Writing effective cold emails

Writing effective cold emails.

I think suddenly a web page that talks about my email writing services has risen in its rankings. I get lots of queries about my email writing services. Many clients also want me to write cold emails for them.

What are cold emails? No, they’re not written after keeping your laptop in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. Or maybe they are called cold emails because you expect people to give you a cold shoulder after receiving them.

Cold emails or unsolicited messages are sent to people who are unaware of your existence. You offer them your product or service through the cold email. They are not expecting to hear from you. They don’t know anything about you. They are just going about their life and then suddenly your message pops up in their inbox and low and behold!

I have never written cold emails to promote my content writing services because I have rejection issues, but I have written plenty of them for my clients.

There is a difference between cold emails and bulk emails

Cold emails are different from the usual bulk email marketing campaigns mostly considered as spam. A cold email is sent directly, preferably to someone you know, with a unique business proposition or a unique idea, or a unique bit of information that you feel will be useful to the person.

A cold email is good for one-on-one interaction. You come across a person. You have his or her email address. You know what the person does and what sort of business partnership you can have. So, you send a proposal.

How to write an effective cold email that generates a response?

Keep it personal

Address the person by name, something like “Hi Balbir.” Use a conversational tone.

Use a compelling subject line

By “compelling” I’m not saying using hyperbolic expressions or promising the stars. Avoid something like, “This email is going to transform your life!”

When sending out cold emails, my personal recommendation is that try to build a relationship instead of getting a business deal or trying to sell something.

A good example would be, sharing a piece of information that would be useful to the recipient. And use that thing in the subject line (Here is something I found that will be useful to you… ).

Use a recognizable “from” line

Use your name instead of just your business. The “from” line can contain something like your first name, your first name and the title, your first name and the company name, and so on. Just make sure that your name is there.

Quickly introduce yourself

It takes someone just a couple of seconds to move to the next message. As soon as the body text of your email begins, tell about yourself. Possibly in just two sentences. Introduce yourself in a manner that it is relevant to the cold email that you are sending.

For example, if I want to offer my content writing services, I should introduce myself like, “I am an experienced content writer who…”

Start with some words of encouragement

Don’t start with “me, I” – start with “you”. Something like, “I really like what you have written on your website, particularly on this web page…”

Or, “The point that you made in the recent LinkedIn conversation was quite revealing and informative.”

Come to the point as fast as possible

Preferably, your cold email shouldn’t be more than 60-100 words. If you can manage, even less, even better. Most probably the person on the other side will be checking your message on his or her mobile phone. It is not convenient to read long email messages, especially cold messages, on a mobile phone.

If possible, don’t try to sell something

Sales messages are really off-putting, especially when you’re not expecting them. No matter how useful a product or service is, nobody wants to spend money just like that. When people want to spend money, they want to spend money when the thought of spending money comes to them, not when someone else brings it up. Just let the person know that you would be interested to know if there is a possibility of you and him/her working together.

Don’t go on and on about your product features

Tell the person how the product is going to help him or her improve his or her life or the way he or she does his or her work. Offer a solution rather than a product or a service.

End with a call-to-action

Don’t ask for something a person would hesitate to do. Just ask him or her to send you a quick reply. Just one word, something like “Yes” or “No”. The person will really appreciate it. Avoid asking to click a link or fix a 30-minute call.

Remember that the best response is that the person responds and responds without a negative reaction. If he or she is eager to take the conversation forward, your cold email has succeeded. Even if it is just a blank response to let you know that he or she has received your mail.

What is quality assurance in content writing?

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What is quality assurance in content writing?

Quality assurance may have simpler meaning and it may have a bit evolved meaning in terms of content writing.

It goes without saying that the quality of your content must be good in the sense that it should be easy to read, there should be no spelling and grammar mistakes, and the flow must be engaging. Your readers must be able to make sense of what you’re writing.

If you want content writing to be an integral part of your content marketing, then it becomes an ongoing activity. Content marketing is not a singular campaign. It is an ongoing thing.

Since it is an ongoing thing, you need to have a strategy, you need to have benchmarks, and you need to have a quality assurance mechanism. What’s that?

When you are writing and publishing content as per your content marketing strategy, you need to ensure you publish content regularly – out of sight is literally out of mind on the streets of content marketing.
You maintain a publishing schedule and publishing calendar.
The voice of your content represents your brand’s voice.
You have sourcing guidelines when you use data in your blog posts and articles.
The titles or headlines are as per your engagement, branding and search engine optimization needs.
Every piece of content takes your content marketing a step forward.

You may have budgetary constraints but don’t allow them to compromise on your content writing quality.

If it comes to choosing between quantity and quality, go with quality. It is fine to publish just a single blog post every month if you cannot spend more money, but make sure that that single blog post adds value to your content marketing efforts and isn’t just there to fill up random gaps or just to cover keywords.

You should document your quality assurance guidelines. This way, whenever you have a new blog post or an article, you can quickly run it through the guidelines to make sure that most of the conditions are met.

Quality also matters when you’re posting on social media. Just because you are publishing 50-100 words, it doesn’t mean that the content that you publish on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram is less important. They say that you should let your hair loose on social media and social networking websites. Although this is fine, every message represents your brand. So, keep that in mind.

Your content writing quality assurance must include your vision

Content writing quality assurance shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should represent your overall business and content marketing vision.

A couple of days ago I was talking to a client, and he has a very clear idea of what he wants to publish for his blogs. He doesn’t want to follow the hackneyed path. He knows how he wants to engage his audience and for that, what type of content he must publish (and I must write). This clarity should be there in your content writing quality assurance guidelines.

Should the creativity of your content writer be sacrificed at the altar of quality assurance?

Not necessarily. Remember that your content exists to engage and inform your audience. Therefore, choose a content writer with whom you can feel the synergy.

Having a clearly defined set of quality assurance guidelines doesn’t mean you don’t let your content writer do his or her own thing. In fact, an effective content writer is always quite individualistic.

Clients who have been working with me for a couple of years keep coming back to me not just for my content writing skills, but for the way I write. But, it doesn’t mean I write something that is not going to add value to their content marketing efforts write in a manner that goes contrary to their vision or quality assurance guidelines.

What exactly do you do?

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It’s very important to know exactly what you do.

This is the first thing that I want to know when take up a new content writing project: what exactly does the client do?

The answer is not as simple as it may seem in the beginning. For most of the clients, it is often difficult to tell in a couple of sentences what they do and exactly who they serve.

And then they wonder why their websites in general and copywriting in particular don’t convert.

It helps you target better if you know exactly what you do.

What do I do?

I provide content writing and copywriting services.

Big deal. There are thousands of content writers and copywriters on the Internet, and some may be even better than me.

So, what do I do to deserve your business?

I write engaging content that helps you convert better. I also improve your search engine rankings.

Now, this is a bit more precise. What next?

My writing is confident. It may not win a Pulitzer or a Booker Prize, but I write with conviction and confidence.

I always know the right words for the message that you want to convert.

I don’t use fluff. I come to the point straightaway. I don’t try to impress the readers. I try to inform them.

Instead of worrying about how many words I should write, I focus on the message (although, most of the clients are more worried about the number of words, but that’s a different story).

So, as a content writer and a copywriter, I do the following:

Write conversational content.
Write content with conviction.
My content writing helps you improve your search engine rankings.

These are the basic traits that a small business owner is looking for in a content writer.

Similarly, if you want to communicate your message without confusing your visitors, you must know exactly what you deliver.

Don’t leave it on your content writer to first understand what you do and then write. He or she will be wasting his or her time and you too will be wasting your time.

Write down somewhere exactly what you do whether you are getting content written by a writer or you yourself are writing it.

What do you deliver?

What is the benefit of working with you?

How do you define your target customers and clients?

What would they be looking for when they search for you?

Is there something that you can deliver that the others cannot? What is it?

What sets you apart?

My English and Hindi content writing rates are the same

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Clients who are looking for a writer who can write in Hindi are genuinely perplexed when I ask them for the same rate that I ask for writing in English. हिंदी के लिए आप इतना चार्ज क्यूं कर रहे हैं? (why are you charging so much for writing in Hindi?).

One reason is that they think that they can find Hindi writers a dime a dozen. Another reason is that writers who write in Hindi are actually ready to charge peanuts for their services.

I tell them that I’m not charging for the language, I’m charging for my writing talent. Whether I use English or Hindi, my writing style and hence my writing talent remains the same. Hence, you are not paying for my English writing services or Hindi writing services, you are paying for my writing services. Whether I write in English, Hindi, Punjabi or Khadi boli, my rates are going to be the same.

Some understand, most don’t.

I don’t compete on pricing for my content writing services

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Content writing – competing on the basis of rates

I get lots of work from abroad. In fact, in the initial years, there was no work from India. Back then people didn’t understand the value of quality content in India. Many didn’t even have a website.

People in the USA and other Western countries on the other hand appreciated good writing. They started having websites in the early 2000’s.

They also understood the importance of content vis-à-vis Google search engine rankings earlier than people in India. It was also a time when outsourcing was at its peak as one of the most preferred ways of cutting costs.

Although, at my end, I never tried to charge less but who am I kidding? Most of the people in the West outsource their work to someone from India assuming that they are going to pay less.

Even when I was charging less (doing it, but not accepting it), even those rates were a lot for Indian clients. Hence, when I started getting assignments in India, I charged a lot less compared to what I was charging my clients from abroad.

This began to trouble my conscience. The foundation of my business was built through the support of people who believed in me – even if it was for the sake of saving money – and now I was charging more from them and less from people who still didn’t understand the value of good content and were simply being arm-twisted into working with a better content writer, by Google.

Clients from India can be lousy. One shouldn’t take it personally because that’s how they are. Our sociocultural environment makes us mistrust even our neighbours. They want to pay the minimum possible rate and they want to extract the maximum possible from you, short of killing you.

The only benefit is that once they understand that there is no escape from hiring a good content writer, they appreciate your talent and somehow manage to pay what you’re asking for. Besides, once you have made a name for yourself, there are so many clients that you can conveniently pick and choose.

Coming back to different rates for clients from abroad and clients from India: even that phase passed, and I gradually started increasing my rates to what I was more comfortable with, even with my Indian clients.

My conscience stopped troubling me. Even when I was charging them rates clients from India would never agree to, they were paying me less than they would have had to pay a native writer.

These days my rates are more or less the same. I’m comfortable with my rates. I don’t compete based on my rates. If a client calls me and tells me that there is a certain content writing agency or there is a certain content writer who is charging a lot less than what I am quoting, I tell them, “Well, congratulations! You have already found the content writer of your choice. Go to him/her.”

Even from my clients from abroad, after doing some reading on the web, I have realized that sometimes I charge slightly more than their native writers. I’m fine with that. I’m charging for the value I deliver, not for the fact that I am a content writer from India. Instead of attracting clients who are more interested in saving costs by hiring a content writer from India, my objective is to attract clients who are just looking for a better content writer.