The Definitive Answer to How Many Cold Emails It Takes to Get a Client

About 43% of sales professionals find emails to be the best channel for selling—and rightfully so!

Particularly for B2B businesses, emails are an effective way of generating sales leads and acquiring customers. However, a successful outbound campaign requires a well-planned cold outreach strategy and staying in the good books of email service providers.

This means you need to take both your ideal customer and email service provider’s policies into account to run an outreach campaign that gets you clients!

Top Cold Email Statistics for 2022

• The average cold email response rate varies from 5% to 20%. You're on track if this response rate is at least half of your open rates!
• An open rate of at least 25% is considered a good benchmark indicating your campaign is on its way to success.
• In 2021, the average conversion rate for a cold email campaign was around 15%.
• 48% of sales reps give up on a prospect after sending just one email.
• 33% of prospects tend to open emails based on subject lines alone.

How Many Cold Emails Should You Send to Get a Client?

It depends on how many customers you currently have.

If starting from scratch, keep the number low, but maximize the outreach efforts by experimenting and trying different approaches.

Once you have some customers, you can focus on optimizing your product and automating your sales process or hiring a team to acquire more customers.

Case 1: When You’re Just Beginning Cold Outreach

If you think 1000-1500 emails per day from the beginning will help you cover more ground and reach more customers, let us break it to you—it doesn’t work that way!

When starting, it’s always a good practice to gradually build up the momentum of sending cold emails.

Sending too many emails, in the beginning, will put you at risk of getting marked as spam by email service providers and your leads.

Solution: Warm-up Emails

Ideally, you must send fewer emails initially and gradually increase the frequency and number. Warm-up allows you to build a positive reputation with your recipients and their email service providers and ensure your emails land in their inbox, not the spam folder.

How Many Cold Emails Should You Send per Day if You’re New to Cold Outreach?

• Start by sending as few as 10 emails per day. The first few emails should go to your friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who wouldn’t miss opening your emails (at least for a week or so).
• Gradually increase this number by 5-10 emails daily for the first month. Also, take the recipient’s time zone into consideration.
• Meanwhile, keep tabs on the total emails (including follow-ups) you’ve sent in the first month—to ensure you’re abiding by your email provider’s sending limit.
• Check your spam score after the first month and pivot based on your findings—work on your copy, find better leads and send relevant and valuable emails.
• Follow this process for 10-12 weeks, and you’ll have your email account warmed up by then.
  

Alternative option: Use Super Send to automatically warm up your cold domains and set up automated outreach sequences.

Remember, don’t scale the campaign until you’re hitting your goals and reaching the benchmarks you had set. It’s always better to get things right on a smaller scale before going big—otherwise, you’re only wasting your efforts and money!

Case 2: When Your Domain Is Warm, and You Want to Acquire More Customers

Once you’ve built a good reputation for your business domain and acquired some customers, it’s time to take your cold outreach efforts to the next level!

The success of a cold outreach campaign, in this case, depends on two factors:

• The quality of leads you’re reaching out to
• The number of touchpoints you’re covering (or the total emails you’re sending)

It’s better to include a handful of relevant leads who are likely to be interested in what you’re offering than thousands of poor-quality leads.

This way, you’re spending your sales outreach budget wisely and avoiding getting marked as spam by uninterested leads.

How Many Emails per Contact?

Ideally, it takes about 5-8 follow-ups to close a sale. Before that, you shouldn’t give up on the lead, especially if they’re engaging with your emails by opening them, downloading resources, or replying.

And we’re not just talking emails, but other touchpoints like Twitter and LinkedIn too!

This way, you’re showing up where your leads are, entering their radar, and interacting with them at their preferred channel.

Here’s a typical 12-day roadmap for following up with a lead:

1. Send an email and wait for 24 hours
2. Visit their LinkedIn profile and wait for 24 hours
3. Follow up via email and wait for 24 hours
4. Send them a LinkedIn connection request with a personalized message and wait for 48 hours
5. Follow up via email and wait for 48 hours
6. Follow up again via email and wait for 48 hours (Usually, this step brings in more replies)
7. DM them on Twitter or send them another follow-up email and wait for 24 hours
8. Send the last email follow-up, and this will conclude their interest levels for you

Case 3: When You’ve Persuaded a Lead to Take an Action

One of the biggest mistakes sales reps make is failing to follow up when a lead has finally taken action (say, seen the product demo). You need a concrete sales follow-up plan to seal the deal.

How Many Follow-up Emails Should You Send to Get a Client?

As per a study by Brevet, about 80% of sales require 5 follow-ups to move the lead forward in your sales pipeline after the first meeting or product demo.

However, most sales reps give up only after 2 follow-ups.

Sales Follow-up Techniques to Get a Client

• Use different channels—calls, social media DMs, and emails.
• Keep a reasonable timeframe between 2 follow-ups—a 48-hour gap is the most ideal!
• Remember a specific detail about each prospect from your first meeting and use that information in your follow-up communication.
  For example, if they talk about a problem in their business, you can share valuable tips and resources that they might find helpful.
• Make your offer intriguing by sharing a limited-time deal or a discount coupon in the email. This helps them take action faster if they’re on the fence about purchasing.
• Always include a CTA and the next plan of action in the communication.
  
  For example—“Upon signing up, you’ll receive a 2-week email course about onboarding,” or “We’ll call you on Tuesday at your preferred time—does 12 PM work for you?”

Sending Mass Emails Without Getting Blacklisted

Most mail servers have gotten stricter when allowing an IP address to pass through and land straight in the recipient’s inbox.

There are 3 barriers that can stop your cold email from reaching a recipient’s inbox:

• Your mail server bans you from sending more emails if the volume is too high or the content looks spammy.
• Your recipient’s mail server can block or send your emails to the spam folder if they don’t pass the quality and safety check.
• If your leads don’t find your emails relevant and valuable, they might flag them as spam.

How Many Emails Does It Take to Get Blacklisted?

This largely depends on the current volume of emails you send daily or weekly. If you’re hardly sending a few emails every week and suddenly go on to sending 1000 emails a week, your service provider may find it suspicious and block your domain.

How to Avoid Getting Blacklisted when Cold-Emailing

• Get rid of inactive recipients—accounts that are no longer in service
• Remove duplicate contacts from your list
• Avoid using spam-triggering words like “free,” “buy,” “earn money,” etc.
• Keep a check on your sending limits
• Validate your SPF or DKIM signature

How to Create Cold Emails that Get Clients

Cold emails don’t have to be cold! If you’re reaching out to someone who’s not expecting to hear from you, make your emails worth opening and reading.

Make the Subject Lines Snappy

• Personalize them using the recipient’s name
• Ask questions to entice the reader
• Create a sense of urgency—for example: “Last chance to get 25% off”
• Make it clear about what the content contains and avoid click baits
• Avoiding spam-triggering words (applies to both subject lines and email content)
• Make use of preview text and consider it an extension of your subject line

Format the Emails Well

• Use different formatting styles—text and templates and jazz it up using (personalized) images, GIFs, and videos.
  

Vidu.io makes it easy to send personalized gifs, memes, and videos in your cold outreach sequences

• Use ample whitespace, bold the essential phrases and make your emails more readable

Create Valuable Content

• Dig deep into the reader’s pain points and tailor your message based on your findings
• Offer them something they might benefit from and make it about them
• Keep it actionable and to the point
• Include a clear CTA

Supercharge Your Sales Outreach Efforts With Super Send!

An outbound automation tool like Super Send will help you scale your outreach activity and increase your conversion rate by streamlining your outreach process.

With Super Send, you can warm up your domains, test what works for your audience, and track the performance of each campaign you send out.

You’ll save a lot of time (and money) by setting up multi-channel campaigns and automating every step of your outreach!

Sign up for Super Send today!