Cold emails can be a bit challenging if you're just starting out. To guide you through this process, Here’s the ultimate checklist you need to follow before you send your first cold email.

For the best cold email results, do your research to find all the important information about your prospects - their goals, interests, and pain points - to check how best they fit into your ICP (Ideal customer profile).

Check them out on social media - LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook - to find out about their career information, interests, recent achievements, or projects.

Based on research by Convince & Convert,

Over a third of people would open an email with a catchy subject line.

Your subject lines should contain some crucial information to gain the attention of your email recipients such as their names, product offers, solutions to their problems, etc. Below is an example of a cold email subject line with custom attributes by Hunter;

(Image: Hunter)

SalesBlink recommends keeping your emails between 50 -150 words to increase your response rates. Since emails of this length take 15 -20 seconds to read, you are able to save your recipients time.

Also, break your messages into sentences rather than paragraphs to make it easy for your recipients to scan through amidst busy schedules. Below is a good example of this from Bluleadz cold email templates;

(Image: BluLeadz)

Woodpecker reports that

Personalized emails have an average response rate of 17% compared to a 7% average response rate for non-personalized emails.

Another study also found that personalized emails increase click-through rate by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%.

Include your recipient's names, goals, interests, and challenges, or highlight their recent achievements in the email to build a relationship with them and increase your chances of conversion. Below is an example of this by Adoric,

(Image: Adoric)

Your first cold email is your first interaction with your prospects. Avoid adding images to your email to protect you from spam filters. However, in follow-up emails, you can include images depending on the email content and existing communication between you and your prospect.

Grammatical errors affect your email and personal outlook. Use spelling and editing software like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, etc., to proofread your emails properly.

The success of your cold emails is not a result of numbers but quality. Send 50 emails per day to help you reduce your bounce rate.

The ultimate goal of your cold email campaign is to interact and build relationships with your prospects, don’t ruin your chances of achieving this by selling or pushing your products or services to them. Only start selling to your prospects once you have established a strong relationship with them.

Rather than use free email services like @gmail.com and @yahoo.com for your cold email outreach, you should use professional accounts like GSuite to evade spam complaints and protect yourself from blocked account issues rampant with free email services.

Sending your cold emails to the wrong email addresses automatically increases your email bounce rate. To avoid this, invest in email verification tools like NeverBounce, Bouncer, ZeroBounce, etc., to verify your email list and minimize bounces.

You are going to make a lot of mistakes with your cold email campaigns as a beginner, hence, it is not advisable to use your primary domain. Instead, use GSuite with a new domain to send all your cold emails.

Note that using a new domain puts you in a spam list for a month, after this you get delisted automatically.

Improve your email deliverability by setting up SPF and DKIM for your domain. Check SPF with Office 365 and DKIM with Office 365 for better clarity on how to achieve this.

Use email warm-up tools like Mailwarm, Quickmail Autowarmer, etc., to build your new email account reputation, and increase your email sending limit and email engagement rate for subsequent cold email campaigns.

For B2B cold email campaigns, only send your emails to business email addresses to evade the spam filters. Sending your cold emails to personal accounts - @yahoo.com and @gmail.com can push your emails to the spam list.

Use email deliverability tools like MxToolbox, Mailtester, Mailtrap, etc., to discover your email deliverability and improvement recommendations.

Your cold emails should be unique and contain different offers and packages to avoid being tagged as Spam. Use custom attributes and different email variations to develop different emails.

Send your emails at specified intervals (30 seconds and above) to reduce the likelihood of your emails ending up in Spam folders.

Include a clear, concise, and compelling call to action in your cold email to guide your email recipients on the next step - increase your chances of converting them. Below is an example of a good CTA by Sales Hacker;

(Image: Sales Hacker)

Your email signature should contain important information about you and your prospects can reach you - name, position/role, office address, website URL, Social media icons, etc. Tools like Sloovi Email Signature give you access to a wide range of email signature templates.

(Image: Sloovi Email Signature)

Follow-ups are critical to the success of your cold email outreach. According to a report by SalesBlink,

80 percent of sales take place after 5 follow-ups, but 92 percent of sales reps tend to give up before that.

Email automation tools like Sloovi Outreach enables you to send personalized, scalable, and automated email follow-ups to increase your email success rate.