Tag Archives: Content Marketing

How to write an effective cold email?

How to write effective cold emails.

To be frank, I have never written a cold email for myself. I have written many for my clients – I’m still writing a couple for a client in Italy.

They are highly recommended. Even for my own business I have been advised multiple times to use cold emails.

Even LinkedIn has a feature that allows you to send “cold” messages to your contacts.

Here I am going to discuss some effective ways you can write cold emails.

Write a clear, convincing subject line.
Use the name of the recipient in the greeting (definitely).
Introduce yourself in the smallest possible sentence.
Immediately come to the point.
Use small, direct sentences.
Avoid being pretentious.
Politely ask to get back.

What is a cold email?

Updating on August 22, 2020: In more refined form, sending out cold emails is also called an “outreach strategy”. Many companies are running their own outreach programs in the wake of Covid-19 to generate more leads and get more business opportunities. Here is a nice blog post on Outreach Tips by Rand Fishkin.

Cold email does not mean you refrigerate your laptop for some time and then write an email on it.

A cold email is an unsolicited email message that you send to someone without having contacted that person before. It is like approaching someone in the crowd and the person is not expecting you. Or knocking at someone’s door to sell something.

It is like the cold calls that annoy you all the time. The big difference is, unlike cold calls, you are not forced to pick up your phone to check who is calling. The email message remains in the inbox and you see it when you check your email, unless, you have set up a noisy notification for new emails.

Is cold email spamming?

Cold emailing is a prominent part of email marketing. Though, there is a very thin line that divides cold emailing and spamming. They are different.

In spamming you send out email messages relentlessly, using a cheap email broadcasting server.

Somehow, you get hold of a large number of email ids. You have no idea to whom these email ids belong. You think that if you send your promotional message to 20,000 people, at least 50 may respond and since sending spam is quite cheap, you may get a good ROI.

I’m not saying it works, but most of the people think that it works.

In most of the countries, spamming is illegal. The Russian spam mafia is notorious.

The moment it is detected that the spam has originated from your server, the IP address of your server is blacklisted by the email clients like Gmail. They have very advanced technologies these days to detect spam messages even by analysing the subject lines. There are already millions of blacklisted IP addresses.

In cold email, you send one email message to one person. You send a personal message. You know who that person is.

For example, I visit your website and notice there are many mistakes in the text. Being a content writer, I can help you write better content for your website and blog. I find your email ID and I write to you. I give you some examples of how I have previously written for similar websites.

Similarly, I come across your profile on LinkedIn. I read about you and find out that you are a real estate agent or a realtor. You have a website that can use a better content writer. The past year I have written for many real estate agents and realtors. Hence, I write an email to you introducing myself and offering my service.

This is, non-spam, cold emailing. I know who you are. After reading my email, you will know that I am a content writer. You know why I am writing to you. There is clear communication. Then, it is up to you whether you want to take that communication forward or not.

Does writing cold emails work?

I have mentioned above that even LinkedIn encourages you to send cold messages. They call it their “InMail” feature. I get lots of messages from my LinkedIn contacts.

As traffic on my website is gradually picking up, many people send me pitches for guest posting. Since I already have a link on my website and blog that encourages people to contact me, although these are cold email messages, one way or another, I am already expecting them.

So in this case, I can say that the cold emails that people send me often work. I know in most of the cases, well, in all the cases, they are looking for backlinks, but they also help me save time by giving me quality content for my blog.

Coming back to the topic, cold emails do work. Since most of the people who use them don’t know how to draw a line between writing effective cold emails and spamming, cold emailing gets lots of bad rap and people are wary of using them and receiving them at both ends of the spectrum.

In this Inc.com article, the writer, Larry Kim claims that his response rate is approximately 1 in 5 with cold emailing, which is higher than the traditional email marketing response rate.

Personally, I believe there should be no reason why cold emails shouldn’t work, provided you send them with a sense of purpose. The key is, what approach you follow.

Before I talk about how to write effective cold emails, I’m assuming you are going to write the emails to people who can actually benefit from your proposition.

Writing effective cold emails

Recently I was reading a copywriting book by Robert Bly and many of the suggestions can be applied to sending cold emails. He says that the most important task is making people pick up your pamphlet, read the headline and then proceed towards the body text.

You need to follow the same approach when sending cold emails.

The importance of the subject line when sending effective cold emails

You must come up with the subject line that prompts people to open your email message. If they don’t open it, they don’t read it. If they don’t read it, they don’t respond to it. If they don’t respond to it, there is no use contacting them.

Hence, without getting too dramatic, the subject line of your cold email is a matter of life and death in the context of your email. So, spend a lot of time figuring out what subject line you’re going to use.

There is no definitive subject line that you can use, but be as specific as possible.

It will take some time for you to finally settle on the right subject line. For example, what subject line would I use if I send out cold emails?

Some of the ideas that come to my mind are:

“Need a content writer for your website?”
“Introducing my content writing services”
“Hello, I can write content for your website”
“I can improve your SEO with my content writing”
“Some suggestions for the writing mistakes on your website” – use such subject lines carefully.

There is no need to be dramatic because dramatization may confuse the recipient. Clearly specify what you’re offering.

Writing the main copy of your cold email

If you cannot personalise your cold email, don’t send it. Just don’t.

Hence, always greet the recipient with his or her real name. Even if you have to make an extra effort to find the name of the person, find it, and then use it.

Remember that your cold email is not a marketing message. It is a one-on-one interaction. You are bringing up something. Of course, you’re promoting your product or service, but since this is a personal message you need to be tactful.

Introduce yourself as clearly as possible. Don’t use a very long sentence. Preferably, in a single sentence, tell the person who you are and what you do.

Then, in the second sentence, tell the recipient why you are writing. It needs to be a genuine reason.

For example, if I am sending out a cold email, first I am quickly going to tell that person that I am a content writer. Then I will tell the recipient that there are certain things that I noticed on his or her website and thought of contacting.

Every content writer has a different style. When I write emails, I don’t want to impose my opinion on anyone. I want the other person to make his or her own decision and I apply the same approach when I’m writing cold emails for my clients.

Keep your writing style conversational. Use some references to convince the other person that you have actually gone through his or her website and are writing a personal message and not merely using a template.

60% of the email writing must be about what the other person is going to gain by associating with you. Don’t focus too much on problems. Focus on solutions. Focus on benefits.

In conclusion, in a couple of sentences, you can talk about your experience, the number of clients or customers you have served and how you have been able to benefit the others.

In the end, ask the person to contact you.

Concluding remarks

Writing effective cold emails is all about making a personal connection. You shouldn’t mass email cold emails because then they become spam.

Just because you have got someone’s email ID doesn’t mean you should be sending emails to that person. Maybe he or she doesn’t even remotely require your services.

If you are a content writing service, should I be offering content writing services to you? Of course, if I need to partner with you or collaborate with you, there is nothing wrong in that, but I shouldn’t be offering you my services for YOUR website.

How does blogging help you grow your business?

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How business blogging grows your business.

More than a decade-and-a-half ago, blogging transitioned from a mere hobby or an AdSense money making tool to business branding platform.

Almost every mainstream business has a blog these days.

You may like to read: 10 Beginners Tips for Business Blogging.

Most businesses claim that they publish blogs regularly because they want to provide useful information to their visitors and customers & clients and also to keep them engaged.

This is a very good reason, but in reality, most of the businesses publish blogs because blogging improves their search engine rankings. Hence, it is a multi-pronged benefit.

In this blog post I would quickly like to discuss how blogging helps you grow your business. The post is inspired by another blog post published on Entrepreneur.com, titled 5 ways to grow your business through blogging.

Blogging improves your SEO

There are multiple reasons why blogging is good for your SEO, assuming you blog regularly. Here are some reasons:

Blogging platforms like WordPress are structured in such a manner that they make your content search engine friendly.
Individual blog post is also structured in a search engine friendly manner as it has the main title, headings and subheadings and categorization.
Writing and publishing new and fresh content is easier using a blogging tool like WordPress and hence, you don’t need a web designer to add new posts or edit existing posts. It means there is a greater incentive to publish regularly and without much fuss.
Since you can write and publish new and fresh content you are constantly providing Google and other search engines new content to crawl, index and rank.
Search engine crawlers can access every single blog post from your homepage (provided you haven’t taken extra measures to prevent this from happening).
Interlinking to other blog posts makes it easier for search engine crawlers to jump to different portions of your business blog.
Since you’re constantly publishing interesting and useful information, other bloggers and website owners have a reason to link to you, improving your SEO in the process.

So, writing and publishing regularly on your business blog is good for your SEO and when your search engine rankings improve, especially when they improve for your targeted keywords and search terms, your business grows.

Business blogging increases your direct traffic

One of the biggest benefits of regularly publishing a business blog is that it increases your search engine traffic, but additionally, it also increases your direct traffic.

As mentioned above, other bloggers and website owners link to your blog or individual blog posts.

For example, American Express publishes Open Forum and I have linked to this business blog multiple times from my website.

Hence, when you regularly publish valuable and link-worthy content many high traffic websites link to your website or blog, and in this way, you get direct traffic from there.

Sometimes even mainstream journalists find the information on your website useful and from their articles, they link to your website, generating more direct traffic in the process.

Business blogging increases your newsletter subscribers

There are multiple reasons why your newsletter subscribers increase when you publish valuable and useful content on your business blog. These are

They don’t want to miss out when you publish fresh content.
More people coming to your blog through search engine traffic as well as direct traffic means more people subscribing to your newsletter.
The blog content can be repurposed as newsletter content, attracting more subscribers.

Publishing a regular newsletter has proven to be one of the most potent marketing tools to grow your business.

Business blogging increases your social media engagement

When you publish a blog post on your blog you can share the link on your social media profiles. This in turn creates buzz.

There are many businesses who simply post content directly on their social media timelines. There is no harm in it but when you first publish useful and authoritative content on your business blog and then you encourage people to talk about your content on social media, it establishes your authority and when you establish your authority, people develop interest in your capabilities and they pay more attention to what you say.

How to build a successful business blog?

To build a successful business blog, you need to do the following:

Write high-quality, useful blog posts.
Stick to a publishing schedule.
Publish regularly – maybe three blog posts every week.
Market your content – use your social media profiles and your newsletter to let people know that you are publishing new blog posts.

The most fundamental thing you can do is publish regularly. This I have observed across the spectrum. Even if the design is not great. Even if you’re not very active on social media. Provided you publish great content and publish it regularly, your business blog is going to succeed.

How to use content to market your business during Covid-19

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Using content for marketing during Covid-19.

Marketing budgets are being slashed all over the world. This Forrester research says that marketing budgets all over the world have definitely declined due to the Covid-19 outbreak, but they are expected to start going up by the end of 2020 and may recover by 2021.

But it depends on which side the unpredictable camel of the outbreak sits. Nothing is for sure right now. Many countries don’t even know what their current position vis-à-vis the outbreak is.

According to the above research, the CMO’s are taking the money out of out-of-home advertisements and moving the budgets to digital marketing for obvious reasons.

Despite the lunatics denying the severity of Covid-19, lesser number of people are moving out and are spending time working from home and consequently, being in front of the screen for longer durations.

Another thing many marketers are stressing is that, you shouldn’t stop marketing. A McGraw-Hill research of the 1981 and 82 recession found that businesses that marketed aggressively during the recession had 256% higher sales than those that did not.

But how do you market yourself if your business is making less money than before?

The answer is content marketing.

You spend less money than you spent on traditional advertisements, and it is far more effective. Especially now, when digital marketing is more effective than traditional marketing.

You can either publish original content or you can re-purpose your existing content, or you can do a mix of both.

The point is, now is the right time to let your customers and clients know that you are still in the game (you haven’t been destroyed by the Covid-19 outbreak) and you are still actively promoting yourself.

The dust is settling. In the early months of the year people were caught off-guard. Emotions were running high. People were scared and concerned. They were caught unaware.

Although the virus is widespread and a big part of the population is infected (in New Delhi right now 33% of the population is reported to have been infected by the virus), people are less worried. A lot has to do with the ignorance about the effects of the virus, but many businesses are getting back to their feet.

https://twitter.com/AmritHallan/status/1285550801151119361

During this time, it is nice if you set a healthy example and use content marketing and digital marketing to promote yourself. Here are a few things you can do with your content:

Repurpose existing content

If you feel you have already got lots of content on your website or blog but you need to add new content, you can consider repurposing your existing content.

You may like to read: How to re-purpose old content?

Repurposing your content means generating new formats of content out of your existing content pieces.

For example, if you have a detailed blog post on how to do content marketing on mobile phones, perhaps you can create a slideshow or a video. You can also create a PDF e-book that people can download.

Refocus on your email marketing

Email marketing is a big part of content marketing, in fact, the most effective aspect of it. When you send emails to your prospects, your message appears right in their inbox.

Of course, before you can send them emails, you need to win their trust so that they regularly open your emails.

Winning the trust of your email recipients is a different ballgame and requires a dedicated post, but for the time being, you need to understand that since most of the people are confined to their homes, they are more receptive to receiving valuable information through emails.

This Campaign Monitor study has revealed that more people are opening their emails than before. From February to March, businesses reported a 16% change in the open rate of emails.

This American Express blog post has shared some insights on the emerging email marketing trends during Covid-19 and what you can do to make your email marketing as effective as possible.

Accelerate your content publishing

Since more people are working from their homes, they are consuming targeted content with greater frequency than when they were going to their offices.

Also, while working in isolation, people are searching for relevant information to solve their day-to-day professional problems.

Basically, everything on the Internet is content. What you publish on your website, whether they are web pages or blog posts, is content. What you publish on social media, is content. When you send an email marketing campaign, you are broadcasting content.

To publish purposeful content during the outbreak, you first need to find out what your core audience is looking for.

For example, my clients want to improve their search engine visibility through quality content. These days, on my blog, I’m publishing lots of content that can help you improve your search engine rankings vis-à-vis the Covid-19 outbreak.

Information is another thing that people are constantly looking. They want to remain informed. Whatever business they are dealing with, they want to get the right information about whether the business can deliver or not.

You can also sail your content marketing boat on uncharted waters. If you have never published case studies, maybe now is the right time because they are a big confidence booster. If you have never published videos on your website, perhaps now is the right time.

Content marketing can help you in multiple ways during these trying times. For example, it can help you stay in front of your customers and clients. You can help them by providing them useful information and as a result, increase customer loyalty.

It was also set in motion your core content marketing strategy even after Covid is over.

B2B marketing content consumption increased during Covid-19

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B2B content marketing has increased during Covid-19

So says this PRWeb report. It is understandable. Since most of the people are confined to their homes, whether they are freelancers or full-time employees of some company, one of the best ways of reaching out to these people is through high-quality marketing content.

In-person, face-to-face meetings have been stopped or even banned at many places. Conferences and workshops stand cancelled for the foreseeable future. The B2B marketplace depends a lot on these communication channels.

Not all findings notice an increase in the spending on content marketing especially in the B2B arena. For example, this McKinsey survey found mixed reactions among its responders.

Sales leaders are already moving quickly to navigate the crisis, with the best ones focusing on how to make targeted changes that help their businesses weather the storm and start preparing for the recovery. As we update this survey in the coming weeks, we will also share perspectives on planning for the recovery as well as reimagining the new normal for sales.

Many B2B companies are reducing their marketing spend but on the other hand, there are many companies who have increased or maintained their current budgets thinking that there is more reason to keep in touch with their core customer base in whichever way possible.

Digital interactions are obviously increasing whether they are through targeted content or video events.

90% marketing among the B2B circles is happening through video conferencing, mobile phones and other digital platforms.

This LinkedIn study reveals that 42% of the respondents faced budget cuts in marketing (whether conventional marketing or content marketing), which is a big challenge. 47% marketers said that they have increased focus on emotional and human-centric content during Covid-19. Consequently 19% confessed that there has been a drastic reduction in the product-focused content.

The author of the above LinkedIn report rightly comments that marketers have no idea how to deal with the current situation. They have a precedents with other market conditions such as the recession or the bursting of the dot-com bubble, but the Covid-19 outbreak is a completely new, unexpected phenomena that engulfed the entire world within a matter of a couple of weeks.

This Forbes article says:

The pandemic has led to nations limiting business activities, which has added immense pressure on business owners. While some organizations have closed, the remaining are left to deal with the harrowing aftermath. They are facing unprecedented challenges, including supply chain disruptions, a slump in customer demand, regulatory changes and increased uncertainty about the future.

The reality is that you cannot ignore marketing. Ad hoc responses don’t pay dividends. You need to put a strategy in place. I personally believe that the Covid-19 situation is going to last for a long time, and we need to prepare accordingly.

What marketing rules to follow during a crisis like the Covid-19 outbreak?

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Marketing rules to follow during the Covid-19 outbreak

Since lots of content is appearing on my timeline about managing your business, marketing, and content marketing during the Covid-19 outbreak, I tend to share more such content through my blog.

Forbes Billionaires has published Marketing Rules To Follow During Uncertain Economic Times.

This article lays down some rules to follow during an international crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

The suggestions made in this article are quite logical and I myself have been writing about most of them on my blog.

Whereas my writing is around content writing and copywriting, this is a general article on how to take care of your business during such a crisis.

Some of the suggestions made in the article are…

Increase your focus on your current customers and clients

Every business struggles to get new customers and clients.

I myself am constantly worried about, and working hard at, getting new assignments from new clients.

But I’m getting a constant supply of work from my existing clients.

Although, it isn’t as much as the usual business that I get, still, a big amount of my work these days is coming from clients who have either used my content writing services previously, or are currently using them.

Keep in touch with your existing customers and clients.

Inform them and send them information that can keep them safe and secure.

Do something that can improve their lives or even cheer them up.

Hard times doesn’t mean you don’t spend on marketing

The meaning of marketing changes in hard times but it doesn’t stop.

There are multiple reasons why you must go on marketing your business.

The article rightly says

When recessions hit, marketing is often among the first budget cuts. Doing so could potentially cause long-term damage to the brand and allow smaller or weaker competitors to steal market share. There are countless studies going back more than a decade showing that brands maintaining or increasing advertising during a recession gain market share over time.

What does marketing mean in contemporary times, even if you take the Covid-19 outbreak out of the picture?

It means constantly engaging with prospective and current customers and clients.

If you abandon marketing during hard times, your prospective and current customers and clients may think that you are here only to sell and when the prospect of selling vanishes, you vanish too.

Adopt new technologies and new tools and platforms

You may feel that I’m pitching my services, if you haven’t started publishing quality content on your website, this is the right time to do so.

The world of business and marketing is constantly evolving.

15-20 years ago, people depended on conventional advertising on TV, radio and newspapers.

Over the past few years, people have been sifting there focus on content marketing – let people come to your website instead of loading them into visiting your website.

Similarly, you should explore different avenues to promote your business without overtly pushing your products and services in front of people, especially when there are more concerned about their safety and livelihood.

Since hundreds of thousands of people are being forced to work from home, I have observed that many cloud-based services are promoting their business aggressively because they know that these people are going to need the new cloud-based tools to work and collaborate.

Use the time to build your brand through quality content writing and publishing

This is my own pitching, but it is quite applicable.

Just imagine how much you are saving by not having to work in an office.

You can use some of your savings to build your content presence and consequently, expand your brand presence on the Internet.

You can work on your SEO and see how you can generate more search engine traffic.

You may like to read 10 SEO content writing rules you cannot ignore

Open a spreadsheet and start making a list of all the keywords and search terms you haven’t yet covered in your content.

Then, you can either hire a content writer and start publishing your blog posts and webpages on your website, or you can do it yourself.

Be a pillar of strength to your customers and clients

You have been running a business.

You have been leading a workforce.

You have been implementing new business ideas.

You know how to turn challenges into opportunities.

Share your wisdom and experience with your customers and clients and help them in this hour of need.