct way possible.

Your value proposition must effectively articulate how your product/service can solve a specific problem or improve the recipient’s business operations. Keep in mind, the decision-makers are primarily interested in the return on investment (ROI) that your product/service will offer them.

Don’t compose the message as a generic list of features, but rather focus on strategic benefits they’ll provide to these decision-makers.

How can your solution save time, improve efficiency, reduce costs, or increase revenue? Be as specific as possible; generalizations will be perceived as marketing fluff, but specific benefits will resonate with readers.

Moreover, you can also boost brand awareness by using storytelling and sharing your brand’s values and mission, while tying them to recipients’ pain points.

3. Work on Building Credibility

To demonstrate your brand’s worth in the recipient’s eyes, include case studies or testimonials from other clients you’ve helped. These work best when they pertain to the product/service you’re marketing to the recipient and come from within the reader’s industry.

Specificity is key here as it strongly resonates. Highlight specific issues you’ve solved for your clients, preferably including measurable outcomes.

To further enhance credibility, include recent insights, trends, or research relevant to the recipient’s industry in your emails to show you have a deep understanding of the corresponding business environment. For sources, offer relevant whitepapers, industry reports, or reputable blogs and publications.

This information should not only be informative, but also relevant to the problems the recipient is facing and that your product/service is solving.

Building credibility in this way is not only a direct selling tactic, but also a great way purely to craft a strong brand narrative of an industry-expert organization.

4. Personalize Your Approach to Build Long-Term Relationships

You know your audience, so personalize your cold emails. The recipient shouldn’t get the impression they’ve got the same message you’ve sent to hundreds of other people. Use the recipient’s name, reference their company, relevant industry news or events, and any mutual connections you may have.

Using the company name as the sender is one of the tactics you should definitely delete from your email marketing. Using an actual person’s name means the message is much less likely to appear as coming from a soulless corporate entity.

However, don’t stop at just establishing an initial connection. Rather, leverage personalization as a starting point for building long-term business relationships. Expressing a genuine interest in collaborating or sharing insights goes a long way.

Again, we must mention LinkedIn, as it’s a powerful tool for B2B marketing. If you reference or link to your relevant posts on this platform, it will also enhance your credibility, provide more context about your professional background and expertise, and overall increase your chances of building a healthy business relationship.

5. Use a Persuasive Email Style

You don’t build trust in your professionalism merely by showing that you know what you’re talking about, but also through presentational details. These should be consistent with your other marketing materials to reinforce brand identity.

The subject line is the first thing your recipients see. So make it count. It should be intriguing, on-point, and concise enough to encourage the recipient to open your message. If you’re having trouble coming up with it, use a subject line generator for assistance.

Once it’s opened, it needs to be read, and to make that happen you’ll need to format your email properly. Use a simple, clean visual design, making sure it’s easy to digest on both desktops and mobile devices. As for the writing style itself, strive for clarity and conciseness.

Using an email address that includes your company’s domain is a must, not only for establishing trust but also for enhancing brand recognition.

6. Encourage Responses You Want

Think about how to build a lasting relationship with your recipients when planning your initial email outreach.

You’ll need a clear call-to-action (CTA), so decide what you want the recipient to do next and make it easy for them to take the next step. For instance, this could be them scheduling a call, signing up for a demo, downloading your whitepaper, or providing feedback.

If the action you called for doesn’t happen, or you don’t get a reply at all, don’t despair. Instead, implement a follow-up strategy in the form of additional emails you’ll send afterwards.

A well-timed follow-up can make a difference; however, it shouldn’t cross the line into the territory of disrespect for the recipient’s time and inbox. Pay attention to the timing and frequency of your emails.

When it comes to B2B audiences, messages you send during business hours will have a better chance of success.

7. Be Prepared for Legal Compliance

Depending on your location and the location of your recipient, different laws relevant to cold emailing apply. While there’s little actual risk here, you should still be aware of the regulations.

In the USA, you need to comply with the CAN-SPAM (“controlling the assault of non-solicited pornography and marketing”) act.

• You can’t have misleading subject lines or headers (“From” and “To” fields must accurately identify the person or business).
• The message must include your valid physical postal address.
• While there’s a lot of leeway in this instance, it must be clear that your message is essentially an advertisement.
• You must provide a clear opt-out option for recipients to stop receiving messages. Typically, it’s included at the bottom of the email.

The European Union GDPR (“general data protection regulation”) regulatory framework has a different focus. While the rules applying to CAN-SPAM are not explicitly stated in GDPR, they are all in line with the framework’s general principle of transparency.

As the name implies, GDPR considerations are more about the protection of personal data.

You should know that, according to GRPR, you must have the consent to send your cold email. This can be informal: publicly available contact information or referrals.

Moreover, if the recipient asks for it, you’re obliged to share all of their data you possess.

8. Refine Through Testing

Again, in case of failure, don’t lose hope or enthusiasm, but fail better the next time until you succeed.

A/B testing is a great approach to the path of improvement. It involves sending the first, A version of the email and later the second, B version (to a different recipient, of course), and then comparing the results to see what works better.

You can experiment in this way with different subject lines, message lengths, tones, or CTAs.

To ensure helpful testing, it’s essential to track key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

You can do it by using an email marketing software tool, such as Hubspot CRM or Salesforce. That’s actually just one feature of popular customer relationship system (CRM) and marketing automation tools. They also allow you to track interactions, manage follow-ups, and segment your audience more effectively based on interactions and responses.

Final Thoughts on Cold Emails for B2B Marketing

With these helpful tips, you’ll be able to craft effective cold emails and make them a useful part of your B2B marketing campaign.

If done right, your cold emails will not only be opened but also welcomed. So, don’t underestimate their power, find those prospects, and start composing those ideal messages that will lead to lucrative opportunities and meaningful business relationships.

Nina Petrov is a content marketing specialist, passionate about graphic design, content marketing, and the new generation of green and social businesses. She starts the day scrolling her digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her white little bunny tends to reply to your emails when she is on vacation.