Yuka Kato
You’re trying to grow your business and heard about cold leads. What are cold leads, and how do you convert them into paying customers? We’ll cover everything you should know in this article, including methods to generate new leads, best practices, and tools that can help you optimize for success.
Cold, Warm, and Hot Leads: What’s the Difference?
Marketing campaigns are all about finding interested buyers and turning them into paying customers. That’s where lead generation can come into play.
A lead is someone who has the potential to become a customer. Leads will be categorized as cold, warm, or hot, depending on the stage of the purchasing process. Here’s a breakdown of each one:
- Cold leads: A cold lead is someone who is unaware of your brand or products. When you contact a cold lead, you’ll need to introduce yourself since you haven’t interacted with them previously. While selecting cold leads to pursue, you should ensure they fit your target audience and would benefit from your products or services.
- Warm leads: When someone responds to an initial message or shows light interest in your product or service offerings, they become a warm lead. They haven’t become a paying customer yet, so you’ll still want to educate them on the benefits of your products while leading them through your sales funnel.
- Hot leads: A lead becomes hot when your prospect showcases behavior suggesting they’re almost ready to purchase. They may have expressed significant interest in your products or services, have been opening and clicking on links in your emails for a substantial time, or made it to a certain point in your sales funnel to signify this.
While moving prospects through the sales process, the type of lead will affect the emails or other marketing materials you should send them. Cold leads generally require an introduction to learn about you and your brand, warm leads want education on your offer and industry, and hot leads are ready for a promotional email that encourages a purchase.
How to Generate Cold Leads
There are several methods to generate cold leads. Let’s review the most popular methods to help you choose the best one for your needs.
Send Cold Emails
One of the most popular methods for contacting and generating cold leads is email. It involves determining your target audience, searching for business prospects who will benefit from your products or services, and sending an introductory email to them.
This is a popular choice because most business-related communication is done through email. 80% of business professionals say they prefer to be contacted via email over other platforms like phone and snail mail. So, when debating between cold calling vs cold emailing, going with cold email is usually the top choice.
Perform Cold Calling
While professionals generally prefer cold emails, cold calls can be effective when you target the right prospects and follow some simple best practices.
Again, you would search for prospects who align with the solutions your products or services provide. However, this time, you’d look for phone numbers you can call to speak to someone at the organization. You can usually find phone numbers on company websites or social media pages.
When cold calling, it’s important to introduce yourself clearly, keep your introductory call brief, and give prospects an easy way to contact you if they want more information.
Find Leads on Social Media
Some business professionals get outstanding results reaching out to cold prospects on social media. Here, you’d want to determine your target audience and manually search to find them on top platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.
When reaching out to cold leads through social media, you’d typically want to try to connect with them and send a quick message introducing yourself. Just like with cold email best practices, you should aim to offer value immediately, like relevant tips for their industry, and be genuine and specific to their needs.
Use Lead Generation Tools
Several lead generation tools exist to help you find cold leads to contact. These tools come in many forms and can help you:
- Scrape data to find contact information for relevant prospects
- Design contact and lead generation forms for your website
- Perform social listening to find prospects on social media
- Identify platforms where you’re most likely to reach your target audience
While some tools can help speed up finding contact information, it’s important to still manually verify each cold lead before contacting them. This will especially help with cold emailing (in fact, it’s one of the best practices for email deliverability). It ensures you avoid contacting inactive email addresses or having emails bounce, both of which can have severe long-term negative effects.
Challenges You’ll Face When Finding Cold Leads
Finding cold leads isn’t without its challenges. Before starting this process, let’s review the most common difficulties so you can prepare for them.
It’s a Manual and Time-Consuming Process
When you locate cold prospects, you must verify each one manually, which will take a significant amount of time.
You’ll see places to buy a list of prospects with emails or phone numbers. However, purchasing a bulk list doesn’t ensure that contact information is accurate or those prospects fit your target customer profile. It can result in a big waste of time if you do it that way. Taking things slow to ensure accuracy is your best bet.
Lead Quality Varies Based on Who’s Finding Them
It’s common for those running a business to assign marketing or sales teams to locate cold leads. However, if you don’t have a well-defined customer profile they should look for and a good training process to help your employees learn how to find cold leads, their quality can vary.
This can also be true if you outsource lead generation to an agency or freelancer. The quality of leads can vary depending on individual experience and the instructions you provide.
Constant Rejection Can Be Overwhelming
Only 8.5% of cold emails get a response, and less than 2% of cold calls result in scheduling a meeting. These are prospects who have little to no awareness of your brand or products, so expect that it’ll take some time and there will be a lot of rejection along the way.
How to Warm Up Cold Leads
Once you get cold leads and are ready to start your campaign, knowing how to warm them up and prepare them to make a purchasing decision is essential. Let’s review some best practices that will help.
Make Your Outreach Relevant to Them
Nobody likes getting generic cold emails in their inbox. It feels too impersonal. Instead, add details that make the content relevant to the needs of every prospect.
Segmenting your contact list can also help you tailor your emails to specific industries or customer needs. For instance, if you offer a suite of web development tools, you could segment your list into e-commerce and service businesses to customize your messaging appropriately for each one.
Personalize Your Emails to Build a Connection
One of the best cold email copywriting tips is to personalize as much as possible. Personalized emails with the prospect’s name or referencing specific details about their company will typically result in better response rates.
For example, maybe the company completed a significant project you could reference, or you could explain how your product or service will help them achieve their mission. You can often find good information on “About” pages or “News” pages of a company’s website.
Share Products or Services They’ll Be Interested In
When you offer several products or services, don’t make your prospects have to manually research to find the one that’s the best fit for their needs. Instead, make a specific recommendation that you promote in your messages.
For example, if you offer web development tools and are contacting e-commerce businesses, you could direct them to your tool that streamlines the e-commerce checkout process. Focusing on the features and benefits of that one product will make your messaging sound much more specific to their needs.
Always Include Specific CTAs (Calls-to-Action)
When you review successful cold email templates, you’ll notice that they generally include a CTA at the end. Giving specific instructions on what the prospect should do next will improve your conversion and click-through rates.
Some options for the CTA in cold emails are:
- Request that they schedule a consultation
- Direct them to where they can find more information about your products or services
- Provide a link to sign up for a demo
- Ask for a response via email
When to Give Up on a Cold Lead
Unfortunately, not every cold lead will respond or convert. While it’s often a good idea to follow up since prospects might not see your email the first time, you shouldn’t send them too many emails. It’s a best practice to give up after the third email without getting a response. You want to avoid being annoying or coming across as spammy, which can land you in a recipient’s spam folder.
Additionally, if someone responds and says they aren’t interested, requests that you no longer contact them, or hits unsubscribe, remove them from your list immediately and don’t send them any more emails. If you continue to email them in this case, you could find yourself in legal trouble!
You might also encounter prospects who initially express interest but then stop responding. If they haven’t sent you a message saying they aren’t interested, you can attempt to follow up and re-engage them. However, again, it’s a good idea to stop contacting them if you’ve sent three emails without a response.
Turn Cold Leads into Sales with Mailsuite
Cold emailing can be a long and intensive process, but it can deliver amazing results for your business when done well. There are some tools out there that can make the process more efficient though. Mailsuite is one those, and it can help you optimize your cold email campaigns. It offers all of the following to help you achieve better results:
- Mail merge to personalize your messages
- Analytics to track opens and link clicks so you can optimize future campaigns
- An automated unsubscribe link to comply with email marketing regulations
- Alerts when you should follow up with a prospect
- Bounced email detection to help you remove inactive emails from your list
- Custom signature to make your emails look more professional
These features will make cold email campaigns easier to manage and will convert more prospects into customers. To get the most out of your cold email strategy, get started with Mailsuite today!
