You’re probably no stranger to the myriad challenges of cold emailing. You’ve written and sent your emails, but now what? No one is responding, and your outreach efforts seem to be going nowhere. The good news is that you can turn things around. With the right email outreach strategy, you’ll see more people engaging with your messages and converting into leads. This blog will discuss how to build an effective email outreach strategy that will help you streamline your cold email processes, maximize your conversion rates, and get more people interested in your business.

Part of developing an effective email outreach strategy is ensuring your email infrastructure is up to par. Inframail’s email infrastructure solution allows you to improve your cold email deliverability rates, so your messages reach more of your intended recipients instead of getting lost in the depths of the spam folder. 

Table of Content

• What is Cold Email Outreach and Why Do It?

• 12 Steps for an Effective Cold Email Outreach Strategy

• 26 Best Tools to Optimize Your Email Outreach Strategy

• Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

What is Cold Email Outreach and Why Do It?

Cold email outreach is an effective strategy for contacting potential clients you’ve never contacted before. They may be aware of your business (it makes things easier), but they’ve never purchased from you, and you have never sent them any marketing material. Your cold outreach email represents your first contact and is, in essence, a form of introduction. It’s a starting point for building a relationship that will, hopefully, lead to increased sales or bookings and, ultimately, to customer loyalty.  

Why Are Cold Emails Still Effective?

A cold outreach campaign can be ideal for prospecting new customers and generating cold leads. They use few resources and can be done at a large scale by using automated email marketing tools. You must also consider the data you can collect and analyze for personalization. If you are doing cold email outreach, your target list will likely be extensive. That means you can quickly identify what has worked for you and what hasn’t so you can tweak any future cold email tactics. That’s a massive advantage over cold calling, where much less data will be generated. Using email to make contact is also less intrusive than cold calls, and leads can read or respond to an email at their leisure.   

When Should You Consider a Cold Email Outreach Strategy?

As with other tactics, you must first consider your target demographics and identify their preferences regarding communication. With 53% of the world’s population being Millennials or Gen Zs, these are two generations that have either experienced the growth of technology and digital communications or have grown up with them already in place. So, if they’re your target audience, chances are they’ll be more comfortable with (and therefore more receptive to) cold emails and other digital communications. 

Cold outreach may also be beneficial if you’re targeting specific customer segments, such as B2B clients who are difficult to reach through different channels. If you know your company has a clear, valuable proposition that meets their needs or solves their pain points, a cold email could be your ticket. One exception to cold emailing is senior executives and decision-makers. As much of their inbound communication goes to a gatekeeper, there is a chance that your email will simply end up in the spam or trash folders. In such scenarios, networking (possibly via LinkedIn) is the best approach.

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12 Steps for an Effective Cold Email Outreach Strategy

1. Know and Segment Your Audience: Efficiently Target Your Cold Email Outreach to Improve Your Response Rates

Before sending your first email, know who you are trying to reach. Your email outreach could slow down your sales cycle depending on how well you know your target audience. That includes knowing how many prospects are available to your business and how they want to be reached.  Dig deep to identify new target audiences and learn how to engage with them. There may be several buyer personas you need to market to, each requiring a different messaging strategy. Only some prospects on your list will respond to the same email. Segment your audience, and A/B test your messaging and content to drive higher open rates and engagement.

2. Clean Up Your Data: Maintain Accurate Information for Better Deliverability 

Most companies have a good sense of their best prospects: they’re all in their CRM, right? Maybe not. Prospects move on, companies change their business focus, and external events can alter the course of a business model. It’s estimated that databases degrade by some 25% a year. As you manage new leads from different channels (i.e., LinkedIn), ensure the contact info is correct and your database is clean. If it isn’t, take that person off your CRM. If the company is genuinely interested, find viable contacts who work there and add those to the list. 

3. Always Add a Call to Action (CTA): Engage Recipients and Move Them Along Your Funnel 

You’ve written your email. It has an eye-catching subject line, an enticing pre-header, and informative content. Job done, right? Wrong! Any cold outreach email should have a clear CTA in the body of the email. It doesn’t have to be a call to buy or book. You could seek to further nurture the lead by offering a free eBook on a relevant topic or signing up for a series of webinars on a particular subject. The point is to engage the recipient and draw them into your sales funnel for further nurturing.

4. Be Personal: Customize Emails for Improved Engagement

Personalization goes beyond using the recipient’s name and can make a real difference to your response rate and open and click-through rates (CTR). You need to find a balance between professionalism and being conversational. While you can’t customize every email to cold email recipients, you can tailor emails to your identified segments. 

For example, in one segment, you’ve identified managers and decision-makers as your ideal customer profile in the call center sector. You can discuss their pain points and problems and offer solutions, such as dynamic scripting tools.  

You can make a cold email personal in areas from the subject line to the body of the mail. Some places where you can add that personal touch include: 

• They are using their name and/or their position in their organization. 

• Note any previous interactions with your business. (your customer relationship management (CRM) system can be ideal for this). 

• Mention any of the recipient’s work I know of, including blogs, white papers, or anything relevant. 

• Highlight products or services they’ve shown interest in or where I think there might be a connection. 

5. Choosing the Right Cold Email Platform: Find a Solid Email Outreach Tool for Your Campaigns 

Your goal with email marketing software is to find a platform that: 

• Speeds you up (and doesn’t slow you down) 

• Helps ensure the best possible email deliverability rates 

• Has the cold email features you need (like scheduling, follow-ups, and more) 

• Be upfront with limits and caps so as not to limit your campaigns unexpectedly. 

The “best” cold email software depends on your overall needs, and your options have increased over the last several years. 

6. Time It Right: Schedule Your Cold Email Outreach for Maximum Impact 

Another critical action to take before launching any email marketing activities is to time your outreach. Map your email activity to the cadences and opportunities in your industry’s business cycles. If everyone takes the whole summer off, don’t waste your time with outreach. If you deal with countries where no one works in August, consider pausing the campaign until they return. 

Find out the fiscal year/s of your clients and determine the optimal times to reach out for next year’s planning cycle. Every company approaches strategic planning differently: knowing when a contact is open to discussing new approaches for the upcoming year can make all the difference. 

7. Use Automation Thoughtfully: Quality Matters More Than Quantity 

Automated campaign technologies are a proven and increasingly popular way to reach more prospects, but they may alienate them, too. This time-saving technology also opens the door for some strategic errors. So, think through your timing and content strategy. Always defer to quality over quantity, and remember why you’re doing this: The intention of an email marketing campaign shouldn’t be to download endless ads or material. 

It generates interest in your company’s offerings, shows the audience you empathize with their needs and frustrations, and opens up a conversation. Before you present your company’s solution, make sure it’s clear I understand the pain points first. A perceived lack of empathy for their situation may prompt recipients to tune you out. 

8. Smarten Up Your Content Strategy: Build Content that Supports Your Email Outreach 

Content takes effort, energy, time, and people power. Don’t waste it. Be honest about what kind of content your business needs to get into the market to succeed in building business. It needs to map to your different buyer personas and be delivered with the right motivational messaging to the right target audience at the right time. A content strategy should be supported by an excellent library: a trove of contact that’s helpful, insightful, and appealing to your target audience. 

As for creating that content internally or using an outside resource, it depends. But don’t limit yourself just because you don’t have the bandwidth in-house, and don’t try to cut corners too deeply, or your content will suffer for it. A great (and competitive) content strategy has variety as well as: 

• Quality

• With white papers

• Industry insights

• Newsletters

All can be effective at engaging prospects and sparking communication. 

9. Go Short: Keep Cold Emails Brief to Improve Engagement 

Email marketing campaigns are great for sharing top-line information about your company, establishing your credentials, getting on a prospect’s radar screen, and hopefully progressing to a call or a meeting. Going too long in an email and exhausting your audience’s attention could derail that entire process. Be precise, hit the right notes (your research will tell you what those notes are) and then get to the call to action or link to industry insights I hope will interest the recipient. 

In exchange for their time and attention, your prospects should be rewarded with brevity and relevant, valuable material and/or business insights. Follow the credo ‘Always be helping’ and the sales will follow. 

10. Consider UGC: Use User Generated Content to Make Your Emails More Engaging 

User generated content (UGC) is a great way to: 

• Break the mold

• Engage your customers

• Build credibility

Inviting your customer base to share their own compelling, objective stories about your company, products, and services can create effective third-party endorsements of what you do and how you do it. Existing client success stories, generated by them, not you, can build a sense of trust among prospects. 

It can also lead to some great initial conversations as prospects find their own perspectives and needs echoed in a piece of UGC. Just make sure, like everything else, the content is brief, to the point, and leads to curiosity and questions, not reader exhaustion.

11. Mind the Header: Craft Engaging Email Headers to Boost Open Rates

In 2022, an average of 3.9 million emails went out globally every second. The average office worker’s email account receives 121 emails a day. We expect emails, and more often than not, we want them. Keeping the email header short, clear, relevant, readable, and engaging will increase your chances of being opened. Don’t get lost in a sea of messages. Use that email header to stand out. 

12. Measure Your Performance: Track Cold Email Outreach Metrics to Improve Future Campaigns 

If you want to know how or if an email campaign is working, don’t leave it to guesswork. Creating campaign performance metrics should be part of your email outreach strategy, as well as investing in the software or platform that measures open rates and prospect engagement levels. If you don’t hit the marks with the results you want, take the time to: 

• Regroup

• Pause your emails

• Find out why

Assemble your internal team and do a deep dive. Ask trusted outsiders for objective feedback. You may even want to survey what people want to see. Do the hard work, and you’ll further achieve your lead generation goals.

Related Reading

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• Mailscale Alternatives
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• Email Scraping Tools
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• Best Sales Prospecting Tools
• Email Warm Up Tools
• Email Personalization Tools

26 Best Tools to Optimize Your Email Outreach Strategy

1. Inframail

Inframail is transforming cold email infrastructure with an innovative approach that simplifies scaling mass email outreach. With Inframail, you get: 

• Unlimited inboxes at a flat rate

• Eliminating the need to wrestle with technical configurations

• Expensive per inbox costs

Users also benefit from: 

• Microsoft-backed deliverability

• Dedicated IP addresses

• Automated technical setup for faster onboarding

Inframail’s email infrastructure benefits that need to boost their outreach efforts: 

• Agencies

• Recruiters

• Sales development representatives (SDRs) 

The platform handles the complex setup processes for your email infrastructure so you can focus on reaching more prospects, including: 

• Automated SPF

• DKIM,

• DMARC setup 

2. Folderly

Folderly is an intelligent tool for configuring mailboxes and mass email campaigns. The platform helps you access your: 

• Clients’ inbox

• Monitor your domain health

• Maintain a high sender score

• Improve the content of your emails to avoid spam triggers. 

3. LeadFeeder

LeadFeeder shows you which companies have visited your website. You can connect it to HubSpot and set up automation scenarios. For example, when an account from the company from your database visits your website, the BDR who works with them immediately receives a notification and can reach out to this contact. 

4. Apollo

Apollo enables you to find accurate contact data about your prospects. This simplifies further lead qualification and improves the quality of your lead lists. 

5. Charge

Charge helps you automate and send bulk outreach campaigns from Outlook. You can also easily customize your email templates using variables from your lead database and manage your lead lists. 

6. La Growth Machine

La Growth Machine is a multichannel sales email automation tool designed to streamline and improve your prospecting efforts. It allows users to automate tasks, create outreach sequences, and analyze campaign performance by integrating these metrics into a single platform: 

• LinkedIn

• Email

• X outreach

7. Lemlist 

Lemlist is a sales engagement platform focused on personalized cold email outreach. It helps companies create and automate highly customizable multichannel campaigns across email, LinkedIn, and phone calls. It provides an AI-powered B2B database of more than 450 million contacts, allowing you to narrow your search with more than 20 filters and find the most profitable prospects in seconds. 

8. Hunter.io Campaigns

Hunter.io Campaigns is a cold email software that simplifies creating and managing personalized email outreach campaigns making it easy to scale your outreach strategies while maintaining high email deliverability. It offers features like: 

• Automated follow-ups

• Email tracking

• CRM integrations 

9. Instantly

Instantly.ai is a sales engagement platform that automates your cold email campaigns to help maximize your outreach efforts and avoid spam filters. It offers: 

• Unlimited email accounts

• Warm-up features

• Advanced deliverability tools

• AI-powered CRM

10. Close

Close is an all-in-one CRM for growing sales teams that provides: 

• Communication

• Automation

• Lead management tools

It streamlines workflows with: 

• Built-in call

• Cold email

• SMS capabilities 

Close automates repetitive tasks so your team can focus on closing deals. It is ideal for small to midsize businesses because of its ease of use and quick setup. 

11. Snov.io

Snov.io is a versatile sales automation platform that helps companies with lead generation, email outreach, email warm-up, and customer and CRM management. It provides tools for: 

• Finding and validating emails

• Automating cold email campaigns

• Effectively managing sales processes

Snov.io’s features are designed to streamline the entire sales funnel, from lead discovery to deal closure. 

12. Saleshandy

Saleshandy is a cold email software that allows users to personalize, automate, and scale email outreach while maintaining high deliverability. It offers features such as: 

• Email tracking

• Automated outreach campaigns

• Integrations with popular CRMs

The platform is ideal for those looking to streamline their cold email efforts: 

• Sales team members

• Marketers

• Agencies. 

13. Reply.io 

Reply.io is a sales engagement platform that combines AI-driven automation with multichannel outreach. It allows users to: 

• Manage email campaigns

• LinkedIn messaging

• Calls

• SMS from a single platform

The tool also offers: 

• AI-powered CRM

• Email warm-up services

• Advanced analytics to optimize sales efforts

14. Woodpecker

Woodpecker.co is a sales outreach and cold email platform designed for businesses that want to automate and personalize email campaigns. It provides tools to: 

• Manage outreach

• Follow-up

• Lead nurturing with high deliverability

The platform also includes features, making it a comprehensive tool for effective cold emailing For: 

• Email validation

• Domain testing

• CRM and API integrations

15. Overloop

Overloop is a sales engagement platform that streamlines outbound campaigns through multichannel outreach. It integrates into personalized campaigns to increase engagement and conversion rates:

• Cold email

• LinkedIn messaging

• Cold calling 

The platform provides: 

• Email discovery tools

• CRM integration

• Advanced analytics to optimize sales processes.

16. Mailshake 

Mailshake is a sales engagement and cold email platform that helps companies automate, personalize, and boost outreach efforts. It supports the creation of a multichannel strategy: 

• Email campaigns

• Phone calls

• Social media outreach

17. Smartlead.ai

Smartlead.ai is a cold email outreach tool designed to help you scale your lead-generation efforts. It offers: 

• Unlimited mailboxes

• Automated email warming

• A multichannel outreach infrastructure

18. Outreach.io

Outreach.io is an outreach sales execution platform that enables sales teams to automate and optimize their multichannel prospecting efforts. It provides tools allowing users to track real-time interactions and engagement for: 

• Managing email sequences

• Calls

• Social media outreach

19. Amplemarket

Amplemarket is a sales automation platform that streamlines and improves outbound sales processes. It offers features such as:

• AI-powered lead scoring 

• Automated email sequences 

• LinkedIn outreach 

• Multichannel sales cadence 

• Domain health analysis

• Uncover deliverability issues

• Track inbox-to-outbox ratios

• Manage SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

Manage email: 

• Volumes

• Spam tests

• Email warmups 

20. Klenty

Klenty is a sales engagement platform that streamlines multi-channel outreach, including: 

• Email

• Phone calls

• LinkedIn

It provides tools to automate and personalize sales campaigns, such as: 

• Email sequencing

• LinkedIn automation

• AI-driven sales playbooks. 

21. GMass

GMass is a powerful email outreach tool that integrates directly with Gmail, allowing users to send personalized email campaigns and automate follow-ups at scale. It’s particularly popular for its simplicity and effectiveness in: 

• Cold emailing

• Newsletter distribution

• Bulk emailing 

GMass is a good choice for a small business that wants to try a free cold email tool that integrates directly with Gmail. 

22. Mixmax

Mixmax is an AI-powered email outreach tool that supercharges Gmail, making it perfect for sales teams and professionals who want to work smarter, not harder. With features like email tracking, scheduling, and automation, Mixmax helps you streamline communication and increase efficiency – all from within your Gmail inbox. 

23. Gmelius

Gmelius is an email outreach software and collaboration tool that turns Gmail into a collaborative workspace with shared inboxes and email automation. It integrates project management, shared inboxes, and email automation directly in Gmail, so teams can: 

• Collaborate

• Get things done

• Communicate better-all within the same inbox

Its value proposition includes: 

• Email Delegation 

• Email Sequencing 

• Email Automation 

• Email Tracking 

• Drip Campaigns 

Integrations: 

• Slack

• Trello

• Google Workspace Kanban Boards 

24. Salesloft

Salesloft is a leading sales engagement and AI-powered revenue orchestration platform that helps sales teams manage their: 

• Workflow

• Engage with prospects

• Close deals more effectively

It aims to help sales teams: 

• Close more deals

• Forecast more accurately

• Coach teams to success

It integrates with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to enrich the sales engagement experience, allowing users to leverage LinkedIn’s vast network effectively within their sales workflows. 

25. SendPulse

SendPulse is an easy-to-use multichannel marketing and sales outreach platform. Businesses can connect with their audience through multiple communication channels, including: 

• Email

• SMS

• Web push notifications

• Chatbots

26. Waalaxy  

Waalaxy is a lead generation tool designed to automate your LinkedIn and email outreach processes. It allows you to create and manage outreach sequences without technical expertise, making engaging with prospects and growing your network easier.

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Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

At Inframail, we are revolutionizing cold email infrastructure with unlimited inboxes at a flat rate. 

We provide: 

• Microsoft-backed deliverability

• Dedicated IP addresses

• Automated technical setup 

This helps customer outreach efforts efficiently like: 

• Agencies

• Recruiters

• SDRs

The Game-changing Benefits Of Using Inframails Cold Email Infrastructure

The main benefits of using our service: 

• Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup

• Dedicated email servers for each user

• 16-hour priority support daily

Unlike traditional providers that charge per inbox and leave you wrestling with technical configurations, Inframail streamlines the entire process. We handle the complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects.