Email marketing is an important and indispensable element of a business’s marketing strategy.

Over time, it has proven to be an effective way to get in touch with current and potential clients in a personalized manner and improve customer acquisition and retention rates.

Even better, there are numerous email marketing approaches from which you can choose per your business needs and goals. 

In this article, we will delve deeper into the realm of cold emails and explore how you can maximize your cold email ROI with the help of accurate and comprehensive data. Isn’t this exciting? Let’s get started! 

But First, What Is Cold Emailing? 

Cold emailing is the unsolicited sending of personalized emails to people with whom you don’t have a prior connection or conversation. Marketers and sales managers use this outreach method to initiate a relationship with a potential client who hasn’t yet opted in to receive your messages. 

You can use a cold email to pitch your products and/or services, and depending on the quality of your cold email or the relevance thereof to your target’s interests, the recipient will decide whether or not to engage with your email. 

When you do cold emailing the right way, you can see a significant increase in the return on investment (ROI) from your email marketing efforts. 

ROI in General Email Marketing

A Data & Marketing Association (DMA) study notes that the average email marketing ROI was as high as $36 for each $1 spent in 2022. Suppose your business operates in industries such as e-commerce, retail, or any other field involving direct purchase links in their emails.

In that case, the ROI might very likely be even higher! 

If you wonder how you can calculate your email marketing ROI by yourself, simply use the following formula: (Gain – spent)/spent = ROI. Please keep in mind that this calculation can be customized in accordance with your business needs and goals.

For example, a SaaS company might prioritize long-term customer retention over immediate product sales. In this case, the SaaS company would factor in the value of customer subscriptions and recurring revenue over time. 

Another company, on the other hand, might choose to prioritize short-term sales and focus on immediate revenues. As seen through these examples, the ultimate goal can significantly affect how a given business approaches the ROI calculations. 

If you consistently measure and document your ROI in email marketing, you can easily track the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns and see any improvement or setbacks over tim ife. 

How to Improve Your Email Marketing ROI with Data

There are numerous methods and strategies you can use to maximize your cold email ROI. These range from narrowing down and segmenting your audience and developing an effective CTA to using automation and monitoring analytics. 

1. Understand Who Exactly Your Audience Is

When there is a difficult, complex concept, we often divide it into bite-sized chunks to make it easier to comprehend. You can do the same with your audience, dividing and segmenting them

into smaller categories in accordance with their behavior, location, age, etc.

This will ensure the contents of your cold email are personalized to the recipient, thereby increasing the likelihood that the recipient will engage with your email and follow the CTA. 

While many believe that personalization is just adding a name at the beginning of the email, it is so much more than that.

Tracking the recipient’s past behavior, purchases, browsing history, preferences, and other factors can help you craft a message that resonates with their needs and goals. 

Is your recipient frequently browsing ski destinations? Share with them a list of the best ski locations in their area, and see what happens! 

To effectively segment your audience(s), you can try to craft buyer personas that represent your ideal customers.

You can also use advanced techniques such as lead scoring based on user activity data. This will help you stay relevant and interesting for each specific target group and maximize the success of your cold emailing efforts. 

2. Make Your Call to Action (CTA) the Best It Can Be!

You can have the best email content, but if the CTA is weak, the recipient is likely to leave your email without taking any action.

A concise yet clear and effective CTA will encourage the recipient to take action immediately to benefit from your attractive offer as soon as possible. 

Data and analytics are important when crafting an actionable CTA; simply testing out various CTA versions and tracking which one generates the highest number of clicks can help you understand which kind of CTAs your potential customer engages with the most. 

Data and analytics are also important when it comes to crafting effective subject lines. Subject lines can be categorized into personal, funny, promotional, curiosity, creative, urgent, and many other types, and the answer to which type is best depends largely on who your audience is. 

A quick and simple A/B testing of different subject lines can help you see what best grabs your audience’s attention. Is it a “Don’t Miss Out This Winter Sale” or “We’ve Received Your Favorite Collection!” type of email that works best? You can’t know until you try it out! 

3. Make Automation Your Friend!

Email automation enables timely, targeted messaging without manual effort. Automated sequences, known as drip campaigns or email workflows, are triggered by specific actions.

You can create an automated welcome series for new subscribers, beginning with a brand introduction, and then progressing to emails showcasing top-selling items or special promotions. For dormant subscribers, implement a re-engagement drip campaign featuring an exclusive discount to rekindle their interest.

4. Reputation Goes a Long Way! 

An effective way to signal to someone that your product/service is trustworthy is by referring to someone else who proves that your product/service is trustworthy.

This is why many renowned businesses make use of social trust elements to meet their email marketing benchmarks (e.g. higher open rates, boosted conversion rates, etc.). 

For example, you can include a positive customer testimonial in your email to show that someone else has already liked and praised your product. Let’s say you’re sending a cold email about the services offered by your marketing agency named “Y.”

You can include a testimonial from one of your customers saying “After trusting my social media pages to “Y”, I have seen a 58% increase in my Instagram followers number and a substantial rise in the engagement rate.” Word of mouth has been an effective marketing tool for centuries, and so it is today, albeit in a slightly modified and digitized format. 

When incorporating testimonials or reviews into your cold emails, there are many ways you can make them come across as authentic instead of looking forced and fabricated:

An effective way is to keep the testimonial concise and effective so that the testimonial fits harmoniously within the email’s overall flow. Here is an example of a concise yet impactful testimonial: “My team highly recommends Company Y. They transformed our workflow and provided us with instantaneous results.”

Another example can be: “Real professionals in their industry. Completely recommend.” Such testimonials are not unnecessarily lengthy or boring; instead, they are concise, catchy, and effective. This ensures that the recipient reads the entire message instead of overlooking it. 

5. Optimization for Mobile Devices 

Did you know that  46 percent of smartphone users like to receive business communications through email? Did you know that more than 50% of emails are opened on mobile devices? 

Keeping this crucial information in mind, numerous businesses worldwide ensure their cold emails look as neat, clean, and professional on their mobile devices as on desktops.

To ensure your cold email looks good on all devices, ensure you test it out on a wide range of electronic gadgets and make any adjustments if necessary to make them the best they can be across various platforms and devices. 

6. Pay Attention to Deliverability 

Email marketing deliverability refers to the percentage of emails that successfully reach recipients’ inboxes. It’s typically expressed as a percentage, calculated by dividing the number of emails in the inbox by the total number of emails sent.

On average, only 81% of sent emails make it to the intended inbox. The remaining 19% are lost due to spam filters, incorrect email addresses, or other delivery obstacles.

Three key metrics are used to measure email marketing deliverability:

1. Delivery rate: The percentage of sent emails that are successfully delivered.

2. Open rate: The percentage of delivered emails that are opened by recipients.

3. Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of delivered emails that receive clicks on embedded links.

It can be very hard to determine which email marketing deliverability rate is good enough for your business. While businesses usually aim for a rate between 85% and 95%, the number may vary significantly based on your business size, industry, needs, and goals. 

What Causes Email Deliverability Issues?

The causes behind poor email deliverability rates may be multifold, including: 

• Spam filters blocking legitimate emails
• Bounces due to invalid addresses
• Blocklisting of entire domains
• Poor sender reputation
• Content triggers flagging emails as spam
• Authentication issues with sender addresses

How to Boost Your Email Deliverability Rates Here are a few practices you can use to improve your overall email deliverability and boost cold email ROI:

• Enhanced Protection with DMARC 

By correctly configuring DMARC, you can significantly decrease the likelihood of successful phishing attacks and other forms of unauthorized use from your business domain. As only trustworthy and legitimate emails will be sent from your domain, you will be able to improve credibility around your business in the eyes of the recipients. Knowing that your emails don’t contain any malicious content will encourage the recipient to open them and engage with any links without the fear of falling victim to a cyberattack. 

• Authentication and SPF/DKIM Setup

If your DKIM and SPF are correctly set up, it can help you authenticate your emails and prevent spam flagging. As only authorized senders will now be able to send emails on behalf of your domain, the risk of phishing attacks will easily be brought to a minimum. 

• List Management 

Always make sure to consistently track and prune inactive subscribers who haven’t engaged with your email communications in 6+ months. This will help you economize your financial resources while also freeing up space in your subscriber database for new potential subscribers.

Additionally, ensure you don’t ever overwhelm your audience with emails.  Optimizing sending frequency (e.g. not sending more than one newsletter a week) can help you stay interesting, relevant, and exciting every time you send a new email, be it cold or warm. 

• Use of Smart Tools

There are many tools that can help you in the process of improving your email deliverability rates. For example, you can use Smartlead’s SmartDelivery feature to get comprehensive insights into your emails’ deliverability. This tool enables you to conduct manual and automated tests with the use of advanced algorithms and an expert-vetted Placement Rate feature.

You can also use Smartlead’s Warm-Up feature to prevent your email from falling into the spam folder and to ensure primary inbox placement. S

Summing Up

There are numerous tools in the market such as DMARC analyzer that can ensure maximum protection for your emails, improved email deliverability, and accurate insights into your email performance metrics.

As the world of cold emailing is evolving at a remarkable pace, it is imperative to stay informed about the latest updates.

Changes such as the increasing use of AI-powered personalization tools and new privacy regulations in email marketing make it necessary to implement professional, reputable tools and services such as those provided by PowerDMARC and Smartlead never to stay behind and always be ahead of the curve.