How to Sell Leads to Your Clients Using Cold Emails

Selling leads to clients can be a very lucrative revenue stream for your digital marketing agency. In order to offer this service to your clients, you’ll need to adopt a lead generation strategy that is easily scalable while delivering high-quality leads.

Cold emails are arguably the most effective way to generate warm leads. The problem is that, for many agencies, the majority of time and effort spent on cold emails can be tedious and ineffective.

Today, we’ll show you how cold emails can help you generate more leads and how automating the process can enable you to sell a more robust offering to your clients.

What is a cold email?

A cold email is an outreach strategy used to contact potential prospects that are not currently doing business with you. The goal is to use this initial contact to convince the prospect that they should engage in further communication to find out more about the products or services that you’re offering.

Cold emails are similar to cold calling. However, they do have many added benefits:

• They are less disruptive to your prospect’s workflow and are a more modern form of sales communication.
• Where you can only make one sales call at a time, cold emails can be sent out on a massive scale with the click of a button.
• The process of finding contacts, writing catchy subject lines and emails, and sending your cold emails can all be automated. You can even automate your follow-up emails to continue re-engaging prospects with ease.

Is sending a cold email illegal?

While sending cold emails to prospects and businesses is entirely legal, there is an outlined list of rules that must be followed to remain in compliance with the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) CAN-SPAM act.

1. Don’t use misleading headers in your email. The “To,” “From,” and “Reply-To” must accurately identify the person or business that sent the cold email.
2. Don’t deceive your prospects with misleading subject lines. Subject lines must be an accurate representation of the contents of the email.
3. Clearly state that the message is an ad. While there is a lot of leeway in how you choose to disclose it, you must clearly disclose that your email is an advertisement.
4. Include your location in your message. You must provide the recipient with the physical postal address of your business. A street address, private mailbox with a receiving agency, or post office box registered with USPS are all acceptable options.
5. Provide recipients with a straightforward way to opt out of future emails. Your email must include messaging that explains how recipients can opt-out of future emails from you. Provide a way for prospects to communicate their choice to you, such as an email address or another simple Internet-based option like an unsubscribe link.
6. Honor any opt-out requests. You must honor the recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days of receiving it.
7. You are responsible for any emails sent on behalf of your company. In the event that a business was to hire an agency to handle their cold email marketing, they are still legally responsible for any messages that are sent on their behalf. Businesses must monitor their actions and ensure that they are in compliance with the requirements above.

How quickly can you expect to see results with cold email?

Cold email can produce results quite fast depending on your company’s industry and product or service type. It isn’t uncommon to see conversions in as little as a week of sending your first message.

Why should an agency offer cold email lead generation as a service?

Cold email is a tremendous value-add for your agency. Businesses from every industry are in need of quality leads. In many cases, they would prefer to pay for them rather than invest in creating a lead generation strategy for themselves.

Offering lead generation services can benefit your agency in several ways:

Create a recurring revenue stream

As businesses are always in need of leads, this service enables you to create a recurring revenue stream for your agency.

Set yourself apart from the competition

Most digital marketing agencies offer the same standard PPC and SEO services, so it can be challenging to remain competitive. By offering lead generation services, you’re providing a value-add that also helps your agency stand out.

Low effort upcharge

Unlike other digital marketing services requiring heavy investments of time and resources, an automated cold email strategy requires minimal effort while bringing in an impressive amount of revenue.

Customer Retention

The greater your offering and results, the longer you will retain your clients.

Encourage agency growth

By expanding your services, you’ll be able to generate more revenue with existing clients and attract new ones as well.

Attract a broader audience

All businesses require leads, so adding lead generation to your existing list of services will enable you to engage with a greater variety of potential clients.

Improves your sales pitch

SEO and content marketing are long-term strategies that can take quite a bit of time before they can yield the desired results. On the other hand, cold email lead generation can often deliver almost instant results with impressive concrete data, making it easier to pitch to prospects.

How to sell cold email lead generation services to agency clients?

When pitching cold email lead generation to your clients, it’s best to lead with these two main advantages:

Rapid results

Cold emails deliver results almost instantly, so you can typically provide your clients with warm leads within a week.

Easy to use

Unlike other marketing services, a cold email generation campaign is almost entirely hands-off for your clients. Once they’ve provided you with an email account to send the emails from, all they’ll need to do is approve your contact list and email sequence.

Tips for success with cold email lead generation

Here are some agency-tested tips to ensure that your cold email lead generation campaigns are successful in attaining the desired results:

Avoid sounding like a template

We recommend writing your emails in a friendly tone that you’d use to communicate with a friend or colleague. While templates are an effective way to send an optimized message to hundreds of potential customers, you want to make sure that your email doesn’t sound like all of the other cold emails sitting in the prospect’s inbox.

Personalization is key

When it comes to cold email lead generation, personalization is king. Businesses can handle a certain degree of mass lead generation, but if you send out mass emails without any real personalization, your messages may end up in the spam folder.

Take the time to add some degrees of personalization to your emails beyond using a {{first_name}} custom snippet. This will help the recipient feel like they aren’t 1 out of 100 people to have received the same email.

Improve open rates with catchy subject lines

Generating a strong open rate is key to successfully converting leads from cold email campaigns. Avoid lengthy or vague subject lines that don’t convey what you’re offering and come off as spammy. Instead, use an eye-catching subject line that’s around 41 characters or 7 words to increase your open rate.

Have a clear purpose

Your cold email should have a clear purpose that is apparent to the recipient upon opening it.

To create a compelling email message, consider answering the following questions:

• Why are you reaching out?
• What is the purpose of your email?
• What problem are you looking to solve?
• What do you need your prospect to do next (call you on the phone or email back for more info)?

Experiment with split testing

When developing your email sequences and templates, you’re going to have a lot of great copy ideas to choose from. With a/b split testing, you can experiment with a variety of different copy tactics to see which subject lines get better open rates and which variations of your email copy result in more click-throughs and conversions. You can use this data to continue making slight variations to your sequences and templates until you find the best copy to achieve the optimal results.

Why automating your cold email strategy is so powerful

Throughout this article, we’ve shared just how beneficial the use of cold email lead generation can be for agencies and their clients. It’s an effective tool that can yield even more outstanding results when you leverage the power of AI to automate the more consuming tasks.

Through automation, you can take the hours spent doing the following tasks and turn them around in a matter of minutes:

• Uncovering detailed prospecting data.
• Mass email personalization.
• Email sequence and template creation.
• Discover the best time to send your sequences.
• Creating engaging icebreakers that help you connect with your prospect.
• Send hundreds of emails to your contact list.

Automation and AI can help you streamline and optimize your workflow, so your lead generation efforts are not only scalable but also more effective.

Conclusion

Cold email lead generation is a hugely impactful sales tool for your agency. You can use it to increase your list of services and drive recurring revenue to your business. By fine-tuning your approach and leveraging the power of AI, you can generate more leads and conversions for your business and your clients. With the help of the latest sales technology you can run an almost fully automated lead generation agency in no-time.