Cold Email Explained
Email marketing delivers the highest ROI to marketers than any other channels, including social media. Cold email outreach campaigns can help you to reach more potential customers and make more sales, so it is an art that requires mastering.
Cold emailing requires finesse because there’s so much noise to cut through in your prospects’ inboxes. The average person gets up to 147 emails per day, and they will barely open 10 percent of that amount.
While you might not be able to harness the divine power as Jim Carrey did in Bruce Almighty, you can outsource the difficult tasks to professionals who can do it better and more efficiently! However, if you have hired a team of Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), you need to stay on top of things. Ensuring that their methods are working towards achieving your business goals.
You don’t have to micromanage, but periodic checks with some key performance indices (KPIs) will help you to measure the success of your cold email outreach.
In this article, we’ll look at the KPIs for measuring the success of your SDR team’s email outreach. First, let’s get through what a great cold email is, and is not.
What Is a Cold Email?
First things first. Let’s get you acquainted with what a cold email actually is. Many SDRs think that cold emailing is ‘spraying and praying’- or randomly sending out non-targeted emails with the hope that someone, anyone, will respond. This results in low open rates and subsequently, little to no conversion.
A cold email is an email sent to a potential customer that has not previously contacted you or expressed interest in your product or service. However, cold emails are intentionally sent to people that you suspect will need your solutions.
The success of your cold email outreach will therefore be determined by how many new leads and eventually, customers that you get.
KPIs for Measuring Your SDR Team’s Cold Email Outreach
Remember you can’t optimize what you don’t measure. These metrics will allow you to dial in your SDR performance.
1. Cold Email Open Rates
Most SDRs are fine with losing 97% or more of their leads. They say ‘that’s just how the market works’ or something along those lines, but that’s not true.
There’s no reason why you should settle for 2-3 percent conversion rates when it is possible to attain open rates up to 28.46%.
To determine the effectiveness of your cold email campaign, you must measure the open rates of the emails you’re sending out. If your prospects are not even reading the killer copy and offers that you’re sending them, what’s the point?
If your open rates are low, your SDR team may have to change their approach to cold emailing to achieve better results.
2. Response Rates (Positive and Negative)
Measuring responses is a highly important metric in determining the efficiency of your cold email approach. This covers both negative and positive responses. Taking binary responses into account will help you further streamline your target market since you can derive insights from recurring patterns in your positive responses.
For example, if all the emails that got positive responses had a certain subject line style, you could conclude that that is a component that you should use consistently.
Basically, measuring your responses will help your SDR team to determine which cold email approach is most effective, and fine-tune their methods in the process.
3. Appointment Rates
It is also important to measure how many interested prospects you get further down the sales funnel. Potential clients that read your organization’s emails and agree to discuss further are rare and welcome green lights, so it is necessary to track what helped in securing their interest to that point.
Securing acceptance and appointments is a strong indicator of good salesmanship. It takes skill to pique the interest of prospects and even get them to go from ‘oh no not another email’ to ‘wow, I’d like to know more about this offer’.
You can keep track of appointment rates by measuring the percentage of follow-throughs against the number of opened emails.
4. Success Rate of Different Profiles
Prospective clients or points of contact are always divided into different tiers in the organization. You could be sending emails to CTOs, CEOs and Procurement Managers. Or Content Marketers, depending on the service you’re offering. Those who you think would be responsible for decision-making in the organization that you’re targeting.
With that approach, it would be very important to track the profiles of the prospects that you’re getting positive responses from. This data would help you to reduce guesswork and channel more marketing effort towards the right prospect profiles.
Let’s say you’re emailing CEOs and Procurement Managers of a particular organization, for example. If you consistently get responses, whether positive or negative, from the PMs, that is an indicator that PMs are the contact people to focus on in that organization.
5. Best Converting Verticals
If your SDR team is sending out emails under different verticals, it is also crucial to measure which of those verticals have the best conversion rates.
For instance, if you have cold emails for target industries like SaaS, tech, small businesses, etc., and the SME verticals are doing good numbers, you need to find out why.
An in-depth analysis into intent, message value, and delivery would help you discover what makes that vertical stand out. Then, you could apply the same approach to the other verticals for better results.
Conclusion
It is not enough to be busy in business; what matters is getting busy doing the right things. Things that help you achieve your business goals. Pumping out cold email batches may make you feel like work is getting done. The main goal is results.
Monitor the progress of your SDR teams with cold email campaigns, so that you’ll be well-informed to do more of what works or change your approach if necessary.
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