What you need to know before you get started:

‍Q: What is B2B Cold Email Outreach?

A: B2B Cold Email Outreach is the simplest form of a signal-led workflow: If a company fits your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and the person fits your Buyer Persona, then send an email sequence. More complex workflows may incorporate additional conditions and actions, often classified as Warm Outbound or Inbound. Here are Examples:

Warm Outbound: if a person has switched jobs, is a product user, and their new company fits your ICP, then update the CRM record and send an email. 

Inbound: if a website visitor is identified and the company fits your ICP and person fits buyer persona, then send a LinkedIn connection request followed by an email sequence.

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Q: Why is B2B Cold Email Outreach so popular?

A: It is the easiest way to reach your target audience at scale. Cold Outreach focuses on volume, while Warm Outbound and Inbound emphasize quality. Although the audience size for Warm Outbound and Inbound is smaller, their reply and conversion rates 3X and 10X greater than Cold Outreach, respectively. 

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Q: Who can benefit from B2B Cold Email Outreach in 2024?

A: Companies that can effectively manage Customer Acquisition Costs will find this strategy invaluable. For those with a solid product-market fit, it means achieving profitability through strategic outreach. For others still exploring their market fit, it's a calculated investment in discovering their niche. Typically, businesses with a Lifetime Value (LTV) > $5,000 and happy customers fit this profile.

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Q: How to calculate Customer Acquisition Costs for B2B Cold Email Outreach?

A: To calculate CAC, you need three things: cost per positive reply, conversion rate to meetings, and conversion rate to sales. Let's use as examples:

• Cost per Positive Reply: $200
• Conversion to Meetings: 50%
• Conversion to Sales: 20%
• CAC: $200 * 50% * 20% = $2000

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Q: What are the benchmarks for B2B Cold Email Outreach in 2024?

A: If your process complies with B2B cold email best practices, you can achieve following metrics:

‍Checklist for successful B2B Cold Email Outreach in 2024

To maximize positive replies and minimize the cost per positive reply in B2B Cold Email Outreach, it's essential to optimize four key parameters: deliverability rate, primary tab placement rate, open rate, and reply rate. These factors collectively determine the success of your outreach efforts, encapsulated in the formula:

‍Replies = DR * PRPT * OR * RR

Where:

• DR: Deliverability Rate
• PRPT: Primary Tab Placement Rate
• OR: Open Rate
• RR: Reply Rate

How to make cold emails that work? Here is a super-duper detailed checklist to optimize each of these parameters effectively.

Deliverability

□  Limit Email Volume: Send no more than 30 messages per mailbox per day to avoid being flagged as spam. This helps maintain a healthy sender reputation and ensures your emails reach the intended inbox. Once the mailbox is aged, like good wine in oak barrels at least for 3-6 months, you can increase the daily sending quota.

□  Calculate Email Infrastructure Needs: Based on your desired sending volume, determine the number of mailboxes and domains required:

• Number of Mailboxes Needed: Divide the total number of emails you plan to send per day by 30. For example, if you want to send 900 emails daily, you would need 30 mailboxes (900 ÷ 30 = 30).
• Number of Domains Needed: Divide the number of mailboxes by 3. Continuing with the example, for 30 mailboxes, you would need 10 domains (30 ÷ 3 = 10). 

□  Use Secondary Domains: Protect your primary domain's reputation by using secondary domains for outreach. These should be similar to your primary domain, such as yourdomain.xyz or tryyourdomain.com. Redirect them (301) to your primary domain to ensure recipients can easily navigate to your main website.

□  Email Service Provider (ESP) Matching: Enhance deliverability by matching your ESP with the recipient's ESP. For instance, send emails from Gmail to Gmail and Outlook to Outlook. To achieve this,  for every 4 domains set up with Gmail, include 1 with Outlook and one 1 another ESP that has private IPs with high reputation.

□  Set Up DMARC, DKIM, and SPF: Implement these authentication protocols to verify your emails and protect against spoofing. Properly configured authentication records enhance your domain's credibility and improve deliverability by ensuring your emails are recognized as legitimate by receiving servers.

□  Disable Email Opens Tracking: Turn off email open tracking to avoid triggering spam filters. While tracking can provide questionable insights (Apple's Mail Privacy Protection makes tracking insights unreliable, as it obscures true open rates), it will also raise red flags with email providers, harming your deliverability. Lifehack: Based on our experience, you can switch to email opens tracking for 20% of your email campaigns after you send 1000 emails from every mailbox. This way you will get data without harming deliverability. 

□  Mailbox Warmup and Inbound/Outbound Ratio: Warm up your mailbox for 2 weeks by using warmup tools to build a positive sender reputation. Start sending only after the initial 2-week warmup. Hint: maintain a healthy ratio of inbound and outbound emails by continuing warm-up after 2 weeks - warm-up messages have close to a 100% reply rate. 

□  Email Verification: Always verify email addresses right before sending to minimize bounce rates and ensure your emails reach valid recipients. With email lists experiencing about 22.5% invalidity annually, about 2% became invalid every month.

Primary Tab Placement

□  Make every message unique with AI variables:  Using the same templates, even with name personalization, can be detected by Google and other ESP. Crafting each email with AI variables enhances deliverability and primary tab placement. For example, "I see you're really into {notable characteristic or focus}. Have you considered {proposed improvement or action} to significantly boost your {relevant goal}?"

• DISC Personalization: Elevate personalization with DISC profiles, which not only positively impact deliverability and engagement but also make each message entirely different. This represents the next level of AI personalization compared to using AI variables and templates

□  Reply Rate Feedback Loops: Reply rates are an important factor in determining email primary tab placement. A positive feedback loop occurs when increased reply rates enhance primary tab placement and further engagement. Conversely, low reply rates can trigger a negative feedback loop, reducing primary tab placement and even deliverability. To maximize primary tab placement, it's essential to implement as many strategies as possible from the Reply Rates section of this checklist.

Open Rates

□  Personalized Sender Addresses: Use a personalized sender address, such as "Name Surname from Company," instead of generic addresses like admin@yourcompany.com

□  Compelling Subject Lines: Craft concise and intriguing subject lines, keeping them under 50 characters for full visibility on mobile devices. 

□  Preheader Text: Utilize preheader text to complement your subject line. This snippet should provide additional context or a teaser to entice the recipient to open the email.

□  Visual Engagement with GIFs: Enhance your email's visual appeal by using a GIF for your Gmail avatar. A dynamic image, such as your photo and company logo blinking, can capture attention and increase open rates. Here is how to do this.

Reply Rates: The 5L Rules for 2024

□  Less than 60 Words: Keep your emails concise to maintain clarity and hold the recipient's attention.

□  Less than 7 Lines: Ensure your message is brief and to the point, making it easy for recipients to digest quickly.

□  Low-Effort, No-Friction CTA: Include calls to action that require minimal effort from the recipient, encouraging engagement.

□  Look Human: Use AI variables for personalization at scale, but ensure your approach remains fresh and creative. Continuously seek out new and effective strategies to engage recipients, as tactics that become widely used can lose their impact over time. The key is to stand out and make your emails feel personal and unique, avoiding the pitfalls of generic AI-generated content.

□  Leverage A/B Testing: Continuously test your offers, value propositions, and guarantees to ensure they resonate with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Reply Rates: Advanced Techniques

□  Ensuring Your List Fits Your ICP: To maximize the effectiveness of your outreach, it's essential to ensure that at least 90% of your email list aligns with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Here are steps to achieve this:

• Define Your ICP Clearly: Establish specific criteria that define your ideal customer, for example: healthcare startups requiring HIPAA compliance, but not yet compliant, with a working website of at least three pages, a CTO lacking cybersecurity experience, and founders who graduated from college more than 5 years ago
• Segment Your List: Use your ICP criteria to segment your existing list, filtering out prospects that don't meet the defined parameters.
• Use ICP Tools: Leverage tools that provide additional data on your prospects, like in our example, if they are: 1)healthcare startups, 2)do they require HIPAA, etc
• Regularly Update Your List: Continuously update your list to reflect changes in your ICP and market conditions. Remove outdated or irrelevant contacts.
• Conduct Periodic Audits: Regularly audit your list to ensure it remains aligned with your ICP. This involves reviewing and adjusting your segmentation criteria as needed.

□  Mix it with Signal-Led Email Outreach: At any given time, only about 3% of your target audience is actively in-market, meaning they have a current need for your product or service. To boost reply rates, integrate cold outreach with signal-led outreach. This approach uses specific signals—such as website visits, job postings, or social media engagement—to identify prospects who are likely in-market now. By leveraging these signals, you can tailor your outreach to engage those most ready to convert. For instance, at Unstuck Engine, we track 45 signals and perform 11 actions, including email, to optimize engagement.

□  Build Familiarity Before Outreach: To increase engagement, introduce yourself to potential recipients before sending emails. This can be achieved through several strategies:

• Retargeting: Use retargeting ads to familiarize your audience with your brand. Upload email lists to major platforms to reach your audience where they are most active.
• Personalized Articles: Write articles specifically tailored for each prospect, addressing their unique challenges or interests. This demonstrates your understanding of their needs and establishes your expertise.
• Social Media Engagement: Actively engage with prospects on platforms like LinkedIn. Comment on their posts, share relevant content, and build a connection that precedes your email outreach.

□  Extended Email Sequences: Implement longer email sequences, extending up to 15 messages. Rotate between up to 5 different mailboxes to maintain engagement and avoid spam filters. 

□  Nurturing Sequences: After completing the initial outreach sequence, transition into a 3-6 month nurturing sequence. This phase focuses on educating the recipient about your industry, solutions, and value propositions. Once the nurturing period concludes, restart the outreach sequence to re-engage prospects who may now be ready to convert.

□  Personalized Videos: What we found recently is that personalized videos embedded into emails, featuring your face and calling the recipient by name, add a big human touch and significantly impact reply rates.

Tech Stack for B2B Cold Email Outreach in 2024

You've got two paths here:

1. Mix and Match: Go with separate tools for everything—email sending, verification, AI personalization, prospecting, list building, ICP fine-tuning, and audience warmup. It's like building your own dream team of tools, but you'll need a bunch of folks with different skills to make it all work smoothly. Check out our market landscape for the best picks.
2. One-Stop Shop: Just use the Unstuck Engine. It’s your all-in-one solution that handles everything from start to finish. No need to juggle multiple tools or hunt for experts—this does it all for you. Signup here with $100 in free credits.