In this video, we discuss the worst email drip campaign that I have ever seen. This email drip campaign is so bad that it is likely that there is not anyone watching this video would use this approach, but we can still use it as an opportunity to talk about how to create a series of follow-up cold emails.
Did You Read My Email Follow-Up
We can classify this email drip campaign as a “Did you read my email?” approach, which involves sending one main email with what you want to communicate and then short follow-up cold emails that point back to the first message by asking if you have received it, if you have read it, or bumping it up in your inbox.
I believe this is not an optimum approach for the following reasons:
No obligation to the salesperson
If you ask the prospect if they read your email, this is similar to a manager asking an employee the status of a task. The prospect is under no obligation to do anything for the salesperson. By asking about the status, the salesperson is applying the same type of pressure that a manager would be by asking about the status.
How can this be good for rapport and motivating the prospect to respond?
The answer does not help the salesperson
What does the answer to the question of “Did you read my email” provide to the salesperson? If the answer is “yes”, what does the salesperson do with that? If the answer is “no,” how does that impact what the salesperson does?
In my opinion, the answer to whether the prospect has read the email is not helpful at all. So why ask it? The main data point is that the prospect did not reply to the email, and we know that without asking any questions.
No additional information
You likely have a lot of information that you want to share with your target prospects. And when you send a follow-up cold email in your email drip campaign, this is an opportunity for you to share more of this information.
By sending a short email that only points back to the first email and asks the prospect if he or she read your other email, you are missing an opportunity to send more information to the prospect.
An Optimized Approach
If I am going to make the claim that his email drip campaign approach is not optimum, I should provide ideas for what I would consider to be more optimum, and I will share that here.
Assumptions
In order to build out our recommended approach, let’s outline some assumptions.
- Prospects are busy: The prospects we are sending cold emails to are extremely busy.
- Prospects get a lot of emails: The prospects we are emailing get a lot of emails from other salespeople.
- Prospects are likely not to respond: Even when doing everything correctly, prospects are likely to not respond to cold emails.
- Prospects have no obligation: Prospects are not obligated in any way to read our emails, respond to our emails, or provide the status of either to us.
If we can agree with those assumptions, we can use those as the basis for building our email drip campaign with these elements.
- Send multiple emails: Since prospects are busy, get a lot of emails, and don’t respond, we will plan to send multiple emails to each prospect.
- Do not refer to other emails: Since prospects are not obligated to read our emails and report back to us, we will not ask if prospects have read or received our other messages.
- Divide the message across many emails: Since we know that we will be sending multiple emails to the prospects, we can divide our message into smaller chapters and send part of the complete message in each email.
We hope this worst email drip campaign helps gives you some ideas for how you can improve your cold emails!