How to Book More Meetings with Cold Email

Booking meetings through cold emails can be a great tool to grow a business – but it can be tough to pull it off properly. Many people send out hundreds of cold emails and get very few responses – which can be very frustrating.

The main issues? Emails are sent to the wrong people or they are so bland and generic that they get flagged as spam. This leads to many missed opportunities to close deals and can make you feel like cold emailing just isn’t that effective.

But there’s a better way to do it. As you learn how to find the right audience, write messages that get their attention, and use data to your advantage – you can book more meetings than you could imagine.

Understanding Your Target Audience

The foundation of a successful cold email campaign is in identifying and understanding your target audience, their interests, and their challenges.

Here are a couple of ways how proper audience identification can improve your chances of booking a meeting:

• Increased relevance – When you target the right decision-makers, your meeting request is more likely to align with their current priorities. 
• Improved efficiency – Focusing your cold outreach efforts on prospects most likely to agree to a meeting enables you to maximize your resources and time.
• Enhanced personalization – When you understand the prospect’s role, interests, and potential pain points, you can write messages that speak directly to their current situation.

To identify your target audience – you can use a B2B database to speed up the process significantly. For instance, the Discover tool from Hunter provides a systematic approach to finding relevant companies and decision-makers.

You can use various filters to find companies that fit your target audience:

• Location
• Industry
• Size
• Type
• Keywords for a narrower result

In this case, we search for small to mid-sized companies based in Europe that develop role-playing games. Once you find the companies, you can also check the emails and find the right decision-makers for your cold outreach campaign.

Still, 30 companies is not too much for a cold outreach campaign. Let’s try to use the Lookalikes feature to find more prospects.

Let’s take this company as a source for similar companies to reach out to.

We can put the company name inside “Companies similar to” field – and now we have 200 similar companies, which is almost 3 times more than the initial output. Along with that, you can use the keywords tied to each company to find more similar companies.

Using a tool streamlines the process of finding and understanding your audience and allows you to start cold outreach much faster than when you do this manually.

Writing the Perfect Cold Email

Once you know who is your ideal audience – it’s time for the creative work. Writing the perfect cold email is not easy – it is both an art and a science. The end goal of your cold email should be not just to create a message that gets opened – but one that books you meetings.

A reassuring fact – email is almost 40x more effective at securing customers than social media channels. Still, that doesn’t mean that you can write something with low effort and call it a day.

Let’s start with the fundamentals of cold email:

• Subject line
• Personalization
• Clear value proposition

A subject line is the first thing a recipient sees. It’s a very important element, as 33% of people open emails based on it alone. Here are some tips on how to make your subject lines irresistible:

• Keep them short – It’s easier to catch a prospect’s attention with something short and straightforward.
• Induce curiosity – Hint at a solution to the prospect’s problems, which will motivate them to learn more.
• Don’t use clickbait – If you didn’t end up in the spam folder with clickbait, an email with clickbait will most likely be flagged as spam.

Here are a couple of well-made subject lines that follow the principles from above:

The next fundamental is personalization. It’s not just using the prospect’s name. Proper personalization outlines that you’ve done your research and understand the prospect’s specific situation. 

Here are a few guidelines on how to personalize your emails properly:

• Reference recent company news or achievements
• Mention specific challenges their industry is facing
• Relate to their interests
• Acknowledge their role and responsibilities

To conclude your cold email, you need to craft a clear value proposition that showcases how you can help the recipient and solve their pain point. 

Your value proposition should:

• Identify a pain point or opportunity
• Offer a specific solution 
• Quantify the potential impact if possible
• Differentiate your solution from alternatives

Here are two email templates that do personalization and value proposition well:

All of these elements should work cohesively in your email to provide results. A well-made subject line gets your email opened, thoughtful personalization keeps the prospect reading, and a clear value proposition compels them to respond and book a meeting with you.

Personalization Strategies

Proper personalization pays off – as having multiple personalization fields can improve reply rates by 142%. This outlines that prospects value emails tailored to them more than obvious bulk emails. 

While personalization is not as simple as just inserting the recipient’s name and calling it a day – it’s not rocket science either. Here are some strategies you can use to personalize your emails properly:

• Show that you are up-to-date on what is going on in their company – This will outline that you did genuine research on them, and are not sending out bulk emails.
• Comment on their recent content or achievement – Demonstrate your interest in their wins and expertise.
• Align your offer with their known challenges or goals – Always tailor your value proposition to the prospect’s specific situation. 
• Use industry-specific language and references – Sometimes, it is beneficial to geek out on something relevant in the prospect’s industry. That helps show that you understand their world and speak their language.

For personalization to work – you need to research your prospects thoroughly. Although the most common method is to directly visit the prospect’s website and start digging for info, you can speed this up with the same Discover feature we mentioned before.

Just from the company description alone, you can work out:

• How big the company is
• What the company does
• What technologies do they use
• The people who work there (along with their social profiles)

You can go a step further and use an intent data tool to find out more about specific companies, and what problems they need to solve. For example:

• Fundings and acquisitions help you determine which companies are growing and can afford your services
• Job openings help you find companies with specific pain points to solve
• Company news helps you stay up-to-date with companies you want to book meetings with

All of these data points will help you automate the personalization of your cold outreach while still sounding genuine.

Follow-Up Emails

Following up with prospects is an integral part of cold outreach, as only 8.5% of cold emails receive a response, and following up can double that response rate. Prospects usually don’t respond to your first email because they are busy, or their inbox is overcrowded.

Timing is important when following up. Send your first follow-up 3 to 4 days after the initial email, as this gives the recipient time to respond without letting too much time pass. 

Frequency is important too. Aim for 3 to 6 follow-ups in a sequence, as that can triple your reply rate. More than that can be perceived as pushy.

A solid data-driven follow-up sequence would look like this:

1. Initial email 
2. 3 days later – Additions to your value proposition
3. 5 days later – Focusing on the call to action
4. 7 days later – Final push for the conversion

Here is how that would look like in practice:

Remember, if there is no response after the sequence – be prepared to gracefully end it for that certain prospect, and focus on others from your list.

Tracking and Measuring Success

Cold email outreach has numerous data points that can communicate the performance of your campaigns for booking meetings:

• Open rates – The percentage of recipients who open your email. They are usually influenced by subject lines and the timing of your cold emails.
• Response rates – The percentage of recipients who reply to your email. They are mostly influenced by the quality of your email copy and value proposition.
• Meeting bookings – When you get more meeting bookings, that means you did the cold email fundamentals well. If that’s not the case, return to the drawing board and repeat the process.

Tracking and measuring these three data points is essential to provide direction to your cold outreach campaigns. After all, data is the best teacher in this case.

One great way to track the success of your cold email campaigns is A/B testing. For example, you can run campaigns with two different subject line variants and determine which one performs better. Remember to test one element at a time to avoid confusion.

You should also use cold email software that lets you set up and automate email campaigns – with integrated reporting on integral data points such as opens, replies, and conversion rates. This is a seamless setup that gives you a seamless environment where you can easily track results and isolate opportunities for change. 

With proper reporting, your campaigns will have more direction – which can result in booking more meetings with cold email.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

As 80% of people prefer sales reps to contact them via email, it is understandable that many people use cold email to pitch their services. That results in many mistakes that can be easily avoided with a couple of tweaks to the strategy.

Sending Generic Emails

Generic emails are problematic because they essentially communicate:

• Lack of effort
• Lack of research

These two aspects of generic emails will most likely induce distrust in prospects – which will shoot down the possibilities of your outreach efforts resulting in more meetings.

Avoid this common mistake by investing time in researching your prospects. Find relevant information to help you personalize for each prospect you want to pitch to. 

You can scale the outreach by using templates with clear placeholders for personalized elements. Don’t forget to tailor your value proposition to the specific pain points of each recipient.

Neglecting to Follow Up

Even though they are highly effective, 70% of cold emails don’t get followed up on – which is a big mistake. Cold email is all about persistence, so don’t give up if the first email doesn’t get a reply.

To fix this, implement a systematic follow-up sequence of up to 6 follow-up emails. Use this as an opportunity to vary your approach to provide new value and perspective to each email in the sequence.

Poor Subject lines

A weak subject line can absolutely wreck your cold email campaigns. It is essentially the first impression you give, so make sure it is top-notch.

Don’t be afraid to test different formulas – use power words, create curiosity, or highlight value. Keep them short and fluff-free. Finally, you can utilize A/B testing to find out which type of subject line performs the best at booking more meetings.

Overloading with Information

Most people are busy (or at least feel like that) which means that you need to respect their time and attention. Most people who utilize cold email ignore this and do their best to bloat their emails with unnecessary fluff.

That’s why you want to focus on one clear value proposition and call to action. Additionally, use short paragraphs and bullet points to make your emails more scannable. You can save the more detailed information for the meeting that you book with the prospect.

Ignoring Data and Metrics

Ignoring actionable data means missing out on opportunities to improve and refine your approach. You can easily fix this by using email campaign tools to track key metrics. 

With these metrics consolidated inside one dashboard, you can use them as insights to inform and improve your strategy on the go.

Conclusion

Effective cold email outreach that helps you book meetings narrows down to the following framework:

• Thorough audience research
• Captivating email content structure
• Strategic personalization
• Systematic follow-ups
• Refining your approach based on data

As you avoid common mistakes like generic messaging and information overload, you will significantly increase your chances of booking more meetings and driving business growth through targeted cold email campaigns.

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About Antonio Gabrić 

Antonio Gabric is an outreach manager at Hunter. For the last three years, he’s been helping SaaS companies grow their organic traffic and revenue through link building. At Hunter, Antonio is leading a link-building and outreach team to build backlinks that move the needle and connect with industry leaders. To get in touch and follow his experiments, say hi on LinkedIn.

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