Best Cold Email Template to Get SMMA Clients (Scientific-Based)

Outreach is one of the most important systems for any SMMA. With the power of cold emailing, you can reach out to many possible prospects with your compelling offer.

But finding a place to start is really difficult. You have no idea what sections your email should include or which sales techniques you can use to land more clients. Email templates will help you get inspiration and knowledge for your outreach.

We’re now going to go over very important points that need to be considered before doing any outreach.

Email template

This is the exact cold email template we’ve improved over 1,5 years already. We set ourselves apart from most other agencies by telling our leads about the status of the Facebook Pixel. Adding this had a significant impact on the response rate and personalized feeling of the cold email.

Feel free to use this as an example:

Dear [Name], 

I became aware of your online store today via your Instagram page. 

After reading about your online store, I noticed that you already use a Facebook Pixel. So you’re already set up better than 80% of the other online stores. 

Are you still sure that your advertising is targeted to your audience and constantly optimized? By conducting thorough customer analysis and evaluating advertising data to identify what works and what doesn’t, you can strategically acquire long-term customers for your business.

We have some ideas to achieve this goal.

Would you be available for a meeting in the next few days?

With kind regards 

[Your name]

I advise you to read the information in this article since it will help you improve your own email and skyrocket your response rate.

Understanding the Target Audience

It’s essential to first understand your target audience before you go out and reach out to them. Here’s a quick example of why that’s important:

Imagine you’re reaching out to a local brick-and-mortar car repair service. Chances are that the owner isn’t in their 20s or 30s anymore and thinks quite differently about the internet and any emails that reach their inbox. In this case, you’ll need to structure your email more formally, like a letter, and do some more explaining, which may not sound like great sales advice, but if there’s no trust, there’s no sale.

Now imagine you reach out to an e-commerce store, which is probably run by a younger person, and you start by sending this formal letter we’ve sent to the car repair service. The owner of the e-commerce store will perceive your agency as outdated, lacking knowledge of current trends such as TikTok. This conveys incompetence and undermines the store owner’s goals.

How to adjust your email for the target audience

Here are some key points to consider when writing emails to these different ages:

Tips for ages 20-35:

This will be your average new e-commerce store owner. Here are some key points to consider while crafting your outreach email:

• Social media: Your prospect will use social media as his/her clients do. You can focus on the importance of social media and the growth you’ve already achieved for other clients. This builds trust and encourages your prospect to dream about what would happen if he gets these results with your agency.
• Show your speed: Younger people are often ready to take risks for higher income in their early years. Build a strong foundation for this characteristic by showing off how fast you can achieve results. You can later combine this by strengthening the importance of security and risk management in your sales meeting.
• Tell success stories: Most people value authentic connections and stories that resonate with their own experiences. Use personalized language, address their pain points, and share relatable success stories to establish a connection and build trust.

Tips for ages >35:

This age category is mostly present in brick-and-mortar businesses. You need to keep these key things in mind when writing an email:

• Establish professionalism: Older business owners often appreciate a more formal and professional tone in their correspondence. Craft your email to reflect respect, expertise, and credibility. Use a well-structured format and address them by their proper title or business name.
• Focus on experience and expertise: Emphasize the value and your experience of proven tactics you’ve been using at your agency for years that help your clients grow.
• Address concerns: Older business owners may have concerns about transitioning from traditional marketing to digital strategies or even starting out with marketing. Address these concerns directly in your email by highlighting the cost-effectiveness and safety.

Elements of an Effective Cold Email

Now that you understand how to adjust your tone for different target audiences, let’s discuss the key elements that are crucial for boosting your open and response rates. These elements are absolutely necessary for any effective cold email.

To understand why we need each of these key points. Let’s view it from the order of how the prospect will perceive your email:

• Your email look/design
• Introduction
• Email body
• CTA (Call to action)
• Follow up plan

Compelling email look:

The prospect will probably see your email in some form of notification or on the smaller side window of his email client. What he’s going to see are the following things:

• Your name
• Subject line
• The beginning of your mail

Here’s an example image:

It’s important to improve those three things to grab attention and improve your open rate instantly. This process is comparable to the title and thumbnail of a YouTube video, which ultimately decides if you click on the video or scroll past it.

Your name:

This is a very simple point, but it may currently cost you some meetings. It’s important to use your real first name and last name and not some nickname you’ve had from your Minecraft career. Maybe you’re not sure what the display name of your email account is. You can simply send an email to a second email account and be sure it’s correct.
Better save than sorry.

Subject line:

Your subject line is a significant factor in improving your open rate. It must be tailored to your prospect’s age and general behavior.

Generally, a subject line is tweaked before every batch of emails you send out in order to test and improve your open rate. But while testing, always be sure to only test one thing at a time. Otherwise, your results are going to be screwed up.

If you want some inspiration for subject lines, check out the templates on top. Subjects are included there.

The beginning of your mail:

In my personal experience, it’s always best to start by introducing yourself. Otherwise, you will sound like a salesperson copy-pasting their text, which is definitely something we want to avoid.

Personalized Introduction

Start your email with a personalized introduction that addresses the recipient by name and demonstrates that you have done your research. This will already set you apart from most of your competition. Mention a specific detail or connection that shows you understand their business or industry.

When crafting a personalized introduction in your cold email, you want to make the recipient feel valued and acknowledged. Here’s how you can achieve this:

Address the recipient by name:

Use the recipient’s name in the greeting to create an immediate sense of familiarity and personalization. Avoid generic salutations like “Dear Sir/Madam” as they can come across as impersonal and generic.

Personalized business research:

You should already be familiar with how the business you’re targeting works, what products/services are offered, etc. So, go out and use that knowledge.

Mention a specific detail or something that caught your eye on their website, blog or social media. This way your prospect already knows, that you’ve already engaged with their business. 

Also, make sure always to mention the company name of your lead since this suggests you’ve done some more research.

Relate to their goals or pain points:

Show that you understand the recipient’s goals or pain points and how your SMMA services can address them. This demonstrates that you are focused on delivering value and solving their specific challenges.

By incorporating a personalized introduction that directly addresses the recipient by name, showcase your research and understanding of their business or industry, and highlights a specific detail or connection, you create a strong foundation for building rapport and capturing their attention. This personalized approach sets the stage for a meaningful and engaging conversation in your cold email.

Email body

Your email body is located right between your introduction and your CTA. It’s the part that helps your prospect to understand what kind of service you’re offering and what makes you stand out from the rest of the marketing emails they receive.

If you want to get a better response rate, it’s essential to stand out from your competition. This blog post will help you find unique touches to add to your email and make it sound different from all the other sales emails business owners get.

Here are some quick tips to improve your response rate and overall email body:

Focus on relevance:

Most business owners don’t have much time to reach through an email with 40 paragraphs. Ensure you stay laser-focused on the important things like your unique touch, what’s in it for your prospect, and your experience. Try to hover around 70-150 words for your email body.

Your tone/vibe:

From my personal experience, it’s important to stay conversational. This means that you write your email the way you’d speak to someone. Caution: This is only true for younger business owners since they are used to this kind of tone through Whatsapp or other messaging apps.

If you’re contacting an older prospect, you must stick to a more respective tone.

CTA (Call to action)

Without a call to action, your email will get less engagement, i.e., a worse response rate. I’ve always stuck to a very simple CTA after my email body. Here’s one example I used, which I concluded to be the best for my niche:

We have some ideas to achieve this goal.

Would you be available for a meeting in the next few days?

After this paragraph, I ended the email with a simple: Yours sincerely, and that’s it. I didn’t try to convince them to get into the meeting anymore. All of that should be done in your email body. This leaves the prospect thinking about what the ideas are and how these can improve their business revenue.

Follow up plan

There is so much useless knowledge on YouTube, and even in some SMMA courses I’ve seen about following up with prospects. 

You don’t need to send five follow-up emails. Just think about yourself, if a company seems to send you one mail every few days, do you trust them, or do you try to get them out of your inbox?

Going for max. two follow-up emails is ok and recommended. These mails serve the purpose of getting the recipient’s attention at a better time or reminding them of your email if they forget it.

That’s also what I mentioned in my follow-up emails. I just wanted to remind you… and maybe my mail reached you at the wrong time… are some phrases I used in these emails.

As for organizing who to follow up with, I recommend using Excel/Google Sheets. You can pretty easily build a small dashboard that shows you who you need to follow up with at that day.

Tips for success in your outreach

We conducted a study together with 50 other SMMA agency owners about the evolution of outreach and cold emails. We started off by noting down our current open and response rate over 1000 cold emails sent. The response rates ranged between 4,12%-18,4%. That’s due to vastly different niches, sizes of leads contacted, and, obviously, how efficient your overall cold email is.

Every agency in this study (including us) started focusing on A/B testing different subject lines, introductions, email bodies, and CTAs with each their own sample size for four months straight. Some tested more aggressively and sent out lots of testing cold emails (which is the better way to test), and some went quite soft. That’s why the results of this study also vary quite a lot.

The testing

As mentioned, we’ve A/B tested all components of a cold email.

Here’s a quick explanation of what an A/B test is and how the tests were made:

We started with our first email (A). We’ve sent that out to some of our leads and checked the open and response rate. After that, we tweaked our cold email, e.g., the subject line, and sent off that email (B) again to some of our leads. Now we compared the open and response rates from email A and email B to find out if our change improved the rates or not.

We basically did that many times over the course of many, many leads and four months.

The results

It may surprise you what can be done with just four months of focused testing. Do you know why you’re surprised? Because you don’t test enough. But hopefully, these results will help you get on the right path of effective outreach and cold emailing.

After the testing was finished, the response rate range stayed nearly the same and went from 4,12%-25,4% to 8,52%-31,1%.

28 of the 50 agencies found that changing the subject line had the most significant impact on the open rate. This was closely followed by the start of the email, which is previewed in most email clients.

However, for the response rate, the biggest factor was the way you communicated with the reader. How personalized it was and how fitting the language-to-age ratio was. Obviously, more personalization led to a significantly higher response rate.

Now, check out the conclusion, where all the knowledge above, combined with the study, are connected.

Conclusion

In conclusion, cold emailing is a powerful tool for any SMMA to reach potential clients. However, success in cold emailing requires a thoughtful approach that takes into account the target audience’s characteristics and preferences. Tailoring your emails to resonate with the age group and preferences of your prospects is crucial for building trust and establishing a connection.

For younger prospects aged 20-35, emphasizing the importance of social media, showcasing fast results, and sharing authentic success stories are effective strategies. On the other hand, older prospects, typically found in brick-and-mortar businesses, appreciate a more formal and professional tone. Highlighting your experience and expertise and addressing their concerns about transitioning to digital marketing can help win their trust.

The key elements of an effective cold email are the email look/design, personalized introduction, email body, call to action (CTA), and a well-thought-out follow-up plan. These elements work together to capture the prospect’s attention, build rapport, and encourage them to take the desired action, such as scheduling a meeting.

I can’t stress enough how insanely important it is to send out personalized cold emails. Addressing the recipient by name, demonstrating research on their business, and understanding their goals and pain points helps create a meaningful and engaging connection. Remember, you’re not just selling a service. You’re solving their challenges and adding value to their business.

A/B testing plays a pivotal role in refining your cold email strategy. By continuously testing and tweaking subject lines, introductions, email bodies, and CTAs, you can significantly improve your open and response rates over time. We conducted a study about this topic right above this conclusion, go and check it out if you haven’t already.

In summary, effective cold emailing requires careful consideration of the target audience, personalized communication, and consistent A/B testing to refine your approach. By following the tips and strategies mentioned in this article and leveraging the insights from the study, your SMMA can increase its chances of landing more clients through successful cold outreach.

Remember, every prospect is unique, and continuous learning and adaptation are essential to keep improving your outreach efforts. Stay open to experimentation, embrace feedback, and refine your cold email strategy to unlock its full potential and achieve greater success for your SMMA.