VESC – 4 Steps you should follow before sending a cold email campaign

If your business deals with e-commerce or you run any kind of email marketing campaign in general, you should be concerned about your email deliverability and reply rate.

Posted 5 years ago by Aleksandra Cugalj

Endless efforts are put in any cold email campaign and a slight deviation from the expected deliverability rates can drive the efforts in vain. Hence, it is necessary that all the precautions are taken before you start a cold email campaign.

This blog will include the 4 important things that you need to take care of before sending out any cold email outreach campaign which will help you get better email open and conversion rate.

VESC checklist:

• Validate Prospect List
• Ensure clear CTA ( Call-to-Action)
• Set Automated Follow-up
• Check Email Spam Score

Let us understand all of them in detail:

1. Validate Prospect List:

You always want to nurture the right prospect so that they can bring your business. These are the email addresses that you have collected through newsletters, signups, and double opt-ins. The first step towards a successful email campaign is validating the prospect email list.

The people you want to reach should be competent enough to digest what you want to deliver, otherwise, your campaign will never achieve targeted results. Validate that all the prospect email IDs are legitimate and there are no spammy email addresses.

Sending emails to spam accounts will hamper your reputation and you might enter in the email blacklists. Hence, authenticating the prospect email list is of prime importance. You can use email verification tools in order to make sure that you don’t have to manually check each and every email.

2. Ensure Clear CTA (Call-to-Action)

A clear Call-to-Action will set expectations with the readers. They will get a clear idea of what should be the next steps of a particular conversation. Here are some examples of CTA used by us in our mailer that worked really well:

• Book an appointment now
• Book a demo now
• Sign up for free
• Get a Free Trial now

Hence, it is necessary that at the end of an email, you mention a clear call-to-action so that the reader doesn’t get confused about your motive behind sending the email and mark your email as spam. This also helps you understand what your purpose behind that email is. So that you can make more meaningful copies.

Do not send a vague email like this:

Dear {First Name},
 
We noticed that you left your purchase in your cart without checking it out. 
Let us know if you had some problem while checking out. 

Thank you, 
David

Make sure you put a CTA like – Complete your unfinished Purchase Now to ensure that your readers know the purpose of the email clearly.

3. Set Automated Follow-ups

When you reach out to people, there are high chances that they won’t respond to it at one go. You need to send them follow-ups in order to ensure a higher conversion rate. When you automate these follow-ups, you get ample time to work on something more important. Also, these follow-ups can be automated with different conditions. There are three types of conditions:

• Not Opened: Follow-up emails will be sent to only those recipients who have not opened the email.
• Not Replied: Follow-up emails will be sent to all those recipients that have not replied to the email.
• Been sent: Follow-up emails will be sent to all the recipients regardless of anything.

It is advised to send at least 5 auto-followups. Stats say that it takes at least 5 follow-ups to make 80% sale. Also, include an unsubscribe link with each of your email. Not only this will make your email GDPR friendly, but also give the people who do not want to receive your emails a choice of not receiving your emails.

This will ensure more open rates and further clean your list if a recipient is uninterested. Also, make sure you remove the email accounts that unsubscribed to your emails within 72 hours of their link click.

4. Check Email Spam Score

It can be a nightmare for you if a perfectly written email crafted just for your recipients does not land in their inbox and lands in the spam folder. Just to tackle this situation, check your email spam score. Email spam score ranges from 1-10 (10 being the best email). There are a number of tools that can help you check the same. We prefer to use mail-tester. It is, as the name suggests, a tool that will test your email.

You need to send your email to the address they show you. Once you send it, they will analyze your email and let you know your score along with suggested changes. This is a crucial stage for your email campaign as it heavily depends on this step whether your blog will land on the primary box or not. They use keywords that might attract and trigger spam signals in order to test the spam score of your email.

Final Words

Hence, these were the four steps of VESC. A cold email campaign is a huge deal for any type of business. You need to make sure that you take care of every minute detail before you send it out. These four steps have helped us out a lot. Which is why we have made them out SOP (Standard Operating Procedure). Make sure you write it down somewhere and follow it before sending all your email campaigns. Following it in this order itself will make sure nothing goes sideways with your campaign.