Many business-to-business (B2B) service providers find themselves staring at a screen, wondering how to connect with potential clients without getting lost in the spam folder. You are putting a lot of time, energy, and resources in, so it’s reasonable you should expect great results. That’s where cold email services can become useful for growth, helping your cold outreach campaigns connect with potential leads.
Cold email can feel like sending a message in a bottle into the vast ocean of the internet. But, the right approach can turn a cold email outreach campaign into an effective tool, with advanced functionality to support many situations. Several different approaches can help a cold email campaign succeed with the support of various cold email services.
The Core Components of Effective Cold Email Services
The first hurdle for anyone is just making sure you’re contacting valid email accounts. Most reputable providers verify email addresses to avoid bounces. Avoiding a high bounce rate is critical for maintaining a positive sender reputation.
Providers should take deliverability very seriously. For instance, they mimic human sending patterns by sending emails at random intervals within specified timeframes.
This is also a technique Woodpecker uses, that greatly minimizes the chance that their user’s emails are viewed as spam.
Personalization at Scale
The trick to making someone want to respond is a personalized touch in a pile of emails. Cold email services are known for their ability to personalize messages, in masse.
Features like custom fields allow for the insertion of details, like a prospect’s name or company, making the email look hand-crafted rather than automated. This allows you to personalize cold emails at scale.
Automation That Feels Human
Automated follow-ups are the workhorses of successful outreach. This keeps the conversation going, yet stopping the sequence automatically upon reply.
Reply detection features make sure you’re not continuing the sales process once a prospect has engaged, preventing irrelevant messages. Outreach has reported they offer sequencing and email templates.
Integrations Make The Process Simple
It is difficult to use so many different software products that can make you have data scattered throughout, and cause loss of data and overall wasted time. With that thought in mind, Smartlead decided to allow for easy integrations with companies like HubSpot and Pipedrive.
With these time saving and data connecting advantages, it allows the sales process to be faster, because automation supports better collaboration between teams. The sales team gains advantages from native integration.
Selecting the Right Cold Email Service For Your Needs
Finding a good solution involves thinking through various needs and considerations, including your business model and email frequency needs. Every situation and company is different; there’s a ton of variation out there. Some offer features better than others, for those who need AI more or other functions.
Here’s how different providers stack up based on capabilities and user feedback:
| Service Provider | Key Features | User Feedback Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Instantly | AI-powered personalization, advanced deliverability features | “I like that…the warming up feature has a lot of advanced settings.” – Tareq S |
| Smartlead.ai | Email warm-up with premium functions, unified master inbox | “Smartlead Master Inbox helps check all emails in one place.” – Kishore C |
| Woodpecker | AI-powered sending to keep messaging looking unique, reply detection that triggers sequence stopping, built-in real-time email validation | One user desired, “More granularity with reporting.” – source. |
| Outreach | Ability to keep contacts tracked, follow-ups triggered | “[It helps] to have all your contact attempts in one place,” – G2 review |
| Mailshake | Ability to send cold emails, make calls and also tap social | “[You can] create many segments in the campaign,” – G2 review |
Some products offer more comprehensive support than others. Cold email tools like Constant Contact are very user-friendly, for all skill levels.
Sometimes all we need is some support and a real human who we can depend on. Mailshake’s support is reported to have quick replies according to this G2 review.
Cold Email Services that are Providers
It’s more than sending an email and hoping for a response; instead, it involves steps.
- Testing: Try many forms of content to figure out which one performs best. It helps optimize engagement. Quickmail reportedly delivers campaign reports in detail, supporting more solid data-based decisions, according to this source.
- Integration With Tools: Link all tools together such as CRM’s to stay up-to-date and maximize resources to help ensure you don’t get data fatigue by seeing so much different data in so many dashboards.
With features directed to helping senders and their users stay out of spam, Lemwarm does a solid job. Also for various B2B Sales teams needs, Lemlist has created step-by-step Playbooks on getting more clients for companies to follow.
Focusing on Engagement
Personalizing emails extends beyond just using a prospect’s name. By inserting what would make them feel important in a way that also feels like you value them.
That kind of data-backed insights are more easily attainable with software solutions like those provided by cold email providers, including Apollo and Lemlist. They offer the ability to do an a/b test.
Staying Compliant and Ethical
It is also important to make sure you comply with GDPR standards when applicable. So you also follow proper data protection best practices.
Be aware of your data and always consider whether or not consent has been given for its collection. Ignoring things can put you and your company in jeopardy of fines, especially if your email system is managed.
Overcoming Common Challenges
A cold email service can also provide support on keeping things brief to optimize attention spans. Subject lines should be kept in the six to ten word range based on research reported by MarketingLand.
You also want to make sure that your emails reach the inbox, and have high deliverability rates.
Maximizing Your ROI with Cold Email Services
Many business solutions don’t fully consider costs that seem hidden initially but reveal themselves later on, through lost opportunities. One common thing is to forget, the most valuable resource of a B2B Sales team are sales activities.
Their time to qualify each potential lead or opportunity should be used for only high potential deals. Using a cold email platform, helps make their time more valuable.
Setting Clear Objectives
A sales focused email outreach can often lose focus with everything else they need to track. When starting, consider making key goals or questions, such as deciding the types of leads you want and from which target industries you want to reach.
Setting clear goals gives your team and process alignment with the key goals to improve your cold email campaigns.
Measuring and Iterating
Here’s an example tracking method to help improve future outreach:
Metric: Open Rate
Definition: Percentage of recipients who opened the email.
Formula: (Number of Emails Opened / Number of Emails Sent) x 100
Goal: Aim for an open rate above the industry average (benchmark and track).
Adjusting different parts like subject lines to keep metrics rising upward overtime. Remember also that subject lines between 6 to 10 words tend to show great results according to Marketing Land’s research.
Leveraging Technology and Support
Technology can make things easier for your company with its software or team members if it has consultants. GMass reportedly has great functionality and robust ability with over 300,000 users on the Chrome Web Store.
A great tool can assist with sending automated follow-ups.
FAQs about cold email services
What is the best email provider for cold emails?
While there isn’t a single “best” provider for every scenario, several stand out based on various user needs. Many lean on using Google Workspace because of its deep integration options, deliverability advantages, and widespread use.
Some email service providers focus more on other things outside of cold email specifically.
What is a cold email service?
It’s a specialized service (either a software platform, a managed service, or both) used to optimize and send outbound emails. The goals is usually sales, marketing or some kind of focused partnership to people who are not existing relationships.
This is usually for those seeking lead generation to grow.
Is cold emailing illegal?
Cold emailing itself is not inherently illegal. But laws like GDPR or CAN-SPAM place requirements that impact situations if broken.
What is the 30/30/50 rule for cold emails?
There is no “30/30/50” cold email outreach rule that any professional recognizes.
Conclusion
With the growth in providers in the last 10 years, more resources and new data have surfaced with techniques to maximize return. There are options for just about any scenario or situation now with various cold email services, like advanced software or expert guidance.
A sales engagement platform can change depending on your needs.