When is the best time to send an email?

We’ve all faced this question at some point in our email marketing campaigns. Sometimes, the success of your email campaign can depend on aspects as haphazard and less considered as the sending time of your emails.

At Nerdy Joe, we’ve created and sent our fair share of email campaigns and marketing emails.

Today, we will combine our experience with the available data to pinpoint the best times and days for email marketers to send emails to target audience. 

What are the best days to send emails?

Why you shouldn’t send your emails on Mondays and Fridays

Your marketing emails should be sent on days and at times when your recipients can take the time to read them and adequately engage with you.

Mondays and Fridays are simply not the best days of the week for this.

Here is why.

The first thing professionals do early during first day after their weekend is to deal with the countless emails waiting for them in their inboxes.

Emails from colleagues and information about the business or workplace are the highest priority.

Cold emails or emails from people reaching out to the prospect with an offer are considered less important, so they ignore them. 

They are put on the back burner and most likely forgotten or lost in the chaos of emails in the prospect’s inbox. Your email marketing strategy simply won’t work at that time.

For Fridays, it’s pretty much the same thing. Depending on when you reach your email subscribers, they are either in the process of planning their weekend or they have actually left.

You are probably familiar with the Fri-Yay joke. It stems from the fact that most people are excited and looking forward to the weekend on Fridays.

They are super focused on checking off their to-dos so that they can open up and enjoy their weekends.

You don’t want your emails competing for attention in their inbox at these times. They are likely to ignore them or put them on hold — and forget you. 

Why Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the best days to send emails

Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days for sending emails.

Both data and logic back this.

There are a lot of stats from Email Service Provider (ESPs) companies, including GetResponse, CampaignMonitor, Klaviyo, Sendinblue, and more.

Here is a quick recap. 

Klaviyo

Klaviyo analyzed 22,000 email marketing campaigns and tracked the open rates, click-through rates and revenue generated from those campaigns.

The highest open rates occurred on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Mondays.

Also, they’ve found that the highest revenues were generated on Thursdays and noted that opens were considerably low on that day.

People are more likely to check and read incoming emails earlier than at the end of the week. Also, they are more likely to make up their minds and make buying decisions on the last business days than they would earlier in the week.

Send educational emails earlier in the week and promotional and offer emails late during the week.

GetResponse

GetResponse sent out 4 billion emails to an audience of entrepreneurs, online marketers, and SMBs over five months. They sent 18% of all email campaigns on weekends and 17% on Tuesdays alone.

They recorded the highest click-through rates and open rates on Mondays and Tuesdays. They also found that the click-to-open ratios were the best on Weekends.

The high openings recorded on the weekends stem from the low competition on those days. Though, to send emails to professionals on weekends may not always be ideal.

Still, GetResponse results align with Klaviyo in that people best check out and read emails early in the week.

Sending emails on weekends may be tempting. But no, we would advise you to avoid sending emails on those times. On a better note, you can send your emails early on in the week and expect great results.

Campaign Monitor

CampaignMonitor examined more than 30 billion emails and email marketing campaign sent by subscribers from 171 countries, primarily small to medium-sized firms.

Overall, they recorded the best and highest open rates on Tuesdays. They drilled down on the results and separated them per industry.

The new findings indicated that businesses in the advertising, marketing, travel, and leisure industries had the best open rates on Tuesdays.

These were followed by businesses in the healthcare, food, and beverage industries which recorded the best open rates on Wednesdays.

Lastly, they observed that businesses in the education industry have an excellent open rate on Sundays.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays are great days to get maximum openings in most industries. We can also understand that the overall email engagement rates differ from one industry to another.

Sending emails in the middle of the week, ideally on Tuesdays and Wednesdays is an effective way to ensure high opens to your email campaigns.

Moosend

Moosend analyzed 10 billion emails sent by their customers through their platform.

They found the best day to send emails to be Thursday because they recorded their highest opens on Thursdays.

People are also more likely to read their emails on Thursdays. This can be explained by the fact that they’ve already taken the early days to focus on essential parts of their business.

By Thursday, they’ve freed up sometime or already have their entire week figured out. This makes them more receptive to emails from other people and cold messages from marketers and sales reps.

It is also a great idea to wait for the earlier days of the week before sending your emails.

Or even better, if you are sending a cold email sequence or an email campaign, you can send different touches across Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue conducted several email timing studies across different industries. They mainly tracked the opens and clicks rates along with the engagement volumes across several days.

In a nutshell, they found that Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the best days to send emails, with the edge going to Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The research shows the three days have the highest open and click-through rates.

Wednesdays have an excellent engagement volume, but it is lower compared to Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Weekdays tend to have more engagement compared to weekends.

Regarding click volume and engagement, Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best.

Send your emails across Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. These are the best days to reach out to your recipients and see significant campaign engagement results.

Research data from different email SaaS companies serving different audience segments in different industries have shown that the best days to send your emails are Tuesdays and Thursdays — and occasionally Wednesdays. 

The main idea is that you should always send educational emails early in the week. Not too early when your prospects are sorting out business issues or catching up on the previous week’s activities.

It needs to be on Tuesday. The meetings, email swaps, and, most important, discussions are already over by then. This makes people more receptive to third-party emails like yours. 

Promotional emails are best sent on Thursday. This is a good day to send them because prospects have already processed business emails and done much of their work for the week.

In other words, they’ve already checked off most of their weekly tasks and are more likely to consider, make up their minds and respond to offers. 

If you plan to send a sequence of cold emails, we recommend sending the first contact email on Tuesday and the second the following Thursday. You can then spread the other emails over Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

What happens during the other days of the week (Saturday and Sunday)

It is a known fact that online activity decreases dramatically on weekends. Most professionals and people generally prefer to spend time with their families and not check their emails on weekends. 

However, a large number of people do check their email on the weekend.

According to Statista data, 43% of white-collar workers reported checking their work email every few hours outside their regular work hours, and 10% reported checking it all the time.

For us, whether you should send your emails on weekends, Saturdays and Sundays will depend on who you are targeting, the purpose of the email, and the relationship between the two of you.

Let’s expand on that.

Targeting B2B professionals (e.g., directors, execs, vice presidents, sales managers, etc.)

We recognize that some professionals who haven’t had time to check all their emails during the week may be tempted to do so over the weekend. 

Also, it may make sense after all. Since most marketers look for the best days to send their emails, sending your emails on days when no one is sending emails may seem like a great way to get a good number of opens and clicks on your emails.

But those aren’t good enough reasons to email professionals on the weekend.

Here’s why. 

First, professionals typically don’t work on weekends and are unlikely to check their emails. Also, sending sales emails, marketing emails, and any other kind of cold emails to your prospects on the weekend is not professional.

It’s the quickest way to damage your reputation and be labeled an “annoying marketer.” People will hate you and your emails. 

Targeting a B2C audience (e.g., online shoppers, end consumers, the general public, etc.).

In this context, sending emails to your recipients can be a good idea. For example, Sunday or even Saturday are prime times for online shopping. The weekend can be an interesting day if you are in the direct-to-consumer business.

Yet, it is difficult to determine whether the weekend is ideal. Many people ignore their emails to relax. Therefore, we recommend that you create and send one-off offer emails. This could be effective without annoying your potential customers. 

We also recommend that you don’t make a habit of sending emails or launching email campaigns on the weekend. It is simply not appropriate.

You need to think about who your targets are. Ask yourself how they would react if they constantly receive emails on the weekend.

What is the best time to send an email during the day? 

We’ve already cleared that the best days to send your emails are Tuesdays and Thursdays — and occasionally Wednesdays. That’s what both data and logic indicate.

So, now what is the best time to send an email during the day? At what day hours should you send your emails for the best openings and engagement results?

The short answer is anywhere between 10 am and 11 am. Research data from Intercom corroborates this. 

Source: Intercom

But as you can tell, there is more to it. So, to be thorough, we’d like to pull data from different email SaaS companies analyzing several email marketing campaigns in a table and draw the conclusions together. 

Sendinblue

The Sendinblue team conducted several email timing studies across multiple industries. Specifically, they looked at the opens and clicks throughout the day and recorded the highest engagement hours.

They found interesting results across different sectors. But first, they pointed out two times of the day that are good to send emails and expect excellent results. The times are 10 am and between 3 and 4 pm.

First, Sendinblue pointed out two times of the day that are good for sending emails and getting amazing results. The times are 10 am and between 3 and 4 pm. Sendiblue’s study went a step further and broke their results per industry.

• SaaS: 2 pm-3 pm.
• Hospitality and Online Retail: 8 am-10 am.
• Nonprofits: 3 pm-4 pm.
• Professional services (B2B): 8 am-10 am.
• Marketing services: 4 pm.
• e-commerce: 10 am.

For morning outreach, send your emails around 10 am. Anywhere between 8 am and 11 am may work just as well. For the afternoon, send your emails between 3 and 4 pm.

Omnisend

Omnisend analyzed more than 2 billion email marketing campaigns sent using its platform to understand and determine the optimal campaign timing.

Ominsend recorded the highest open rates between 8 am and 10 am. The click-through rate was high during that time as well. But the order rate was notably low during that time.

1 pm didn’t come highest on any metrics but has proven to be an excellent time to send emails.

At the same time, 4 pm brought the most increased orders, and 5 pm displayed the highest click-through rates.

While people might be open to opening and reading emails in the morning, they might not be inclined to make up their minds and decide then. They’re more likely to make decisions later on during the day.

Send educational emails in the morning and promotional emails later during the day or in the early evening.

Intercom

Intercom focused on analyzing its data on business to business audiences to see at what time of the day B2B officials mostly react to emails and in-app messages.

First, they observed that responses to in-app message platforms were almost spontaneous. But on the other hand, they found that emails recorded the highest opens between 10 am and 11 am.

This comes as no surprise as it is common for people to check their inbox first, then read and respond to specific emails by order of importance over the course of the day.

Sending your emails in the morning guarantees that your prospects will take the time to check you out as they do their email inbox checking routine.

The key takeaway from all the studies is that you should seek to send your email moments before people mostly check out their inboxes. 

People routinely check their inboxes before they start working in the morning, when they get back from lunch break, and in the evening before they leave. 

So, if we were to pinpoint specific times to send emails, your best bet should be between 9 and 11 am for the morning and between 3 and 4 pm for the afternoon. 

Also, studies have shown that people mostly read emails in the morning but are the least likely to make decisions during that time. Alternatively, they are more likely to make decisions later during the day. 

Therefore, we recommend you send education emails in the morning and send order, sales emails later in the day. This will give you a better chance of having your messages opened, read, and acted upon. 

The best days and times we send our emails at Nerdy Joe

Here is what our CEO thinks when asked about the best day and time to send emails. Understand that this is based on his personal experience and the performance of our diverse campaigns for our clients. 

“I’ve noticed that Tuesdays have a very high open rate (60-85%) and Fridays have a very high click-through rate (15%).

On Mondays, the open rate is not bad, but it is not very good either. It’s just normal (40-50%). On Mondays, the click-through rate is very low.

I’ll explain this as follows:

Most of the people on my list are directors or vice presidents. Because of their job, they use Mondays to read their emails, catch up on the previous week and prepare for the new week.

As a result, they spend very little time on unimportant tasks such as answering non-work-related emails.

On Tuesdays, they have a little more time and are more relaxed. This explains the high opening rate. I’m successful when I send my emails between 9 am and 2 pm and between 5 pm and 7 pm East Coast time.

On Fridays, they usually end the week and have greatly reduced their workload. This gives them more time to interact with the content of the emails. This explains the incredible click-through rate.“

Ernest Bogore, Email Marketing Wizard at Nerdy Joe.

4 tips to improve your email open rates and click through rates

The best time to send an email is not all you need to get right to improve your email marketing campaigns engagement.

A lot of other email components (e.g. subject lines, mobile friendly, time zones, geographical locations, etc.) can also impact your campaign’s performance.

So, here are a few tips to achieve the highest engagement rates.

1 – Write irresistible subject lines

These are the first elements your email subscribers see after receiving your email campaigns. Even if you send your emails at the right time, people will skip it if the subject does not look click-worthy.

The average people rely on the subject line alone to decide whether or not to open your marketing emails.

Here a few ways to improve it.

• Make it interesting: Will you ask an intriguing question? Create a sense of urgency? Talk about benefits? Make an allusion to a story? Make it interesting and they will be interested.
• Leverage curiosity: Curiosity calls fo action. It intrigues your target audience to want to check out want you want to say.
• Avoid being obvious: You should give them something that makes them want to check out the email by making it interesting.
• Personalize it: Emails with personalized subject lines are 22% more likely to be opened. Make the subject line specific to your prospect and capture their attention.
• Keep it short: Long subject lines never do well. Keep the device your target audience uses in mind and ensure your subject line does not get cut off for being too long on a mobile device.

2 – Consider the time zones

It’s one thing to get the best time to send an email marketing campaign right, it’s another thing to get right timing in your recipients’ area to achieve the desired impact.

The peak time in one location may be lunch breaks else where, the best day of the week in your area may not not have arrived elswere.

Sending your emails without considering your recipients’ time zone is the same as sending it at the wrong time.

So, always consider you subscriber list, segment the audience based on geographical locations and send your emails accordingly.

3 – Segment and personalize your email

If you send too few emails, you’re probably fine. But if you send email blasts to a huge audience, you will suffer with email engagement metrics such as the click to open rate, conversion rates, etc.

Even if you search and find the right time to send your marketing, you can still struggle to keep your email engagement above board.

So, reseach your customers and find commonalities between them. Segment them into groups based on user habits, and any other relevant factor and send marketing emails accordingly.

You can also set custom variables and attributes per recipients to personalize and send email campaigns right inside your ESP.

4 – Shape your emails for mobile devices

As a general advice, always shape your emails for mobile devices.

Data shows that 60% of email campaigns are read on mobile, 29% on webmail, and only 10% on desktops, optimizing emails is definitely worthwhile.

Simply put, most people check and read with emails using their mobile device, so you stand a better chance for the highest open rate.

Best time to send email: FAQs for email marketers

Here are a few frequently asked questions about the best time to send an email campaign. 

What is the best day and time to send an email?

If you are sending educational emails, the best day and time to send them is Tuesday between 9 and 11 am. If you are sending a promotional email, the best day and time to send the email is Thursday between 3 and 4 pm. 

How frequently should emails be sent out?

The best days to send emails are Tuesdays and Thursdays.

So, ideally, you should seek to plan your campaigns to go off on those days. That gives you an excellent frequency to send your email without being too intrusive. 

What is the ideal weekly email frequency?

You should send no more than three emails per week. 2 are perfect. 3 is the maximum you should send.

Sending more than three emails per week will make you across as annoying, and people will hate receiving emails from you. 

Is it better to send an email at night or in the morning?

You shouldn’t send emails at night. It’s not professional; no worker checks their inboxes at night, and it might get lost in the flood of emails your recipient will get in the morning.

Sending your emails in the morning, around 10 am, is ideal. 

What is the best day to send emails?

The best day to send emails is between Tuesday and Thursday. Research indicates that you should send promotional emails on Thursdays and educational emails Tuesdays. 

You can program you cold emails and email marketing campaigns to go on those times.

What is the best time to send emails?

The best time to send emails in the morning is between 9 am and 11 am, and the best time for sending emails in the afternoon is between 3 pm and 4 pm. 

Finding the best cold email marketing agency to handle your cold outreach strategy might be stressful.

More challenging if your previous agency ran campaigns that were unsuccessful or flagged by spam filters.

The truth is, it is not fair to have you worrying about all of these, as the pressure could still push you into making a poor decision. That is why we made this guide to teach you how to hire an agency to do cold email marketing for you.

Let’s dive in.

Why do you need to hire a cold email agency?

Before outsourcing cold email marketing, it is important that you fully understand why you need it in the first place.

Identifying your reasons for a cold email campaign is important to ensuring that you get on the same page with your target lead gen company and obtaining optimal results.

It guarantees a certain number of qualified leads per month

Unlike hiring SDRs and marketers, cold email agencies do a better job at helping you track data.

You will be able to identify which campaigns were effective and which failed if you take the appropriate steps to ensure you can track your outcomes after each campaign.

This way, the agency can come up with a definite result of how many qualified leads they can get per day and afterward create a lead estimation for a given time.

For instance, at Nerdy Joe, we guarantee 4 meetings per month if you choose the $799 plan.

You spend less on SDRs and marketers

If you have hired SDRs and marketers, you would agree that it is not scalable.

SDRs and marketers are constrained to sending a certain number of emails or making calls daily. This means to get your desired reach or volume, you might need to hire a sizable team of SDRs and marketers, pay a sizable amount of money and possibly end up with mediocre results.

However, cold email agencies are relatively affordable, more effective, and do not require you to be much involved in every activity. All you need to do is sit back and let the agency work towards your objectives.

Here at Nerdy Joe, we take pride in charging per outcome versus per number of contacts we reached out to.

You scale and grow fast

Your brand will expand faster if you hire cold email marketing services to help with your lead generation.

Why is this?

Most cold email agencies are made up of professionals who can create persuasive email content that does not breach the regulatory frameworks governing email marketing. They structure their emails in formats that keep them from ending up in the spam folder.

Most importantly, they are experts at converting leads rather than frustrating the audience with boring cold emails or disturbing cold call.

They are experts in lead generation campaigns and take their time to create a stellar cold email strategy before sending cold emails.

When do you need to hire a cold email agency? 

Knowing the right time to contract cold email services is as important as learning how to hire a cold email agency, as it can help you avoid making the wrong choices.

If you resonate with the following instances, you sure need to hire an agency:

When you don’t have enough resources to hire and train new staff and build an internal team of cold email specialists.

Hiring cold email marketing services is a brilliant alternative for a company low on resources. Cold emailing isn’t just a better alternative due to its affordability but because it provides so much value in terms of scalability.

As a matter of fact, doing cold email training for new staff and building an internal cold email team is quite an expensive idea for a one-time cold email campaign.

Let’s break it down.

First, setting up an internal team means you must make provisions for different marketing roles like campaign manager, email marketing expert, social media manager, assistant campaign manager, and copywriter specialist.

After making provisions for these roles, you should also remember that there will be additional costs.

Let’s break it down to analyze each individual’s role and the costs.

1 – Campaign Manager

Setting up an internal cold email team means there is a need for a person overseeing all activities and campaigns.

Now, you may think this role is unnecessary, and it is something you should be able to handle. Well, no!

Here’s why:

• The campaign manager is a specialist who brings 3 to 5 years of experience to the team
• They have the whole campaign team under their supervision
• They create the campaign budget
• They evaluate the budget and expenditures regularly
• They are responsible for creating product branding strategies and forecasting sales
• Generating concepts for campaigns
• Evaluating and improving campaign strategies
• Monitoring and assessing the effectiveness of campaigns
• Staying up to date with the latest trends and analyzing them

While these may seem like jobs anyone can handle, experience is indispensable and determinant to any marketing campaign’s success. 

Aside from that, taking on this function takes away from your ability to complete your regular tasks for your organization and from your time to receive and convert qualified leads.

According to Glassdoor, Campaign/Marketing Managers earn an average of $104,295 annually.

2 – Email Marketing Expert

While everyone on the team should be cold email savvy, you still need someone to head this position, being in charge of every emailing task. Their roles include:

• Produce excellent content and email templates 
• Keep and expand the email list 
• Campaign optimization (through CTAs and what content to include in the email) 
• Integrating critical messaging into email campaigns 
• Reviewing the copies and modifying email content as necessary 
• dividing up email lists to improve marketing
• Assisting with the campaign strategy 
• Actively observant of essential information about the target audience
• Analyzing data to report to the rest of the team

Glassdoor reports that the average yearly salary for email marketing experts is $59,026.

3 – Social Media Manager

While setting up your team, you should also fancy the idea of establishing visibility on social media. The social media manager will help with:

• Learning more about the target audience’s interests and providing reports to the rest of the team
• Follow the latest trends and learn the best strategies
• Actively engage prospects and build a community
• Learn what people are saying about other brands through the aid of listening tools

Glassdoor reports that the average yearly salary for social media managers is $50,996.

4 – Assistant Campaign Manager

The importance of this position is to ease the campaign manager’s workload as they already supervise the team and perform other tasks.

They do not typically execute administrative roles, but they also help in:

• Generating campaign concepts
• Identifying trends with the rest of the team
• Ensuring the campaign database is updated
• Providing reports on every aspect of the campaign
• Providing resourceful materials like case studies and guides

They play exactly the same roles as marketing assistants and earn a yearly average of $62,179.

5 – Copywriter Specialist

Anyone can write cold emails, but it takes an expert copywriter to write concise and value-driven cold emails.

Copywriters master the art of crafting effective sentences that offer so much value and compel prospects to take action towards your business.

Copywriters:

• Personalize emails and the entire cold email outreach.
• Know how to develop compelling a subject line.
• Know how many cold emails and follow-ups to send for getting more leads.
• Know to craft great cold emails and avoid the cold email tone.
• Avoid the time-consuming process for cold email outreach.
• Structure the cold email to avoid spam filters and being thrown into the spam folders.
• Know how to do research, exactly who to send messages to and when to ask your sales to do cold calling.

$58,352 per annum is the average salary of a copywriter specialist, according to Glassdoor.

Note that this is merely the minimum criteria for the positions. Depending on how large the campaign is, non-administrative positions like copywriting specialists, social media marketers, etc., may require you to hire additional people.

As a result, the annual expense of establishing an internal cold email team may be between $334,848 and $502,272 per year.

On the other hand, an agency operates independently with a provisional team of experts. As a result, a mid-sized company will need to spend about $10,000 to hire an agency.

When you have a product or service that is selling

There is no better time to acquire cold email services than when you have a product that answers the exact needs of your target audience.

A product that garners attention despite the competition. Cold emailing will definitely help you maximize your sales.

Here’s how.

Because your product already stands out from the competition and is getting all the attention, cold emailing prospects can facilitate lead generation and help the business get more leads and generate clients.

When you want or need to focus on closing deals

In essence, the purpose of cold emails is to close deals. It is structured to focus on one idea (the proposal) and includes persuasion triggers that encourage your potential clients to take action.

Additionally, the agency takes care of the hassle of producing qualified leads, giving you and the rest of your team more time to focus on setting up appointments and closing sales.

10 questions to ask before hiring a cold email agency

Now that you know the advantages of hiring an agency and when to hire one, let’s go straight to learning how to choose to the best agency for successful cold emails.

Of course, you cannot go through the hiring process without asking questions, but you must ensure that you ask the right questions in the right order because the questioning starts with you.

Questions to ask yourself

Here are a series of questions to ask yourself before reaching out to a cold email agency. These questions will help you define your campaign objectives and clearly communicate them with the cold email agency.

1 – What does your company want to achieve with this cold email campaign?

Of course, every investor’s goal is to generate leads, expand PR reach, make sales and build connections, but you need to define your goals a little more than that.

You need to streamline them down to the number of sales you hope to have made, the deals you hope to have struck, and even your desired ROI at the end of the campaign.

Here’s an example:

• By the end of Q2, we want to have added 10% more MQLs to our funnel thanks to a focused cold email campaign. 
• We need to convert two qualifying leads into X service buyers each month in order to make $ in monthly income. 
• Implement a solid lead nurturing plan that involves publishing targeted content directed at our ideal customers to increase our lead-to-customer conversion rate by 5% for the quarter.

With these kinds of objectives, you can be sure to have a fulfilling campaign if you work with a good cold email agency.

2 – Do you know what your target audience is?

You cannot just start a cold email campaign with a random audience; it is a total waste of resources. The agency needs to understand your target customers to produce the best results.

If you aren’t sure of your target customers, it is important that you begin to foster team collaboration and market research.

Suppose you have trouble defining your audience, here are some tips to follow:

• Refer to your current customers, ask them about their pain points that your business solves and try to identify other people with the same needs.
• Research your successful competitors and take stock of who they are targeting and why. You can easily steal customers from them.

3 – Do you have a well-defined UVP?

A unique value proposition (UVP) automatically puts an appealing offer on your prospects’ table. Even better, a well-defined unique value proposition can successfully convert a potential consumer into a paying one.

Regardless of your services, generating a concise and appealing UVP is a terrific way to discover the user experience.

In addition, it serves as the standard by which your new customer will judge your product if you fulfilled expectations, did better or did less than expected.

A strong UVP will make your company stand out from competing ones, integrate your product with the needs of your target audience, and target your ideal customer demographic specifically.

As a result, your sales promotions will be maximized, and you will draw in qualified leads who mostly become customers.

4 – Can you afford to hire a cold email agency?

As mentioned earlier, agencies are affordable and give value for money compared to other marketing options.

However, it is a no-brainer that you consider how much it would cost you to secure the right cold email agency and get ROI.

Questions to ask the agency before committing

If your answers to the previous questions are positive, then you are close. It is time to question the cold email agency to ensure they are right for the job. Ask the following questions:

5 – Will you own your cold email domain?

It is a no-brainer that you should own the domain name because it keeps you fully in control of your brand’s online presence.

Having the agency send each campaign from your domain is a great way to build trust with your recipients, as they can see that the emails are coming from a credible source.

6 – How long before you get your first lead?

While you may expect to make leads swiftly, you must be patient during the first weeks because first leads usually come slow.

From our experience, most agencies spend the first few weeks of the engagement setting up your domain and warming it up for deliverability purposes.

But because of their business model, the majority of agencies will ask you to engage in a minimum 3-month contract. Of course, this comes with a huge budget and commitment.

Here at Nerdy Joe, we don’t require our customers to engage in any sort of contract. You’re free to renew your subscription anytime you want. You also know upfront how many leads we’ll generate for you per month.

7 – What kind of leads will you be getting?

Imagine working with an agency that considers anyone who downloads an ebook as a lead — when you are trying to sell a product. Of course, that’s something you would not want to experience.

Hence the importance of defining the type of leads you want from your cold email service provider.

To ensure agencies are on the same page as you, you should also ask if your leads’ demands can be met.

8 – What’s the cost of a cold email agency?

You can afford the services of a cold email agency based on the average cost. But cost varies according to agencies, the quality of their service, and their pricing.

Most agencies charge between $2,000 and $5,000 per month. But the outcome is questionable as they charge per number of email blast sent.

At Nerdy Joe, our lead generation services cost on average $799 and that gives you right to 5 meetings per month. That could also be 5 guest outreach opportunities, 5 influencer partnership opportunities, etc. We do tailor everything depending on your needs.

9 – What is the agency’s experience with cold email?

The agency might impress you with good answers to your previous questions. Still, the most practical way to prove your expertise is by giving an example of your experience handling cold email campaigns.

Remember to ask about their successes in cold email campaigns, the specificities, and the challenges. It is the same way potential clients and business partners would question your services before engaging.

For instance, at Nerdy Joe, we used cold emails to:

• Grow one freelance writer’s business from $1,200/month to $8,000/month.
• Get replies from people like Tim Soulo, Rand Fishkin, Noah Kagan, Guillaume Moubeche, Ross Simmonds, Irina Maltseva, etc.
• Land guest blogging opportunities on websites like Mailshake, Hunter, Convince And Convert, Coschedule, etc.
• Help a content agency go from 1 to 6 clients. 

We can go on and on about our results, but you can find them on our case study page.

10 – What are the financial terms?

At this point, you are most likely close to hiring the agency. And this makes it one of the most vital things that you and your potential business need to get straight.

Listen to what the agency is proposing, tell them what you can offer, and try to come to a common ground. If the agency insists on a particular term that isn’t suitable for your company, you should not compromise. 

Here are some tips for having a good financial agreement:

• decide on shared objectives,
• talk about anticipated scalability,
• evaluate potential revenue,
• defend your business interests,
• be explicit about your aims,
• and talk about potential disputes and how they should be addressed.

How We Generated a $1,400 Per Month Worth of Client With Just One Cold Email

At Nerdy Joe, we are data-driven, and that’s why we are different from the average cold email agency. 

Instead of playing the numbers game, sending thousands of irrelevant and spammy emails, we study your business and develop a strategy that aligns with your sales funnel and is result-focused.

Back when Ernest and I were freelancing, he decided to pitch our content services to a Head of Growth at a big marketing agency. 

• Their ideal customer size is anywhere between medium scaleup businesses and public companies.
• Their approach to advertising is based on pain points, which means they avoid being vague like most of their competitors. 

Here’s how we approached sending their Head of Growth.

We started by researching his social media profiles. LinkedIn and Twitter seemed to be the ideal place to look at since these are where they run most of their ads.

Based on our research, we discovered the agency worked with another thought leadership, pain-point SEO agency.

We also discovered a tweet where the Head of Growth was showing support for Ukraine at the beginning of the war. 

So, we leveraged this information and crafted a very personalized email opening line and short cold email copy.

Here’s the email.

Here’s how it turned out.

As you can see, they pay $1,400 per article. Also, notice how the guy praised the cold email as one of the best he’s received in ages.

At the rate of 1 article per month, that’s $16,800 in revenue per year. At the rate of two articles per month, that’s $2,800, or $33,600 in annual revenue by sending a single cold email. 

Key takeaways

• Cold email marketing is a highly effective lead generation and customer acquisition tool. Sending a single cold email can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars down the road. But making sure you’re working with the right people is always key to the success and results you obtain.
• Hiring a cold email agency is always hard. But the first step in ensuring you get off on the right foot and establishing a long-lasting relationship is to be clear about your expectations. As the client, you must understand that hiring a cold email agency doesn’t necessarily you will start making millions right away. Have realistic expectations and understand that there is a process to it. 
• Before getting in bed with your cold email agency be sure to ask them the right questions to ensure they are a fit to qualify your needs. Don’t rush into working with an agency, ask questions, understand their marketing philosophy, discuss prices, reporting, and all. 
• It’s not just with Marc Thomas. We’ve done it with Ross Simmonds, Irina Maltseva, and more. Our cold email agency, Nerdy Joe, is completely built on the back cold emails and the campaigns we’ve run have helped generate hundreds of thousands for our clients. Talk to us here!

Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. It’s a cost-effective way to reach a large audience, build brand awareness, and increase sales.

But to be effective, you need to understand the current state of things and the latest email marketing statistics and trends. 

In this blog post, we’ll explore the most important email marketing statistics for 2021 and beyond, including open and click-through rates, conversion rates, mobile optimization, and more.

General email marketing statistics and trends

These email marketing stats concern all areas of a digital marketing that involve email marketing and email users.

So whether you are looking for the numbers on marketing emails, personalized subject lines, or email marketing ROI, we go you covered.

General email marketing statistics: Worldwide email usage data

• Each day, more than 306 billion emails are sent and received worldwide. (Statista, Daily Number of Emails Worldwide, 2021)
• 4 billion people use email for communications and marketing on a daily basis. This number is expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025. (Statista, Number of Email Users Worldwide, 2021)
• The number of brands who place great importance on email marketing has increased from 41.5% in 2019 to 78% in 2020. (Litmus, Insights From the 2021 State of Email Report 2021)
• Email marketing is used by 64% of small businesses to reach out to customers. (Campaign Monitor, Small Business Marketing Trends, 2021)
• There is a 15.8% loss of emails resulting from spam filters or missing emails. (Email Tool Tester, Email Deliverability Test, 2022).

Email marketing statistics: Email marketing investment and ROI

• Email marketing revenue is expected to reach almost 11 billion by the end of 2023. (Statista, Email Marketing Revenue, 2021)
• The ROI for email marketing in the B2B industry is typically higher than in the B2C industry, with an average ROI of 3800%. 
• Businesses are allocated more and more money to email marketing.A third of brands are increasing their email budgets, while just one percent are cutting it. (Litmus, Insights From the 2021 State of Email Report 2021)
• Email marketing has an average return on investment (ROI) of 122%. (eMarketer).

Email marketing stats: Engagement, conversion, and preferability stats

• The average open rate for emails is around 20%. (HubSpot, Email Open Rates) 
• The average click-through rate for emails is around 3%. (MailChimp, 2022 Email Marketing Statistics & Benchmarks)
• The majority of emails are opened on mobile devices.Over 61.9% of emails are opened on mobile devices by subscribers for checking the inboxes. (EasySendy, The Ultimate Mobile Email Open Statistics)
• The average bounce rate across all industries is 9.96%. (Constant Contact, Average Industry Rates for Email, 2022)
• Email is the most preferred method of business communication for users. 74% of people chose email as their preferred method of communication, and 89% email at least once every month for business or personal reasons. (SendGrid, The Future of Digital Communications)
• A whopping 22 percent of email campaigns are opened within the first hour after they are sent.(GetResponse, Email Marketing Benchmarks, 2020)
• Email is one of the most popular ways consumers discover coupons from brands in the U.S. (Statista, Common Ways to Find Coupons Among Consumers, 2021)
• The majority of respondents (59%) say that marketing emails have influenced their purchases.(Salecycle, Essential Email Marketing Statistics, 2020)
• Over 80% of people will open a welcome email, which generates 4x more opens and 10x more clicks than other types of emails. (GetResponse, Email Marketing Benchmarks, 2020)
• 98% of the single message autoresponder email recipients opened it, and 37% clicked on it. (GetResponse, Email Marketing Benchmark, 2020)
• Marketing emails are used by 50% of people at least once a month to make a purchase. (Salecycle, Essential Email Marketing Statistics, 2020)

Email frequency

• The average number of emails sent and received per day is around 121. (Radicati, Email Statistics Report). 
• The most popular day for sending emails is Tuesday. (Nerdy Joe, Best Time and Days for Sending Emails, 2022)
• The best time to send emails is 10 AM in the recipient’s time zone. (Nerdy Joe, Best Time and Days for Sending Emails, 2022)
• 63% of businesses reduce the frequency of emails sent to subscribers based on their levels of engagement. (Databox, Email Frequency Research, 2022)
• 33% of marketers send weekly emails, and 26% send emails multiple times per month. (Databox, Email Frequency Research, 2022)
• Keeping your newsletters under five a week will have a positive impact on your open and click rates. (GetResponse, Email Marketing Benchmarks, 2020).

iOS data privacy changes

• Data privacy changes have forced email marketers to prioritize different KPIs, which has been one of the most significant ways they have adapted. (HubSpot, Apple iOS 15 Impacting Email Marketers, 2021)
• As a result of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, 43% of marketers are changing how they measure email performance, while 24% aren’t making any changes. (Litmus, Insights From the 2021 State of Email Report, 2021)

Inbox checking

• 99% of email users check their inbox every day, with some checking 20 times a day. Of those people, 58% of consumers check their email first thing in the morning. (OptinMonster, Email Marketing Statistics. 2020) 
• 84.3% of consumers say they check their marketing email at least once a day. (Pathwire, 2021 Email Engagement Report, 2021)
• Consumers spend an average of 10 seconds reading brand emails. (Statista, Time Spent on Brand Emails Report, 2021)
• At least 40% of consumers have more than 50 unread emails. (HubSpot, Marketing Statistics, 2020)

Email marketing strategy

• Recognizing a sender is the most important factor in deciding to open an email, followed by actually having the time to read an email. (Pathwire, Email Engagement Report, 2021)
• Marketers take several actions to ensure accessibility when creating emails, including writing short, descriptive subject lines, clearly displaying links and buttons, and keeping paragraphs short. (Pathwire, Accessibility in the inbox Ebook, 2021)
• Your email ROI will increase when you perform quality assurance, A/B testing, and spam testing. Testing your emails can increase your ROI to 28% higher. (Litmus, Email Marketing Guide on Email ROI, 2022)
• Personalized emails have an open rate 29% higher than non-personalized ones. (Instapage, Personalization Statistics) 
• Segmented email campaigns have an open rate 14.32% higher than non-segmented ones. (MailChimp, Effects of List Segmentation on Email Marketing)
• Subscriber segmentation has proven to be the most effective strategy for email marketing campaigns (78%), it is followed by message personalization (72%), and automation (71%). (HubSpot, Marketing Trends and Benchmark Report, 2021)
• Subject lines with fewer than 50 characters have the highest open rates, while subject lines with more than 50 characters tend to have lower open rates. (UpLandSoftware, Shorter Subject Lines, Better Results, 2022) 
• Segmented emails have a 14.32% higher open rate and a 100.95% higher click-through rate than non-segmented emails. (MailChimp, Effects of List Segmentation on Email Marketing)
• Emails with video have an open rate 49% higher and a click-through rate 65% higher than emails without video. (Campaign Monitor, Average Click-Through Rate (CTR) from Videos?, 2021) 
• ​​75% of email revenue is generated from triggered personalized campaigns, rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns. (DMA, National client email report) 
• 50% of SMBs use marketing automation software to send automated email drip campaigns. (Statista, Leading Marketing Automation Software, 2021)
• A whopping 87% of B2C marketers use automation for email marketing. (HubSpot, ​Marketing Strategy & Trends Report, 2021)
• Email, along with social media marketing and the organization’s website, is used by 79% of B2C marketers to distribute content effectively. (Content Marketing Institute, Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends, 2019)
• The most commonly used type of email is automated emails, like welcome emails, used by 58% of B2C marketers. (Content Marketing Institute, Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends, 2019)

Email subject lines statistics

• 47% of email recipients open email based on the subject line whereas 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line. (Invespcro, Email Subject Lines – Statistics and Trends, 2021)
• 33% of email recipients open emails because of catchy subject lines. (OptinMonster, Email Subject Line Statistics, 2020)
• 64% of consumers make a decision to open abandoned cart emails based on subject lines. (Barilliance, Abandoned Cart Email Subject Lines, 2021)
• A/B testing their subject line helped Skandium to increase their CTR by 26.96%. (Barilliance, Abandoned Cart Email Subject Lines, 2021)
• 47% of marketers A/B test their subject line before finalizing their emails and sending them out. (HubSpot, Tips to Write Email Subject Lines, 2019)
• Eighty-two percent of marketers send emails with subject lines under 60 characters.(Convince & Convert, Email Marketing Stats, 2020)

Email usage by generation

• A majority of Millennials (59%) and Generation Z (67%), respectively, use their smartphones to check their email. (Bluecore, 2021)
• Among Baby Boomers, 74% think email is the most personal channel for brands to reach out to them, followed by 72% of Generation Xers, 64% of Millennials, and 60% of Generation Zers. (Bluecore, 2021)

B2B email marketing campaign engagement stats and industry benchmarks

Average email open rates by industry

The average email open rate is one of the most important email marketing statistics to track.

It indicates the percentage of people who opened your email marketing campaign out of the total number of people who received it.

Tracking and analyzing your own email open rates over time allows you to get a better understanding of how your campaigns are performing and to identify areas for improvement.

The average open rate for marketing emails is around 20%.

However, this can vary widely depending on your industry, the quality of your email list (email subscribers), the email subject lines, sender reputation, your email marketing software and many other factors.

Here is a general overview of email open rates by industry:

• Retail: 20-30%
• Finance: 15-25%
• Healthcare: 20-30%
• Technology: 20-30%
• Nonprofit: 20-30%
• Travel: 20-30%
• Education: 20-30%

Keep in mind that these are just rough estimates, and your own open rates may differ significantly. 

To increase your open rate, make sure to segment your email list, use catchy and personalized subject lines, and send emails at the right time.

Make sure to get all the technical stuff (such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.) set up and right. 

Also, always optimize your emails for mobile device (for smartphone users) since most emails are read on those devices.

Or, you can look at your existing customers to see which device they use the most and optimize accordingly.

Average email click-through rates by industry

The click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your email out of the total number of people who received it. 

The click-through rate mainly tells you how convincing or compelling your email is and how interested your recipients are in discovering more or simply at taking on your call to action. 

And so, your email CTR may vary based on factors such as the quality and relevance of your content, the effectiveness of your subject line, the segmentation and personalization of your email list, and the frequency of your email sends.

The average CTR for business emails is around 2.5%. Here is the average email click-through rates by business industry:

• Retail: 3.29%
• Healthcare: 2.5%
• Finance: 2.3%
• Business Services: 2.3%
• Travel and Hospitality: 2.3%
• Manufacturing: 2.3%
• Non-Profit: 2.1%
• Technology: 1.9%
• Education: 1.9%

A few tips to increase your CTR, make sure to use clear and compelling calls to action, design eye-catching emails, and segment your email list. 

Average email conversion rates by industry

Conversion rate is the percentage of people who took a desired action (such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter) out of the total number of people who received your email. 

Tracking and analyzing your conversion rate can tell you what works best for your business.

You can easily understand whether or not your email marketing strategy is working and improve it. 

The average conversion rate for business emails is around 1%.

Some industries may have higher conversion rates due to the nature of their products or services and the target, while others may have lower conversion rates. 

For example, selling to B2B professionals is more complex and takes longer as it requires multi-stage marketing strategies and involves multiple decision makers. 

Here are some general conversion rates by industry:

• E-commerce: 2-3%
• Healthcare: 2%
• Finance: 1-2%
• Technology: 1-2%
• Retail: 1-2%
• Travel: 1-2%
• Education: 1-2%

Note that actual conversion rates may vary significantly. 

A few of the best practices you can follow to increase your conversion rate include making sure to use targeted and personalized emails, offering incentives and promotions, and optimizing your landing pages for conversions.

Average email bounce rate by industry

Email bounce rate is a measure of the percentage of emails that are not delivered to the intended recipient’s mailbox. 

There are two types of email bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces. 

• Hard bounces are permanent failures, meaning that the email cannot be delivered because the email address is invalid or the recipient’s mailbox is permanently unavailable. 
• Soft bounces are temporary failures, which can occur for a variety of reasons, such as the recipient’s mailbox being full or the email server being down.

Here are some general statistics on email bounce rates by industry:

Industry	Hard Bounce	Soft Bounce
Business and Finance	0.43%	0.55%
E-Commerce	0.19%	0.26%
Education and Training	0.32%	0.51%
Health and Fitness	0.30%	0.40%
Marketing and Advertising	0.44%	0.68%
Non-Profit	0.33%	0.49%
Real Estate	0.38%	0.56%
Retail	0.22%	0.32%
Travel and Transportation	0.31%	0.51%

Source: MailChimp

If you need to troubleshoot a high bounce, you can regularly clean and update your email list, use double opt-in to confirm email addresses, and ensure that your emails are properly formatted and adhere to best practices for email deliverability.

Average unsubscribe rate

The unsubscribe rate refers to the percentage of recipients who request to or opt out of your mailing list after receiving your emails.

A high unsubscribe rate generally means that people are not interested in what you send them or that you need to improve your email copy. 

The average unsubscribe rate for business emails is around 0.1%.

 Here are some general statistics on email unsubscribe rates by industry:

• E-commerce: 0.1%.
• B2B: 0.2%.
• Nonprofits: 0.1%.
• Media and publishing: 0.2%.
• Education: 0.1%.
• Healthcare: 0.1%.
• Financial services: 0.2%.
• Travel and hospitality: 0.1%.
• Retail: 0.2%.
• Real estate: 0.1%.

To reduce your unsubscribe rate, make sure to send targeted and relevant emails, and give subscribers the option to customize their email preferences.

Also, segment your audience and improve the quality of your offers. 

Average email spam rates by industry

Spam rates are the percentage of emails that are marked as spam out of the total number of emails sent. 

It’s difficult to provide specific spam rate statistics by industry. However, in general, spam rates for email campaigns tend to range from 0.1% to 2%.

Also, spam rates in the financial, service, marketing industries tend to be high. 

It’s important to note that spam rates above 2% can be a red flag for ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and may result in the sender’s emails being flagged as spam or blocked. 

So always practice email list hygiene, follow best practices for email marketing, such as obtaining permission from recipients before sending emails, and avoiding spam language and tactics.

Key takeaways

• From promotional emails, transactional emails, or triggered emails, there are many ways you can successfully use email marketing for effective customer engagement. Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes.
• It’s the most effective marketing channel and digital marketing strategy when it comes to customer acquisition and customer retention. Many marketers and small business owners have grown their business and online store on the back of email marketing.
• Remember that while these email marketing statistics provide valuable insights, they’re not one-size-fits-all. Different industries and businesses will have different average open, click-through, and conversion rates. It’s important to track your own email marketing metrics and use them to optimize your campaigns and improve your results.
• The main factors that will impact your email marketing statistics include the quality of your email list, the relevance of your content, your segmentation and personalization efforts, the design and layout of your emails, and more.
• Make sure to focus on building a targeted email list, creating high-quality content, and optimizing your emails for conversions. With the right strategy, you can use email marketing to effectively reach and engage your audience and drive sales.

Cold emailing can be a powerful tool for businesses looking to reach new customers or clients, but it can also be a tricky and time-consuming process.

Every marketer has their perspective of what works and what might not work. But figures don’t lie. 

Before launching cold email campaigns, it’s important to understand the key statistics and trends that can impact the success of these emails.

These figures can inform you on what to expect and what success could look like. 

In this article, we’ll dive into the key cold email statistics that businesses need to know in order to craft effective and successful campaigns.

40+ cold email statistics, benchmarks, and trends to keep an eye out on

On average, the open rate for cold emails is around 15.22% to 28.46% (Source: Writecream.com)

This might appear low to you. But here is why it makes sense.

First, cold emails are typically unsolicited, meaning that the recipient did not specifically request to receive the email. They don’t know about you, your business, or your product so there won’t be any brand recall — you are a stranger. 

This can make it more challenging to get the recipient’s attention, as they may not be expecting or interested in the email.

Second, the subject line of the cold email is often the first and only chance to grab the recipient’s attention and convince them to open the email. If the subject line is not compelling or relevant, the recipient may simply delete the email without opening it.

Finally, the quality of the email list can also impact the open rate. If the list is not up-to-date or contains invalid or inactive email addresses, the open rate will likely be lower.

The average cold email click-through rate is around 2-5% (Source: Quickmail.io)

QuickMail analyzed 65 million cold email campaigns and realized that the average CTR for cold emails is around 3.67%, which is lower than the CTR for other types of emails such as newsletters or transactional emails.

The first reason for this is that cold email campaigns are unsolicited, which is why it can make sense that people don’t want to click through links in emails they didn’t ask for.

That aside, the content of the email and the value proposition must be compelling enough to convince the recipient to take action.

If the email does not clearly articulate the benefits of clicking on the link or does not offer a strong enough incentive, the CTR will likely be lower.

The quality of the email list can also impact the CTR. If the list is not up-to-date or contains invalid or inactive email addresses, the CTR will likely be lower.

The average cold email response rate for is around 8.5% (Source: Backlinko.com)

Cold email responses are notably low most of the time. If you’ve ever tried cold emailing, you know it’s hard to get people to reply to your cold emails.

According to Backlinko research on cold email response rates, a targeted cold email campaign has an average response rate of 8.5%.

Here are a few reasons why this can make sense. 

In most cases, the cold nature of the email makes it challenging to get the recipient’s attention and convince them to take action. 

Also, average cold emails targeting thousands of people won’t cut it. The content of the cold email and the call to action must be compelling enough to convince the recipient to take action.

And if the cold email does not clearly articulate the benefits of taking action or does not offer a strong enough incentive, the average response rate will likely be lower.

The email list quality also comes into play here. Invalid or inactive email addresses or a non-up-to-date list will likely result in a lower response rate.

Personalization can increase cold email open rates by up to 50% (Source: Woodpecker.co)

Personalization means the extra work that will make your cold emails more effective.

According to Woodpecker, personalization can increase cold email open rates by up to 50% — which makes sense because the reason why it works so perfectly is simple. 

Personalizing your cold email helps make it more relevant to the recipient. Also, with personalization, you can tailor the cold email to their interests and needs, which can make it more appealing and engaging.

It makes them feel that the cold email is directed specifically at them (only), and they are more likely to be interested in the content.

In addition, personalization can also help to build trust and credibility with the recipient, which can increase the chances that they will open the email.

When an email is personalized, the recipient is more likely to feel that the sender has taken the time to understand their needs and is more likely to trust the content of the email.

Using a personalized subject line can increase open rates by up to 35.9% (Source: Klenty.com)

Personalizing your cold email subject line and making it relevant to the recipient is key to boosting your open rates.

According to data from Klenty, personalized cold email subject lines can increase open rates by up to 35.9%. 

Personalizing the subject line works in the same way as customizing the actual cold email. It makes your prospects feel valued and helps to get them to trust you. It makes them want to discover what you have to say and as a result, they open the cold email. 

The best time to send cold emails is generally during the workweek, with the highest response rates on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (Source: Woodpecker.co)

We’ve proven this at Nerdy Joe as well. The best days to send cold emails are Tuesdays and Wednesdays. 

First, people are more likely to be at their desks and checking their email during the workweek, rather than on weekends or holidays.

This means that there is a higher chance that your cold email will be seen and read if you send it during the workweek.

Also, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are generally considered the most productive days of the week.

People are likely to be more focused and energized at the beginning of the week, and less likely to be burnt out or distracted by the end of the week.

As a result, they may be more likely to respond to a cold email on Tuesday or Wednesday than on other days of the week.

On top of that, sending a cold email at the beginning of the week allows the recipient more time to follow up or schedule a meeting during the week, rather than waiting until the end of the week or the following week.

This can help to ensure that your email doesn’t get lost in the shuffle or forgotten about.

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Short and concise emails tend to have higher response rates than longer ones (Source: Boomerang.com)

In an exhaustive study involving over 40 million emails, Boomerang (a software platform that syncs with Gmail) determined which factors led to getting responses. 

It was found that word count is strongly correlated with response rate.

On average, emails that are short (but not too short) receive the highest response rate. Emails with 75 to 100 words had the highest response rate (51%). 

Things are so for several reasons.

People are generally very busy and may not have the time or inclination to read through long cold emails — especially since they didn’t sign up for them.

Short and concise emails are easier to read and take less time to get through, which makes them more appealing to busy executives.

On top of that, shorter emails are often more focused and to-the-point, which can make them more effective at conveying their message.

At the same time, longer cold emails make it difficult for recipients to understand the main points or action items, which can lead to confusion or a lack of response.

Also, shorter cold emails are less likely to contain unnecessary or extraneous information, which can make them more relevant and valuable to the recipient. 

Using a clear call-to-action can increase response rates by up to 371% and and Sales 1617% (Source: Wordstream.com)

Using a clear call-to-action (CTA) in an email can increase response rates by up to 371% because it gives the recipient a specific action to take after reading the email.

Without a CTA, the recipient may not know what to do next or may not feel motivated to take any action at all.

A CTA can be as simple as asking the recipient to reply to the email, visit a website, or schedule a meeting.

It should be clearly stated and easy to understand, and it should be relevant to the purpose of the email.

For example, if you are sending a cold email to a potential client, your CTA might be to schedule a meeting or a call to discuss the potential for working together.

Specifying and urging the prospect to follow it gets them clear on the next step. 

How do cold email open and click-through rates compare to other types of emails?

Cold email open and click-through rates can be lower than those of warm emails (emails sent to contacts who have already expressed interest in the company or its products) or transactional emails (emails related to a specific transaction or interaction with the company). 

This is because recipients may be more familiar with and trust the sender of warm or transactional emails, making them more likely to open and engage with the email.

They’ve already established some sort of relationship with the recipient and it makes them more receptive to the sender’s email. 

At the same time, cold emails come in unsolicited and at a disadvantage. It takes strategic thinking and smart targeting to cold emails to work, and most people are terrible at it.

That’s why cold emails don’t generally perform as well as the other types of emails. 

However, there are a few factors that can impact the average click through rate and open rate for all types of emails.

For example, the sender’s reputation (as determined by their domain and IP address) can affect whether the email is delivered to the recipient’s inbox or sent to their spam folder. 

The relevance of the email to the recipient is also important, as emails that are not of interest to the recipient are less likely to be opened or clicked on.

What are the best practices for writing cold emails?

Crafting a compelling cold email requires some careful thought and attention to detail. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind:

Shoot for cold email sequences 

First, cold email sequences give more flexibility and better chances to make a good case for yourself in the campaign.

Also, a Woodpecker study revealed that sending 4-7 emails in each sequence as opposed to just 1-3 emails triples the response rate.

They also found that longer campaigns have seen 27% reply rates as to 9% for shorter ones. 

Create clear, compelling subject lines

The subject line is the first thing the recipient will see, so it’s important to make it as compelling as possible. 

Avoid spammy words, misleading, and long subject lines, and try to include specific details about what the recipient will get out of reading the email.

Personalized subject lines always work best.

Here are some cold email subject line statistics you will need to keep in mind. 

• Using the recipient’s first name in the subject line can increase open rates by up to 41% (Source: ConstantContact.com)
• Using a subject line that is less than 50 characters long can increase open rates by up to 59% (Source: Uplandsoftware.com)
• Using a subject line that is vague or unrelated to the email content can decrease open rates (Source: Nerdy Joe)
• Using a subject line that includes a number or statistic can increase open rates by up to 22% (Source: Woodpecker.co)
• Using a subject line that includes a question can increase open rates by up to 13% (Source: Woodpecker.co)
• Using a subject line that includes a sense of exclusivity or scarcity can increase open rates by up to 9% (Source: Woodpecker.co)
• Using a subject line that includes a sense of curiosity or mystery can increase open rates by up to 7% (Source: Woodpecker.co)
• Using a subject line that includes a sense of humor can increase open rates by up to 5% (Source: Woodpecker.co)

Keep the message concise and to the point

No one wants to read a long, rambling email, so keep your message as brief and focused as possible.

Use bullet points or numbered lists to make the email easy to scan, and get to the point quickly.

Personalize the email

As mentioned earlier, personalized emails with the recipient’s name and their specific needs or interests can increase the chances of a response.

Be sure to do your research and tailor the email to the specific recipient.

Use buttons based CTAs

Button-based CTAs make it easier for your prospects to see and click on them. They’re more fun and they easily catch the attention of the recipients.

According to Campaign Monitor research, button-based CTAs improved click-through rates by 127%.

Follow up

It’s not uncommon for cold emails to go unopened or ignored, so don’t be afraid to follow up.

Your prospect could simply be busy or maybe your cold email just came in at the not-right-time. 

According to a Backlinko study, sending multiple follow-ups can double your response rate.

Just be sure to wait a few days and craft a new, compelling subject line for the follow-up email.

Key takeaways

• Overall, cold emailing can be a powerful tool for businesses looking to expand their reach and find new customers, as long as it’s done in a respectful and professional manner.
• While cold emailing can be an effective way to reach out to potential customers or clients, it’s important to make sure you’re following best practices and not spamming or harassing recipients. Also, cold emailing triggered campaigns can be an effective way to automate your cold email sequence.
• The global average open rate and the general cold email statistics may seem low to you, but still, targeted cold emails is the most effective way to reach out to potential customers or clients.
• A/B testing can help you optimize your cold email campaigns by allowing you to compare different subject lines, email bodies, and other variables to determine which ones are most effective.

Lead generation is a crucial part of any business’s marketing strategy. It involves attracting and converting strangers and prospects into leads, and ultimately, customers. Without a steady stream of leads, businesses risk stagnation and a decrease in revenue.

According to a recent survey, a significant percentage of B2B marketers rank lead generation as their top marketing challenge. Generating leads can also be costly, with the average cost per lead varying by industry. 

However, the payoff can be worth it, as converting leads into customers has the potential to drive significant growth for a business.

In this article, we’ll highlight and discuss the main B2B lead generation statistics and strategies. We’ll explore the average cost per lead, lead generation goals, conversion rates for different tactics, what marketing automation generates, and more.

We’ll also highlight the top lead generation strategies most B2B businesses and most marketers use and provide tips for successful inbound and outbound lead generation. 

Top 2 lead generation strategies

Let’s discuss the two main lead generation strategies sales teams and marketers use to generate new leads and see how they compare based on their average lead conversion and their average cost per lead. 

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing involves generating leads and converting them through targeted, valuable content and experiences that are relevant to the customer. 

This can be achieved through tactics such as email marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing. And according to HubSpot, businesses using primarily inbound marketing techniques spend an average of $135 per lead.

Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing is a type of marketing that involves generating qualified leads by actively reaching out to potential customers through channels such as advertising, cold calling, or cold mail. 

It is an effective way to generate leads, but it can also be more expensive and time-consuming than other types of marketing, such as inbound marketing. Inbound marketing involves attracting potential customers to the business rather than actively reaching out to them.

Outbound marketing is particularly effective if you are trying to sell a product that doesn’t have awareness (cold selling) or targeting specific demographics or customer segments. It is more demanding and time-consuming. But if you do it, it yields more meaningful results.

According to HubSpot, getting qualified leads through outbound costs 39% more than inbound leads. Also, they’ve found in their State of Marketing Report that less than one-fifth of marketers think outbound practices provide valuable leads. 

The general lead generation statistics

The target industry and its unique factors determine the average cost per lead

The average cost per lead varies by industry. For example, data from a marketing research firm shows that the average cost per lead for the healthcare industry is $162, while the average cost per lead for the software industry is $208.

It’s important for businesses to consider their industry and competitors when setting their lead generation budget.

Here is the cost per lead data by industry. 

Industry	Low	High	Average
Financial Services	$44	$272	$160
IT, Computer, Software, and Technical Services	$39	$370	$208
Education	$37	$66	$55
Healthcare and Medical	$36	$286	$162
Industrial and Manufacturing	$33	$235	$136
Travel & Tourism	$29	$182	$106
Retail	$25	$41	$34
Consumer Products	$24	$182	$105
Telecom	$24	$64	$45
Marketing Agencies	$22	$173	$99
Media and Publishing	$21	$191	$108
Non-Profits	$16	$43	$31
Business Services	$39	$225	$132

Source: linchpinseo.com

The conversion rates vary by industry

Your ability to convert leads will also depend on their industry and the business vertical in which they are. Ideally, it’s easier to get B2C leads to buy than it is to get B2B leads to buy.

This can be explained by the fact that B2B companies mostly include many decision-makers, require more thorough marketing strategies, and more. Also, bear in mind that conversion can mean many things, and it isn’t just about sales.

Here is the average conversion rate data per industry. 

Industry	Average Conversion Rate
Agency	3.30%
Automotive	2.00%
B2B Ecommerce	3.20%
B2B Services	3.50%
B2B Tech (SaaS)	1.70%
B2C eCommerce	2.00%
Cosmetics and Dental	2.30%
Financial	4.30%
Healthcare	5.60%
Industrial	5.60%
Legal	2.60%
Professional Services	9.30%
Real Estate	1.70%
Travel	4.70%

Source: ruleranlytics.com

Lead generation tactics have different conversion rates

Conversion rates for different lead generation tactics can also vary. 

For instance, data from the marketing research firm, Barilliance, shows that email marketing has an average conversion rate of 15%, while Power of Digital Marketing (PDM) found that social media has an average conversion rate between 2-5%. 

It’s important for businesses to test and track the conversion rates of their lead generation efforts in order to determine which tactics are the most effective.

Lead Gen Tactics	Average Conversion Rate
Organic	16%
Amazon Advertising	9.47%
Google Ads	3.75%
Microsoft Advertising	2.94%
Paid	2.50%
Social media	3.00%
Referral	2.60%
Email Marketing	15.22%
Direct	2.00%
B2B content marketing	1.1%-8%
Landing page	9.70%
Event marketing	3-5%
Video marketing	4.80%
Chatbots	10-30%
SEO	2.40%
Pop-ups and overlays	3.09%
LinkedIn lead gen	13%

Sources: barilliance, firstpagesage, sumo, chatdesk, linkedin, yansmedia, ruleranalytics, vwo, invespcro

The time it takes to convert a lead into a customer also varies by industry

The average time it takes to convert a lead into a customer can also vary by industry. On average, whatever marketing tactics or channel through which you acquired the lead, it takes weeks to convert leads into customers. 

For example, the average time it takes to convert a lead in the software (SaaS) industry is 28 days. This is mainly because selling a software product requires long sales cycles, proper customer education, and creating some product experience before integration can happen. 

The average conversion rate for leads to customers is 4% (MetricHQ)

As we mentioned earlier, lots of factors influence the lead to customer conversion benchmark. It can vary by industry, marketing strategies, channels, and even the device type. 

That cleared; a good lead conversion rate, according to Klipfolio is around 2.4% globally for the average webpage. They’ve also found that a lead gen landing page can have a lead conversion rate of around 4%.

40% of marketers measure the success of their content marketing strategy by lead generation. (HubSpot)

It makes sense for marketers to measure the success of their content marketing strategy by lead generation because lead generation is the first win in marketing success. 

When you measure the success of your content marketing strategy by lead generation, it allows you to determine whether your content is effectively attracting and engaging customers and contributing to the growth of your business.

Only 56% of B2B companies verify business leads before passing them to the sales team. (HubSpot)

Verifying leads is an important step in lead generation. It helps you ensure that the leads are high-quality and are more likely to convert into paying customers before passing them on to your sales team. 

Failing to verify leads can result in your sales team wasting time and resources following up on leads that are not actually interested in making a purchase, which can be costly and detrimental to your company’s bottom line. 

And unfortunately, not all marketers do this. HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report found that only 56% of B2B companies verify business leads before passing it to the sales team.

Google gets 3.5 billion searches a day, making it prime real estate for any ad campaign, especially lead gen. (HubSpot)

According to HubSpot, Google gets 3.5 billion searches per day. 

This simply makes Google the best and the most reliable platform for any sort of advertising, including lead generation campaigns.

Advertising on Google allows you to reach a large audience of potential customers who are actively searching for your products or services. This can be an effective way to generate leads and drive sales.

Marketers face a huge challenge connecting with prospects, as it takes an average of 18 calls. (Gartner)

According to data from a Garnter research on lead gen, it takes an average of 18 calls for a marketer to connect with prospects.

It’s just not easy in everyone’s ken to easily engage customers into meaningful conversations through phone calls, especially when you’re cold calling. And so, it can be time-consuming and require a lot of effort to connect with prospects and convince them to provide their contact information or make a purchase.

The most challenging aspect of lead generation is prospecting and lead qualification, according to 34% of salespeople. (Writer’s Block Live)

Both prospecting and lead qualification are crucial for successful lead generation. They help you identify and target the most promising leads and increase the chances of making a sale. 

According to Writer’s Block Live, 34% of salespeople see them as the biggest lead generation challenges. That’s because it’s generally a time-consuming and hard process to find and reach potential customers, especially if you are targeting a specific niche or geographic area. 

Also, determining if a potential customer is a good fit for your product or service requires carefully evaluating their needs, budget, potential objections, decision-making authority, and applying sales qualification frameworks to assess the likelihood of a purchase.

56% of leads aren’t ready to buy yet. Only 3% are. (Vorsight)

According to data retrieved from Vorsight, up to 56% percent of the people you are targeting with lead generation are not ready to buy yet, only 3% of them are, and the remaining percentage is poised to begin. 

It simply means that the majority of leads you generate will not be ready to buy at the time you initially contacted them — and it comes as no surprise. It is a common challenge in lead generation, as it always takes time and multiple touchpoints to nurture a lead and convince them to make a purchase.

80% of marketers consider their lead generation efforts only to be slightly or somewhat effective. (Lead Generation Institute)

A large percentage of marketers do not feel that their lead generation efforts are very effective at generating leads or converting those leads into paying customers; that’s what the Lead Generation Institute found.

The problem we find with this is that most marketing messages or tactics don’t resonate with the target audience. Marketers target huge lists of customers, and they fail to create relevant, personalized messages that make sense. 

A successful lead generation strategy requires research and personalization. No two customers are the same and shall not receive a copy of the same message.  

Over half of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation. (Bonsai)

According to Bonsai, 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead gen and B2B lead generation agencies. 

It’s important for businesses to invest in lead generation as it helps to increase brand awareness and ultimately drive sales. 

Lead generation stats by marketing strategies

Here is what studies say about the different lead gen strategies, channels, and tactics that marketers use to target and acquire leads for their business. 

Email marketing

The most effective lead generation channel for B2B marketers is email, according to 79% of B2B marketers. (Writer’s Block Live) 

There are a variety of channels and tactics that B2B marketers use to generate leads, including email, social media, content marketing, events, and more. 

But according to Writer’s Block Live report, email is particularly effective for this purpose, as a large majority of B2B marketers believe it to be the most effective lead generation channel. 

This mainly has to do with the fact that email allows businesses to directly reach and engage with potential clients in a personalized and cost-effective way. 

There is also the fact that you can automate your email campaigns — thereby saving time and ensuring that your leads are consistently being nurtured and followed up on.

Compared to other lead generation methods, email marketing drives 50% more sales leads. (WebFX)

Email allows businesses to engage in targeted and personalized messaging. According to WebFX, email marketing generates 50% more sales leads than the other lead gen methods. 

Marketers get to send messages to potential clients based on factors such as their pain points, unique challenges, goals, and more. And it helps increase the relevance and effectiveness of the email, as it is more likely to be of interest to the recipient.

Content marketing

70% of people prefer to learn about a company through articles rather than ads (Demand Metric)

Demand Metric found that 70% of people prefer to learn about a company through articles rather than ads. 

In general, people perceive articles to be more trustworthy than ads — given that they are typically based on facts and provide in-depth information about a product. Also, articles often provide valuable and interesting information that readers can relate to and learn from.

91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to generate leads. (Writer’s Block Live)

Blogging (aka content marketing) generates 67% more leads than traditional marketing methods, it only makes sense that the majority of marketers focus their efforts and resources there to generate leads. 

According to lead gen data from Writer’s Block Live, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to generate leads. 

When marketers target leads based on their position in the sales funnel, they have 73% higher conversion rates. (SmallBizGenius) 

This boils down to strong personalization and increased efficiency in your lead nurturing. 

Because by targeting your leads based on their position in the sales funnel, it lets you send more relevant and personalized messages, which can increase conversion. 

Also, it allows you to focus your marketing efforts on leads that are more likely to convert, rather than wasting time and resources on leads that are not yet ready to buy. 

Social media marketing

Social media generates almost double the marketing leads of trade shows, telemarketing, direct mail, or PPC (HubSpot)

According to HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report, social media is the best lead generation tool, generating almost double the marketing leads of other methods such as trade shows, telemarketing, direct mail, or PPC.

That’s because social media marketing offers targeted advertising options that allow you to reach specific demographics and interests. These options allow you to create and increase the relevance and effectiveness of your social media ads. 

60% of B2B marketers think social media is the second most effective lead generation strategy. (Writer’s Block Live)

According to data from Writer’s Block Live, 60% of B2B marketers see social media is the second most effective lead generation strategy. 

Social media opens your brand to the largest market you can have. It also gives your brand the ability to connect with potential leads in real-time and you can easily generate awareness for your business or products and build relationships with the audience directly.

66% of marketers generate leads from social media by spending only six hours per week on social media marketing. (Bonsai)

According to lead generation data from Bonsai, 66% of marketers are able to generate leads from social media by spending only six hours per week on it. 

This indicates that social media facilitates both prospecting and lead generation.  Better yet, it also indicates that it is a low-effort and cost-effective way to generate leads compared to other methods. 

LinkedIn lead generation statistics

LinkedIn is the most effective B2B social media channel for generating qualified leads. (Bonsai)

According to Bonsai, LinkedIn is the most effective B2B social media channel for lead generation.

One reason for this is that LinkedIn is a professional networking platform, and many users are actively looking for new business opportunities or partners. 

LinkedIn Inmail allows businesses to create company pages, publish content, and use paid advertising to reach potential leads. These features make it easier for you to connect with and nurture leads on the platform.

47% of marketers use LinkedIn to generate leads, and 45% of them gained customers through the platform. (Bonsai)

Bonsai also found that almost half of the marketers who use LinkedIn for lead generation are able to get leads and 45% of them get customers directly through the platform. Building on what we discussed earlier, these only go further showing the effectiveness of LinkedIn outreach. 

Paid advertising lead generation statistics

Paid search advertising has an ROI of 200% (Truelist)

According to PPC statistics from Truelist, paid search advertising can generate a return on investment (ROI) of 200%. This is a very attractive ROI for businesses, especially when compared to other marketing channels.

Paid search advertising is that effective for lead generation because it allows you to target specific keywords and phrases that potential customers are using to search for products or services online. 

Referral marketing

Referral marketing generates 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing (HubSpot)

According to HubSpot, referral marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing methods. 

This may make sense for lead generation because referral marketing relies on recommendations and personal connections, which can be more effective at attracting potential customers than more generic forms of outbound marketing like cold calling or cold email. 

Event marketing

Events and webinars generate a median of 18% of total leads for B2B companies (Bonsai)

Events and webinars can be effective for lead generation because they provide an opportunity for businesses to connect with potential customers in a more personal and interactive way. 

Attending an event or webinar allows potential customers to learn more about a company and its products or services and ask questions and get answers in real time. 

73% of B2B marketers believe that webinars are the best strategy for generating high-quality leads. (Writer’s Block Live)

This makes sense as it joins the point we made earlier for events and webinars. Businesses can target a large audience and be more personal and interactive in their approach. They can build authority and credibility and gain the trust of their attendees. They can also collect their information.

Landing pages

Landing pages with forms that ask for less information have higher conversion rates (Cobloom)

The idea is simple. 

Seeing a form full of space holders for a lot of information to fill in will not be encouraging for your potential leads. Also, the more information you ask, the more friction you create, and can considerably reduce your chances of getting the lead.

Using video on a landing page can increase conversion rates by 86% (EyeView)

Videos explain things better; both people and search engines prioritize them, and they let people learn and discover products in a way that is fun and interesting. 

So, adding a video to your landing page helps increase conversions because it allows you to more effectively communicate the value of your product or service and engage visitors. 

68% of B2B companies use strategic landing pages to generate leads. (Writer’s Block Live)

Such landing pages are super-focused on a single goal and help you present your information (about your products or services) in a clear and concise way and direct potential customers to take a specific action. 

Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

Personalized CTAs convert a whopping 202% better than basic calls-to-action. (HubSpot)

According to HubSpot, personalized calls-to-action (CTAs) are significantly more effective at converting visitors into leads or customers than basic CTAs. 

In other words, tailoring it to a specific audience’s needs or interests is more effective at encouraging them to take a specific action.

Lead nurturing

Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost (Forrester)

Companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate more sales-ready leads because they are able to effectively engage and build relationships with their potential customers through their nurturing sequences (no matter what communication and channels they use). 

Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (WBL)

This comes as no surprise. Nurtured leads make larger purchases because they have a deeper understanding of the product or service being offered and have had the opportunity to build a relationship with the company. 

Also, they are more likely to trust you and feel more confident in their decision to make a purchase.

59% of marketers say that content marketing is the most challenging lead nurturing strategy. (WBL)

In most cases, lead nurturing (doing it the right way) is easier said than done. It requires a significant investment of time and resources to create high-quality content and to effectively promote it to the right audience. Also, you will need to have a deep understanding of your target audience and their needs.

63% of leads who inquire about your business won’t convert for at least 3 months. (Marketing Donut)

Marketing Donut found that 63% of leads who inquire about your business won’t convert for at least 3 months. This can be because the potential customer is still in the early stage of the buyer’s journey and not yet ready to make a purchase, or because they are still in the process of researching their options.

Marketing automation

By using marketing automation, businesses experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (SmallBizGenius)

Marketing automation can help you generate high quality leads by allowing you to more effectively target and personalize their marketing efforts and to do it all at scale. Also, you can automate repetitive tasks such as sending emails or posting on social media. 

You can also use a marketing automation software to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and identify areas for improvement.

80% of marketing automation users saw leads increase. (Blogging Wizard)

According to Blogging Wizard, 80% of marketers who use automation see an increase in the number of leads they get. This aligns with the upper statistics as it allows marketers to scale their activities and more results. That’s why Bonsai also found that 77% of marketers convert more leads using automation software than those who don’t. 

Video marketing

Video in email leads to a 200-300% increase in click-through rate (Digital Information World)

Video will always intrigue your leads. Adding video to your email makes the email more engaging and attention-grabbing. It allows you to communicate your message more effectively and be more compelling than with text. 

70% of B2B marketers think video content helps leads convert. (Bonsai)

According to Bonsai, a whopping 70% of marketers think video helps them easily attract and convert leads. Video content gets more reach than any other form of content. Also, studies show that most people would rather watch a video than read a text about a specific topic. 

Video content is more compelling and leaves your audience more interested and engaged. You can easily tell stories, and they can see the actual people behind your brand. This adds an extra layer of trust and credibility to your content that’s hard to beat. 

Chatbots

Chatbots have a 50-80% success rate for lead generation (AnyLeads)

According to Anyleads, chatbots have a success rate of 50-80% for lead generation. 

Chatbots can be an effective lead generation tool because they allow businesses to engage with potential customers in real time and provide them with information about products or services. 

They can have meaningful conversations with your visitors (even when you’re away) and can gather information about leads, such as their contact information and areas of interest.

Customer reviews and testimonials

88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations (InvespCro)

Online reviews provide an opportunity for people to read about the experiences of others who have used a product or service. And since most people are skeptical about new experiences, it helps them make informed decisions.

Testimonials are the most effective form of content for converting visitors into leads (Exploding Topics)

According to Exploding Topics, that’s the most effective form of content for converting visitors into leads. 

Testimonials can be an effective form of content for converting visitors into leads because they provide social proof. They can also be more persuasive than other types of content because they are written by real people who have used the product or service and can provide first-hand accounts of its benefits. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads have a 1.7% close rate (The Search Engine Journal)

According to the SEJ, SEO leads significantly have a better close rate (the percentage of leads that eventually convert into customers), 14%, than outbound leads, 1.7%. 

This may be because SEO leads are often more qualified and have a higher level of interest in the product or service being offered. When a person searches for a product or service online, they are actively looking for information and may be more likely to make a purchase. 

In contrast, outbound leads are often generated through cold strategies, such as cold calling or cold email, and the potential customer wasn’t planning for it. As a result, outbound leads may be less likely to convert into customers.

Lead magnets, Pop-ups, and overlays

Pop-ups and overlays can increase email signups by up to 1,375% (AWeber)

Pop-ups and overlays are types of interactive content. They offer you an effective way to increase your email signups as they present visitors with a clear and prominent call-to-action (CTA) and gather valuable information, such as their contact information and areas of interest. 

Gated content can increase lead generation by up to 300% (IronPaper)

You can increase your lead generation by up to 300% by using gated content, according to Iron Paper. Gated content means content behind a form or other barrier that requires the visitor to enter their contact information or complete some action in order to access it. 

Offering a lead magnet can increase conversions by up to 785% (Backlinko)

Lead magnets work in almost the same way as gated content, visitors must give out information or perform an action to access the content, except this time it’s not gated, it’s sold to the visitors (as incentive) and they will know what to expect. 

Follow up

41% of companies struggle to quickly follow up with leads (Verse)

Following up with leads in a timely manner is essential as it allows you to engage with potential customers while they are still interested and to try to convert them into customers. Unfortunately, 41% of companies struggle with it, and 44% of sales reps are too busy to do it, according to Verse.

Key takeaways

• Lead generation is a crucial part of any business’s marketing strategy, as it involves attracting and converting strangers and prospects into leads and, ultimately, customers. 
• You can use the data and stats in this post to continuously improve your lead generation efforts. 
• Be sure to always track the success of your lead generation efforts; you can identify what’s working and what’s not and make necessary adjustments.

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, picking the right lead generation agency among the countless agencies that exist is not always easy. 

That’s mainly because:

• There might be some confusion as to how some agencies define “lead.”
• Most agencies are both expensive and inexperienced, and their results can’t cover your costs. 
• The majority of lead gen agencies market “job-to-be-done” (i.e., Send 5000 emails per month) versus selling outcome (i.e., We generate 10 leads for you per month). 

When on the market for the best lead generation agency, you want to make sure the agency you’re bringing in has a track record of solving similar issues, and they can drive qualified leads toward your sales teams.

In this article, we’ll cover the mistakes most companies make when hiring agencies and how to find the best one.

What YOU and lead generation agencies get wrong about working together

When outsourcing your client acquisition to a lead generation agency, it’s common to believe that it’ll be plain sailing and that soon you’ll be able to scale trials and demos.

But in actual fact, it is not always so straightforward. Here are some common pitfalls for agencies and clients alike and how you can avoid them.

Mistake 1: Wanting and promising results too fast

The majority of outbound lead generation agencies are great at promising to deliver results in a very short timeframe. Some even offer guaranteed leads from day one.

The reason for this is that you as a client make an investment and expect results much faster than is reasonable. 

That’s a big mistake for many reasons:

1. Unless the lead generation agency you’re working with knew about your business in and out before the start of your engagement, it’s almost impossible for them to get you leads from Day 1.
2. Every company has its unique buyer’s journey and sales cycle — so is yours. And so even if your lead generation agency has a proven process, the chances it applies to your specific case are really thin. 
3. The nature of your product or service can affect how fast you see tangible results in your outbound lead generation.

For instance, business to business purchases involve several decision-makers who can influence the purchase decision. And because of this, selling services and products to B2B clients can require long sales cycles.

So, it stands to reason that for such companies it can take much longer to fully benefit from lead generation services. 

Mistake 2: Adopting a one-size-fits-all approach for everything

There is no off-the-shelf solution for lead generation. 

Each product solves a specific problem in a slightly different way and each company has its own audience that is slightly different from others. 

That said, even products that address the exact same problem may do so with different features, making each “competing” product cater to a certain demographic, a certain niche, and a certain level of expertise. 

And of course, this has a direct impact on the marketing strategy that the company should adopt.

Consider the difference between these two SaaS companies.

Company A: a self-serve SaaS product that has a free trial

Company B: an enterprise-level SaaS product that requires some installations and integrations. 

Obviously, Company A’s lead generation activities might be more channel-focused with the aim of driving traffic to its free trial page. 

Whereas Company B’s strategy would be much more suited to longer-term lead nurturing, account-based marketing (ABM), and more emphasis on outbound activities.

So, avoid working with lead generation agencies that have proven processes that they think may work for your business.

Of course, some of their processes may apply to your business, but that’s after they listened to you and got to know your business in and out. 

Mistake 3: Not getting aligned as to what success metrics should be with your lead generation company

Success metrics make it possible for your team to gauge in a quantifiable and predictable way your progress and the results of the cold email agency you outsource to. 

By setting metric-based goals, you can evaluate your lead-to-close rate, your lead-to-prospect rate, your time-to-close rate, and most importantly, your revenue per lead.

Here’s how you can calculate each of these.

1 – Lead-to-prospect rate

Lead-to-prospect rate is the percentage of leads that move on to become prospects. In general, there is confusion between a lead and a prospect. 

Understand that a lead is an unqualified contact, while a prospect is a qualified contact that you have walked through your sales qualification process to determine if your company’s products or services are suitable for their needs. 

Here’s the formula you need to calculate your lead-to-prospect rate:

2 – Lead-to-close rate

The lead-to-close rate represents the percentage of leads that are eventually converted into customers. This is the most basic, yet the high-level view of the quality of the leads from your lead generation agency. 

Here is the simplest formula for calculating your lead-to-close rate.

Note that a “good” lead-to-close rate varies substantially by industry and that a sub-par performance can be attributed to a variety of factors other than lead quality alone.

3 – Time-to-close rate

The time-to-close rate is the average time it takes for a lead to turn into a buyer. Like many other metrics, it is useful to calculate and compare the time to close between different campaigns.

Here’s a formula.

Time-to-close is critical in that it gives you a good indication of where a prospect is in the sales process — it is obvious that those further along in the process will have a shorter closing time. 

Picking up leads that are further along in the sales process benefits the company in terms of cash flow and saves time for the sales team. 

4 – Revenue per lead

Revenue per lead is the revenue derived from a set of leads divided by the total number of leads. 

It helps answer the most crucial question about lead generation: are these leads really worth the investment?

Here’s how you can calculate your revenue per lead.

Mistake 4: Having the agency and the client’s sales and marketing teams work

Traditionally, the sales and marketing teams used to work in silos — segmented from each other. While the marketing team handled the top of the funnel, the sales team would handle the bottom of the funnel.

When a prospect was deemed sales-ready, they would be passed on to sales, and in many cases, such prospects would never hear from marketing again.

In other words, marketers use a lead generation strategy to generate leads, nurture and turn them into qualified leads, then pass them along to sales teams, and that’s it.

Unfortunately, this linear process is no longer possible in today’s world. Especially not when you outsource lead generation.

If you ever hope to get optimal results, not only do your sales and marketing teams need to work collaboratively, but they also need to align with your lead generation agency. 

Why? 

Because they all have the same goal of driving sales and revenue. 

It all goes from a lead generation strategy to get more leads — based on a well-defined target audience — to an (email) marketing funnel for nurturing leads and a sales funnel to convert leads. They are all related.

So, it is crucial to keep them in sync for better communication and collaboration and clear lead generation goals. 

The lead generation agency might need to talk to a few of your customers to better their ideal customer profile.

When you succeed in uniting your sales, marketing, and outsourced lead gen teams’ around a single revenue cycle, they will drastically improve marketing return on investment (ROI), sales productivity, and, most importantly, top-line growth.

When do you need a lead generation agency?

Every company needs to grow, but not all of them need to resort to lead generation agencies. 

You need a lead generation agency when:

• You want or need to focus on booking appointments (through cold calling or cold email); or
• You have steady growth but want a proven methodology to double down on generating leads. In other words, you’re not in a “get 10 MQLs or die” mode; or
• You have the resources, you are ready, and you need lead generation specialists to try and understand how your audience thinks; or
• You’re thinking long-term relationship with your audience; and/or
• You want and are ready to trust your led generation agency with the strategy they come up with.
• You had no prior digital marketing or online marketing strategy and lacked sales qualified leads.
• You want to increase sales steadily through lead generation efforts and build a base of loyal customers.

You’re not ready to resort to or don’t need a lead generation agency if:

• You don’t know exactly how many leads you need to sustain your year-over-year growth; or
• You have crazy expectations; or
• You are in dire need of marketing qualified leads to keep running your business; or
• Your service or product is broken; or
• Your positioning is broken; or
• You expect the agency to do everything; or
• You have a dedicated and experienced team of experts working full-time on lead gen; 
• You want blog post content marketing, search engine optimization, and creating content for your social media platforms.

10 smart questions to ask a B2B lead generation agency

As mentioned above, choosing and hiring a lead generation agency to outsource to can be a tough decision. 

And for that matter, if your priority is cold emailing, the choice can be even tougher because if you hire the wrong agency, you are going to lose money. 

To avoid that, here are some questions you need to ask before closing the deal.

1 – What’s their definition of a lead?

Maybe for you, a lead is when someone shows an interest in your product. Or maybe when they reach out directly to your sales and ask for the product.

Lead generation experts might have a different definition. Maybe for them, any person that downloads something or does something as little as clicking on a link is a lead.  

So, make you clarify what a lead is and that you both agree on what success would translate into. 

2 – Do they specialize in your niche?

It applies to every type of digital marketing and lead generation as well.

It’s always easier to generate leads from a specific target market when you already know you already know how to speak to them, how to find leads and build lead lists or prospect lists, the right sales funnel, the email marketing approach, etc.

That’s why niche experience matters.

Your lead generation experts’ experience in your niche can make the difference between the quality and the lifetime value they provide your business and what you get from other agencies. 

3 – How do they ensure high-quality leads?

The hardest part of lead generation is to ensure a quality prospect list in the first place.

Scrapping a list of lead gen tools and sending hundreds of emails per minute is not the way to go. Having a lead generation partner who can search for your potential customers and build quality lead lists is priceless.

So, talk to your target lead gen company and ensure they have a reliable way of getting leads. Also, make sure that the way they acquire leads aligns with your business. 

4 – What’s their marketing philosophy?

How do they target customers? Are they aggressive in their messaging?

Are they in it to simply advertise your products or do they painstakingly create outreach sequences that offer value to the recipients before asking them to take an action? 

5 – How do they report to clients?

You will want to know how your B2B lead generation agency is cooking things up to bring customers. So, you will want to know how often they report and what they report on. 

6 – Does the lead generation team source or purchase leads through another company or are they generated in-house?

The way your target lead gen company generates leads is indicative of the quality of the results you get. Companies that purchase lists are basically sending emails to random people.

They’re simply through rocks at a wall to see what sticks. That’s not what you want. You need your lead gen company to properly conduct research, identify your ideal customer profile and build quality lists. 

7 – Does the lead generation team comply with data protection laws?

There are lots of spam laws out there in almost every aspect of digital marketing. Most laws differ from one location to another.

You don’t want to generate leads and wind up paying fines. Discuss and ensure that they abide by the different laws that pertain to your target audience. 

8 – How much (and when) do they charge for their service?

Whatever service they promise, there won’t be any leads generated if you can’t afford them. So, you’ll also need to know how much they charge for the service and how that fits into your budget. 

9 – What’s their plan to ensure your ROI?

So do they ensure you get a good ROI? You may be able to quickly see the value you get.

For example, you can easily see that generating 4 paying customers will make up for your investment.

But you’ll also need to figure out whether it is sustainable for you budget-wise. Also, they may not be able to deliver every month. Still, you pay. So, what happens then?

10 – Do they use your mailbox for outreach?

So, will they be using your mailbox for the outreach or use one of their own? You also have to figure that out.

Will they be sending emails that indicate they are third-party outreach specialists or will it feel like it is your organization reaching out to them?

How to hire a lead generation agency: red flags to look out for

Here are a few red flags you’ll need to avoid when looking for or working with a lead generation company. 

Poor reporting

Poor reporting will hurt the collaboration. Your target lead generation agency needs to specify KPIs and metrics and establish a reporting frequency. 

After all, if you invest in something, you deserve to know how it’s going and what the return on your investment might be. 

Poor communication

You need to have frequent communication with your lead generation agency. 

This can be about figuring out new approaches, getting updates on strategy adoptions, discussing engagement and results, and more. 

You need to have a routine-based conversation to ensure everything is going well. 

This is what gives you visibility into their work and everything else. 

Poor communication will leave you in the dark. So, make sure you have clear communication before getting started together. 

No documented process

You don’t want to work with an agency that is just figuring things out. That’s one of the main reasons most people struggle to work with digital marketing companies.

Plus, it’s a clear lack of professionalism and a no-no for you if you want serious, predictable results. 

No proven results

It can be hard to sell intangible services like lead generation and we get it. But you need to ensure your target B2B lead generation agency has already achieved the results they’re promising you at least once. 

No clarity as to when to expect the results

This might not be a specific date, but you’ll need a timeframe to work with.

You can possibly expect results for ages while you need ROI to grow your business. So, make sure you get clarity as to when you’ll be getting results. 

Why the first 30 months of the relationships are so crucial to the lead gen campaign’s success & how we work with our clients at Nerdy Joe

Week 1: Onboarding

Our services are productized and self-served — meaning we won’t have hours of back and forth. 

We basically have several plans and once you choose the one that fits your current needs and budget, you’ll be taken to a cart where you can purchase the plan. 

After that, you’ll get an invoice plus a welcome email. We will give you access to a Basecamp Project. That’s basically where we’ll collaborate and communicate on the to-dos and the campaign results. 

Once in the project, we’ll have an asynchronous conversation that’ll help us know more about your business and your ideal customer profile, and target companies.

Those will be done within Day 1 and 2 of onboarding. 

During those days, we’d aslo assign you some to-dos like purchasing a domain, giving us your domain credentials, and setting up your DKIM, DMARC, etc.

We can basically set up those but if you prefer, we’ll leave it to you. We’ll also start warming up your domain before we launch the campaign. 

Between Day 3 and Day 5, we’ll identify and define your ideal customer, start profiling the ideal people to reach out to, and once you validate the list, we’ll go on and find their email addresses and research each account and add the email opening lines. 

We’ll also write the cold email copy based on your tone of voice, brand messaging, and style guide.

Outcomes at the end of week 1

• Domain name set up.
• DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc., set up.
• A working list of prospects to reach out to.
• Each account is researched and there’s enough information to personalize it.
• The email copy for the campaign is ready.
• The domain is being warmed up. 

Week 2: Implementation

In the first days of week 2, we start by making sure everything is in place, that we’re aligned in terms of messaging and that everything about each account is correct. 

We also launch a first pilot campaign with some prospects from our list to test our copy, messaging, and setup.

Based on data from that pilot, we identify room for improvement, iterate, and revamp our setup before we deploy the entire campaign. 

Note: It sometimes happens that we hit our goal with that pilot campaign. For instance, if the plan you chose is for us to book 3 meetings for you per month, it may happen that we hit this goal with the pilot.

In this case, you can either upgrade your plan or we pause until the next month to continue the campaign (in the event you renew your plan).

Starting from Day 3, we deploy the campaign at scale — leveraging our learnings and results from the pilot. We also start monitoring results and some important metrics like clickthrough rate, reply rate, and bounce rate.

We basically want to make sure the metrics are circa our benchmarks and that we’re getting everything right.   

Meanwhile, we also keep working on your target customers’ list, the account personalization, and follow-up emails.

Outcomes at the end of week 2

• The open rate of above 50%
• Reply rate averaging 20 – 25%
• Monthly goal hit or halfway achieved
• A bigger prospect list 
• Some early campaign results 

Week 3: Iteration

Week 3 is usually when we start to see results. I mean, CONSISTENTLY. We use the statistics and findings from the first two weeks to iterate the messaging, targeting, offer, and calls to action. 

We then launch the campaign at scale and work to achieve our campaign goals. 

We intentionally aim to hit our goals in Week 3 to avoid last-minute pressures but also to prepare for the next month’s campaign. 

Outcomes at the end of week 3

• At this point, we certainly hit our target
• Monthly strategy call
• Campaign wraps up

Week 4: Wrapping up

The fourth week is when we try to wrap up the campaign and prepare for the next month’s campaign. 

It depends, of course, on whether you approach and confirms your plan for the following month.

Preparing for the next month allows you to save time on certain tasks and maximize the results. 

For example:

• We will keep warming up your domain
• We’ll extend your target list
• We’ll segment the list 
• We’ll research the leads in advance
• And more.

But in case you don’t want to continue with your subscription, we just hand you the previous campaign material and call it a month.

Key Takeaways

• Whatever the lead generation company you decide to work with, your first 30 days will determine how everything plays out eventually. So, it’s always a great idea to stay patient for the first month and record the red flags you see and whether or not they’re a fit for your needs. 
• Keep in mind that hiring a lead generation company always comes with some uncertainties. Your goal in the hiring process is to ensure that both parties have clear and realistic expectations about the other. 
• Always make sure you ask the right questions before you sign off on a deal with your lead generation company. This is important for ensuring you stay on the same wavelength throughout your collaboration. 

Most link building outreach emails aren’t compelling enough.

• They’re either generic with zero personalization.
• They don’t give blog owners and content marketing managers a reason to link back to your sites.
• They are poorly written and often end up in the spam folder.

At Nerdy Joe, we’ve had our fair share of link building outreach campaign. We’ve figured out the best way to secure links and it has earned us links from brands like Sumo, ButterCMS, VideoForm, Hyperise, etc.

But how do you craft those emails that effectively? 

We’re so glad you asked.

In this blog post, we’ll teach you how to create backlink requests outreach campaigns. We’ll also discuss the different types of backlink request emails, the elements of a successful backlink request email, share the best backlink request email templates, and tips for crafting a successful backlink request email.

What makes a successful backlink request email?

Here are the elements you need to put together to come up with the best emails for your backlink request campaigns. 

Mind you; these elements can also help you appreciate the link building email outreach templates we’ll share with you later on.

So, let’s discuss them. 

A great icebreaker

Most of the people you’ll be reaching out to don’t know who you are. There is also a good chance they’ve never come across your website before.

So, you are coming into the unknown, and you need a good first impression to catch their attention and hook them to read your email. 

So, to do this, you need an icebreaker. As the name implies, icebreakers are email opening lines designed to help you break the ice between you and your recipients. 

Here are the different things having an icebreaker means for your outreach:

1. an opening line that doesn’t strike the audience, like “I’m here for a backlink, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
2. an opening line that rapidly differentiates you from other link building emails and hooks your target webmaster to read your email. 
3. a beginning sentence that makes your recipients feel valued and makes the statement that you did your research before reaching out to them. 
4. a phrase that indicates you know them personally and conditions them to be more receptive of your email and offer. 

So, instead of simple greeting opening lines, you take it to the next level and bring interesting facts about the recipient to personalize the opening line and make it more impactful. 

And that’s how you can go from an email opening line that reads like:

To an icebreaker that reads like:

Interesting, yeah? But how do you do it? 

Well, glad you asked.

• Watch interviews and podcasts your target audience has participated in.
• Read blog posts and thought leadership articles they wrote or contributed to.
• Read their comments and posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon.
• Read their company’s new mentions.
• Etcetera 

You then combine all of the information you collected to find unique angles and craft personalized first lines or icebreakers.

Here is an example of how we keep it all in a spreadsheet before the campaign.

Personalized offer introduction

This is where you start talking business. First thing, you can just reach out to someone and ask for them to link back to your site. That’s not the way it works. 

From our experience, a link building outreach should always go about building a relationship with your fellow marketer. Remember that the recipient is not obligated to provide a link to your website. 

Because of this, you need to make a good impression and show that you value your recipient’s time and expertise.

Personalizing your introduction can help establish that connection and make the recipient more likely to consider your request.

For example, instead of a generic line like: 

a personalized offer introduction could be something like: 

This approach shows that you have taken the time to research their website and that you understand their interests and expertise.

Clear and specific request

The goal of your email is to get a backlink, so you need to be clear and specific about what you are asking for. Instead of making a general request for a link, ask for a link to a specific page on your website. 

Specifically, you need to mention a specific post or page on their website that you found interesting or relevant to your own content. It shows that you have put thought into the request and that the link will be relevant to their audience.

Value proposition

In order for the recipient to be motivated to add a link to your website, you need to show them how it will benefit them. That’s just how it works. Ask yourself, why would they be interested in putting your link to their website? 

So, you need to explain the value of your link to motivate them to put it on their website. 

For example, you can explain how the link will help increase their referral traffic or improve their search engine rankings. 

You can also mention that linking to your website will help their audience by providing them with valuable information or resources.

Sense of urgency

Giving a sense of urgency to your request can help motivate the recipient to take action.

For example, if you have recently updated a page on your website that would be relevant to your audience, let them know that the link would be especially valuable at this time.

Clear call to action

You need to be clear about what you would like the recipient to do next, whether it be to add a link to your website or to schedule a call to discuss further. 

And while you’re at it, be sure to provide them with any necessary information or resources, such as a link to your website or a specific page. It will make it easier for them to take action.

Professional and courteous tone

Last but not least, take the time to make sure your email is well-written, free of errors, and shows appreciation for your recipient’s time and consideration. 

Maintaining a professional and courteous tone throughout the email will help you build trust and show that you value the recipient’s work and resources.

14 backlink request email templates (+ types of backlink request emails)

There are different types of emails you can create for your link building outreach campaign, depending on your goal and what resource you want linked to. 

Here are the main backlink request email templates you can use based on your needs. 

The introduction email

The introduction email is used when you want to introduce yourself or your company to the website owner and explain why a backlink would be beneficial for both parties. 

 The guest blogging/guest post email

We all know about guest blogging, and it is one of the most effective ways to reach out for a backlink.

So, here you offer to write a guest post for your target website owner’s site and request a backlink in return. That’s it. Here are your link outreach email templates for that.

The broken link email (aka broken link building)

Here, you inform the website owner of a broken link on their site, detail how it is hurting their SEO strategy and ranking on search engines, and offer a replacement link.

The best scenario for this is that you used an SEO tool to check their website, and you picked up on a broken link scheme that might be hurting their site’s performance on the SERP and suggested a broken link strategy. 

The valuable resource email

This type of backlink request email is used to offer a valuable landing page resource or piece of content that the website owner can link to.

Basically, you just created this beautiful and excellent piece of content that’s so excellent or paradigm-shifting, and you want them to link to it. 

The testimonial email

The goal here is to offer a testimonial and request a backlink from a company whose services you used and were happy with.

The resource/product list email

This type of backlink request email is used to offer your website/product as a valuable resource/solution to be included in a resource/product list on another website.

This is also a great way to market your product by pitching for industry lists and getting a backlink in return.

The skyscraper technique email

If you’ve been poking around link building outreach materials, you’ve probably seen this one. 

This strategy is used to reach out to a website owner or editor to request that they link to a piece of content that you believe is more informative or useful than the content they currently have linked to on their website. 

The premise is that they will always prefer the best material for their audience, and if your content is truly better, it’s a sure win. 

The influencer email

Here, you reach out to a well-known or respected individual in your industry to request that they share or link to your content.  

The partnership email

You can use this backlink request email strategy to reach out to another website or business to request a partnership or collaboration.

The idea is that both you and your partner can benefit from the link swap. It also establishes a good relationship between you two for the future. 

The interview email

The interview-style backlink request email allows you to reach out to an expert in your industry to request an interview for your website.

You then host the interview on your website, and they can promote it on their website using your link:

The leverage email

Finding new webmasters or marketers to reach out to all the time can quickly become hard.

You can request a backlink by leveraging an existing relationship or connection with the website owner. Here is an excellent template for that. 

The link round-up email

The idea here is to request a backlink by offering to include a website or blog post in a link round-up or list of resources. Here is the email template for this. 

The event email

This type of backlink request email helps you land a backlink by offering to promote someone else’s event or webinar on your website. You promote it there, link back to your site, and that’s it. 

You can even wait till the event is done. Then you can offer to repurpose the content for the audience that couldn’t make it or simply create a digest of the event for the audiences. 

The networking email

The idea here is to land yourself a backlink by offering to network with another website or business. 

5 tips for crafting a successful backlink request email

Let’s discuss a few tips to help you craft your backlink request emails to perfection. 

Doing your research

The idea about doing your research to make sure you understand the target website and its audience before reaching out. You want to make sure you’re not throwing random links at random sites. 

If you do it well, it ensures that your request is well-received and has the best chance of being accepted. Researching before backlink outreach should include the following:

• Identifying websites that are relevant to your industry or niche and that have a similar target audience to yours.
• Looking at the content on the website and identifying natural opportunities for a mutually beneficial link, such as content that is related to yours or that could complement yours.
• Reviewing the website’s link profile to ensure that it is reputable and has a good reputation within the industry.
• Looking at the website’s contact information and making a note of who the best person would be to contact regarding a backlink request.
• Looking at the website’s social media presence, as well as any other online presence, they have to understand more about their audience and what type of content they prefer.

Personalizing your approach

Personalize everything and tailor your message to the specific website you’re reaching out to. By personalizing your approach, you demonstrate that you have a genuine interest in working with the recipient and that you are not just sending out mass emails. 

This will also help establish a positive working relationship with the recipient. Here are a few tips on personalization. 

• Use an icebreaker to open the email, rather than using a generic greeting.
• Reference the specific content on the recipient’s website that you think would be a good fit for a link to your content instead of simply mentioning their whole site.
• Explain why you think a link between your website and the recipient’s would be beneficial, both for your website and for the recipient’s website.
• Use language and tone that is appropriate for the recipient’s industry and audience.
• Show that you have done your research and understand the recipient’s website and what they are trying to achieve.
• Show your respect and appreciation for the recipient’s work, and give credit where credit is due.

Being patient and follow up

Don’t expect immediate responses, being patient and following up should be integral aspects of your backlink request strategy.

In most cases, people will go silent on you, especially if it’s not anything urgent. So, you need to be patient and follow up with them strategically. 

It can help you demonstrate that you are easy to work with and can also help with a good relationship between you and your target. Here are a few tips for this.

• Give the recipient time to respond to your initial request. They may be busy or have other priorities that need to be addressed first.
• When you do follow up, be polite and professional. Avoid being pushy or aggressive.
• In your follow-up email, remind the recipient of your initial request and explain why a link between your websites would be beneficial.
• Provide any additional information or resources that the recipient may need in order to make a decision.
• Give the recipient the option to opt-out or decline your request gracefully, without pressure.
• Show your understanding that the recipient is busy and that you are willing to work with them on a schedule that is convenient for them.
• Keep track of your follow-ups and be mindful of not over following up, as this might come across as pushy or annoying.

Being polite

Always be polite and professional in your communication. Remember that people have no reason and are not obliged to take up on your offer. So, being respectful and mindful of their time and communicating politely need to be part of your quiver. 

Keep in mind that a polite and professional approach can lead to further opportunities for collaboration in the future. Here are a few things you can do regarding this: 

• Use a professional and respectful tone throughout the email. Avoid using language that could be considered aggressive or pushy.
• Show appreciation for the recipient’s work and the content on their website.
• Acknowledge that they are busy and may not be able to respond to your request immediately.
• Thank them for their time and consideration, even if they are not able to accept your request.
• Show that you understand their needs and that you are willing to work with them to find a mutually beneficial solution.
• Be polite and courteous in your follow-up emails as well.
• Show your willingness to help and support their website in any way you can.

Go for a relationship

Your backlink building strategy should always be a long-term strategy. Going for a relationship-based approach indicates that you are interested in working with the recipient in a mutually beneficial way and that you are not just looking for a one-time link. 

This can help establish a positive vibe between you two as well as build trust and credibility with them.

This can result into further opportunities for collaboration in the future. Here are a few tips for going for a relationship-based approach:

• Don’t make it sound like you are just there asking for a one-time link. 
• Don’t become too pushy in asking for a backlink.
• Show that you are interested in their website and the content they produce, and that you want to support them in any way you can.
• Offer to help with their website in any way you can, such as by providing useful resources, sharing their content on social media, or promoting their website to your audience.
• Show that you are willing to collaborate and work together on projects that can benefit both your websites.
• Show your understanding that they are busy and that you are willing to work with them on a schedule that is convenient for them.

Key takeaways

• Regardless of the type of email you send, always make sure that it is personalized, well-written, and clearly explain the value of the backlink to the website owner in order to generate quality backlinks. Also, these are only outreach templates, you should only use them as inspiration to craft your own emails. 
• You need to experiment with different types of backlink request emails and approaches, and to personalize your approach to maximize the chances of success.
• When it comes to outreach, keep in mind that relationships always win. So, never reach out for a one-time link swap. Always play the long-term game. 

The best digital agency for lead generation for businesses is the one that promises you leads, gets them for you, and charges you exactly for the results. 

Unfortunately, such digital agencies are hard to come by. Most companies charge you based on the work they do for you and the lead generation process they use — instead of the results they get for you — and also bind you in some 3 to 6 months contract where you pay per month without so much of a guarantee for your ROI. 

We fix that. Our digital agency, Nerdy Joe, only charges you based on the results we get for you and you won’t have to sign any contracts. 

Plus, we create cold email campaigns that are so compelling that the recipients can’t help but acknowledge our greatness before making us offers. See for yourself: 

Yeah, that’s Ross Simmons, CEO of Foundationinc.co. Here is another example from ex Hunter.io CMO, Irina Maltseva. 

Here is another example. 

We can go on. But you get the idea. 

In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the 8 best lead generation marketing agencies in 2023, and we’ll start with our own lead generation service, Nerdy Joe.

Four things a lead generation company does for you

A digital lead generation agency is a company that creates and implements marketing plans to help businesses attract more qualified leads — prospects that show interest in a company’s products or services and are likely to become paying customers. 

Depending on your business needs, they can perform different functions that are essential to the growth of the business. Some of these functions include:

1 – Expand your market

When you start your business, you probably target a small group of audience. But that isn’t the only people you can target. Lead generation agencies enable you to learn about your prospects. 

Based on data-driven decisions, they conduct research on your ICPs, which can stem from various industries. This results in getting opportunities to expand into new markets. 

2 – Boost revenue

Lead generation enables you to reach out to the right prospects. Before you can do this, you have to implement various strategies such as the right messaging, content, and offer to pique interest from them. 

When done correctly, you can easily capture the attention of qualified leads and also convert them. This action has lots of revenue growth potential, which you can use to scale your business.

3 – Improve lead quality

Creating and posting generic content on the web can get you tons of traffic. But if they aren’t converting your visitors into leads, it is only a waste of time. 

A lead generation agency can implement a highly targeted approach toward content creation. Everything they will craft for your brand, whether email marketing campaigns, LinkedIn posts, or messages, will cater to a specific group. 

This makes it easy to craft messages that resonate with your audience. Subsequently, this improves the quality of your leads and boosts conversions, and drives sales.

4 – Build brand awareness

If you are a startup that recently launched in a new market, or perhaps, you already have an established business that requires more exposure, you will need to create brand awareness. This is where lead generation agencies come in. 

They can help to identify your target audience that is interested in your products or services. Then, they can create engaging content and distribute them through the most effective channel to reach them.

As time goes by, they will get your company into the eyes of people that matter the most.

8 best digital agencies for lead generation

Now that you know what lead generation agencies do, here are the eight best digital agencies you can consider for lead generation. 

1 – Nerdy Joe

Contrary to most digital marketing agencies which are Jack of all trades, Nerdy Joe only focuses on email marketing and outbound lead generation services (i.e., cold emailing)

Our team uses proven strategies to attract and engage potential customers through cold outreach strategies. We will closely work with you to understand your unique needs and tailor our services to deliver the results you’re looking for.

We believe we differentiate from most digital agencies due to our unwavering commitment to quality. In our opinion, generating leads is only half the battle; the real challenge lies in converting them to loyal customers, which is what we aim to achieve for you. 

This is why we generate leads who are both interested in your product and likely to make a purchase.

Our customized lead generation solutions are tailored to meet your specific needs because we understand your business is unique. 

Whether you’re a startup or an established business looking to expand, we have the expertise and resources to help you achieve your goals.

When you work with us, you don’t have to commit to a certain number of months, and you know exactly what you’re getting.

So if you’re tired of wasting time and money on ineffective lead generation strategies, our team of experts is here to help you take your business to the next level by generating high-quality leads that convert. 

Why Nerdy Joe is the best digital agency you need to consider

We are an ROI-focused lead generation agency: You’ll pay for the results that makes sense to you, not for the work we do

This might be a little confusing to you “you’ll pay for the results that make sense to you”. But let’s unfold the analogy we put behind this so that you actually understand what we mean by that. 

There are lots of digital agencies out there, but all of them can be classified into three categories.

1. Digital agencies that charge you for the quantity of the work they do and not for the results they bring to your table. For example, a content marketing agency will charge you for the number of content they create, and not for the number of LEADS they bring you. Or, a lead gen company will charge you for the number of emails they send, and not for the leads you get from their campaigns. 
2. Digital agencies that promise you a certain lead quality, charge you a monthly fee for it, but always come short of their promise or fail to deliver altogether. For example, a lead generation company that calls everyone who’s downloaded an ebook or PDF a LEAD and charges you for that, while the lead never buys.
3. Digital agencies that charge you based on the ROI, the number of QUALIFIED LEADS they generate for your sales team. For example, they say you’ll get 6 sales-ready leads by the end of the month, and you’ll pay $999, you sign up  for it. They do the job it takes, bring you the leads, and your sales team closes them. 

From our experience, it’s only the last type of agency that truly cares about your ROI and brings you great results. 

We believe if you are looking for a lead generation agency, your main point is that you need more leads to sell to, and that’s why you were looking for a startup marketing company in the first place. 

So, given this, our priority and main strategy aims to bring actual results that make sense for you ROI-wise. That means that our service does not revolve around the number of emails we send or the work we do (nor anything else), but rather the results we deliver.

For example, we do not report on vanity metrics like open rate, bounce rate, clickthrough rate, etc. Here are some of the metrics we rely on to makes sense of the campaigns we run for you:

• Number of positive replies
• Number of meetings booked
• Lead to close rate.

For instance, if you want to work with us to increase the customer base for your SaaS product, we’ll report:

• The number of new sign-ups you get. 
• The number of positive replies we get.
• The number of demo calls we book for you.
• And the number of new clients we get for you.

If you’re a healthcare software company selling to doctors, we’ll only charge you for the number of appointments we set for your sales teams.

We run super-targeted and successful campaigns that are aligned with your brand and makes people love you

As you’ve seen from the introduction of this article, we take creating cold emails and running campaigns seriously.

As a result of this, some of our prospects love the cold emails we send them and take the time to show some appreciation. 

Now, here is what we mean when we say “we run super-targeted and successful campaigns that are aligned with your brand and make people love you”. 

Most digital agencies and marketers go about lead generation, especially when it comes to outbound methods like cold emails, the wrong way. It mainly has to do with the fact that marketers approach it as a numbers game. 

They devise outreach campaigns and strategies like: “we’ll send 1000 cold emails per day for every week and before the weekend, we can convert 0.01 percent of them and get a few clients.” In most cases, it sounds like a solid approach and could even work. 

Here are some stuff business growth experts preach on Twitter.

And some more.

Basically, you have to send 1000 cold emails per day to get new leads. But here is why we hate it. 

That means blasting too many people with cold emails to only convert a tiny-tiny percentage. That’s ideal.

It also means that you won’t take it seriously to research your prospects to create personalized cold emails relevant and meaningful to each of them; that’s not ideal as well. 

Worst, doing outreach that way comes with many consequences for you, the client. 

• Getting flagged as a spammer: ESPs and ISPs will flag your email and IP addresses as spammers.  
• Damaging both brand and sender reputation: They’ll kill your company’s reputation, and you’ll get a bad rap on social media. 
• Poor leads quality: The quality of the leads you get will be subpar, and you can’t convert, at least not easily or in a short timeframe. 
• Pissed prospects: Some prospects can be mean to you, saying things like “Remove me from your list”, “Don’t ever email me again,” or worse, “Really? Your cold email sucks”. 
• Deliverability issues: Your domain will face severe deliverability issues, and most of your future emails, if not landing in the spam folder, will be bouncing.

Basically, doing it like this will simply make your churn rate skyrocket and damage your reputation in the same wave. 

So, we believe that’s not how you want your company to be represented and that’s why we avoid this by being super-specific in who we target and creating personalized messages, to very short prospect lists, and guess what? It works like a charm. 

We target very short prospect lists, and the most important part of our work is to spend time learning about your ideal customer profile (ICP) in and out before we send a single email. 

We want each recipient to feel like you know them and take you seriously and not just another spammer in their inbox. 

The ideal scenario we strive for is to send 20 personalized cold emails, get 15 replies, 10 positives, and get you 4 sales-qualified leads or sign-ups. For most people, this is not conceivable, and that’s because they do it the wrong way. 

Now, don’t get this wrong. By personalization, we mean we make each email relatable, meaningful to the prospect’s unique personality, and timely. We don’t just add [[First name]] and other variables to the email subject lines. 

Just for some context on how this works for us, here’s an example of a reply we received as we reached out to a VP of Marketing who has historically blocked or reported SPAM to anyone who’s sent him a cold email.

Here’s another example where we pitched a Head of Marketing, and here’s the response. 

Contrary to what most digital agencies think, we target very many people. Like 10 or 15 people, not 1000. And this gives us time to research each individual and craft completing emails.

That’s why most of the responses we get are:

• “Wow, such a nice email.”
• “Your email is well-done, partener”
• “Thank you for the nice words and compliment.”
• “Love your cold emails. Wanna write for us?”
• “Let’s catch up next Thursday.”
• “Love your email. Can you follow up on the 20th?” 

We believe the best marketing approach is the one that promotes trust and relationships. That’s why we always put in the extra work and patience it requires. 

You might wonder what we mean by researching the prospects and where we get information about each prospect or member of your target audience we use for personalization? Among many things, here are a few things we do. 

• We listen to podcasts your potential customers have been on.
• We read blog posts they wrote. 
• We read their LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon posts.
• We read discussions on forums they’re in.

Using the data we collect, we craft first lines and icebreakers customized to each individual.

Here’s what it looks like in real life. We pitched CoSchedule’s Head of Content, Ben Sailer, and asked him if we could write for them.

Here’s what he replied 1 hour later.

Here is another successful example from a similar strategy.

As you can see from both screenshots, the cold emails sent to the prospects were so compelling that they couldn’t help but acknowledge it before offering to hire us. 

Top-notch data quality and accuracy: we only run our campaigns with manually-built lists and data

You probably can tell by now that we’re very meticulous about the data we use and how we target people. 

You’ll be surprised to learn that our team manually builds all the data we use when targeting prospects for our clients.

And this includes list building, prospect research for personalization purposes, and everything else. 

We know there are data intelligence tools like LeadsEngine, ZoomInfo, or Lusha that we can sign up for, and they’ll quickly scrape up the net to build us lead lists, including 1000s of targets we can send emails to every day. 

But as well, we know the level of accuracy and customization it takes to cut it into someone’s inbox with an unsolicited cold email and get their attention. 

That’s why we do not rely on data intelligence tools. In most cases, such tools only compile technographic and demographic data from companies.

For example, using these tools, it’s easy to find data such as: 

• The company is in the healthcare industry, 
• They have 500 to 1000 employees,
• Are series B-funded companies,
• Are in India,
• Use Freshworks or Salesforce as part of their tech stack.
• Etc.

The problem is that this type of data can’t serve for quality personalization. Anyone can easily guess those, and they are not unique enough to make the prospect feel you actually researched them. You can only use it to devise poor first lines like:

So instead, we want to generate high-quality leads and data that we can use to create personalized emails and make the prospect feel like you know their day-to-day and more. So, we make use of psychographic data and other types of data.

For example, after signing a new client, we ask them about their ICP.

We ask questions like:

• Which type of client has the highest lifetime value?
• Which type of clients is easiest to close?
• Which type of clients churns the fastest?
• What are the top 3 objections you hear from prospective clients during sales calls?
• Why did you start your company? 
• What pain points were you trying to solve?
• Etc.

By getting them to answer these questions, we can pinpoint precisely who we should target and why — and it gets easy to do it manually. And this type of information makes the difference between: 

“We’re targeting series A tech companies,” 

And 

“Our ICP is a CTO at a software company selling to DevOps, and his main pain points are lack of organization, time management, and team collaboration. He often refers to XYZ podcasts to get insights as to how to manage his team efficiently.” 

Once we have a clear understanding of who the ICP is, we proceed to manually build our list, and that’s what we use to run our lead generation campaigns.

No long-term and retainer contracts: only pay to get results and renew only if you’re happy

When it comes to lead generation, we think it should be that we charge you for the leads we get you. And as displayed on our website, you choose which plan you want, you pay, and we bring you your leads — no contract, no retainer.

But what happens with most digital agencies is that they will ask you to sign a 3 to 6-month contract before you start working together. They’ll explain it by saying they’ll need to do some testing and that the purchase journey is long. 

This scheme makes you pay every month for the results you are supposed to get — even when you don’t get them.

So, you invest a lot of money, and at the end of the day, you may not have anything to show for it. That’s why our services are subscription-based. 

We promise to offer you results exactly from the first month, and you’ll have to choose whether to continue to pay and get the results or whether you want to stop working with us — depending on how satisfied you are with our service and your budget. 

We eliminate the stress that comes with long-term and binding contracts and let you decide. Here are the benefits you can enjoy from this. 

• Flexibility: A retainer contract usually requires you to commit to a fixed period of time and payment, regardless of your satisfaction with the service. In contrast, you are free to choose when to subscribe and when to stop. It’s all based on whether you are satisfied or not, which means that you won’t have to stay committed while you are not getting the results you want. 
• Risk mitigation: If you are dissatisfied with the service, you can stop the subscription without incurring financial and legal consequences. You take on less risk than with a retainer contract. 
• Accountability: The system rewards us for maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. We know you have the option to stop your subscription if you aren’t satisfied. The opposite is true with a retainer contract since the provider is already obligated to pay for the service regardless of your satisfaction.

Pricing

Our marketing service’s pricing is crystal clear. We have three plans:

• Silver: It costs $499/month and only gives you two warm LEADS.
• Gold: This is the plan we recommend, as it gives you the biggest bang for your buck. It costs $999/month and gives you 6 hot and sales-qualified appointments or LEADS.
• Platinum: This plan is for mid-level to enterprise companies willing to fuel their sales team with up to 15 sales-ready leads on a monthly basis.

Our email marketing pricing includes the following:

• The tech stack we use to build your prospect list and send and monitor your campaign.
• A complete list of prospects that fit your buyer persona and ICP.
• The campaign setup fees.

2 – Single Grain

Single Grain is a full-service digital marketing agency that provides lead generation, content marketing, and other services to various companies and helps them to generate revenue online.

They specialize in generating qualified leads for various SaaS companies such as Bluehost, Nextiva, Drift, Axure, Streamlabs, and more.

Thanks to their innovative digital marketing strategies and modern tech tools, their digital marketing specialists find, nurture, and convert qualified leads to scale businesses. 

Their goal is to drive more site traffic, target qualified leads, convert, and ensure they become paying customers. They make data-driven decisions and constantly tweak and test them to ensure their effectiveness. 

Contrary to Nerdy Joe, Single Grain’s pricing details aren’t displayed on their website. You must contact them to get further information. 

3 – Neil Patel Digital

Neil Patel Digital is a digital marketing agency that offers digital marketing services to small and medium-sized businesses.

They are an audience-led and data-driven agency that connects brands to their customers and provides unique experiences. 

Some notable brands they have worked with include ConnectWise, Contentful, SoFi, CNN, Adobe, Western Union, LinkedIn, Nexcess, Party City, and more. They offer integrated search marketing solutions and deliver lead generation services based on three categories:

• Digital IQ – strategy and planning, data analytics and insights, persona development, dashboard development, conversion rate optimization, and more.\
• Earned Media – Search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, influencer marketing, app store optimization, organic social media, link building, and more. 
• Paid Search – Paid search, display and native, affiliate marketing, digital audio, and more.

They also offer the latest software tools that help to drive efficiencies for their team and scale businesses. Some of these tools include UberSuggest, Answer the public, ROI calculator, and Ads grader. 

Unlike Nerdy Joe which displays pricing details, Neil Patel Digital doesn’t display its pricing details on its website. You have to contact the company for their pricing information.

4 – WebFx

WebFx is also a lead generation agency that helps brands to generate qualified leads and drive sales. They also offer content marketing, email marketing, SEO, and paid ads services.

According to their website, they have generated over 7 million leads for their customers and have worked with companies such as Arrowquip, Kangol, Stanley, Sysco, Virginia Lottery, and more. 

If you choose to work with their company, you can contact them on their website. 

5 – Pearl Lemon Leads

Pearl Lemon Leads is a full-service UK lead generation service that generates qualified leads and drives revenue to grow businesses.

They have partnered with various notable companies, including TEDx, Appsumo, SemRush, Oracle, Upwork, and more.

They offer B2B lead generation services for B2B companies of all sizes to generate more qualified leads, increase brand awareness, and boost your online presence.

They implement varieties of B2B lead generation strategies to meet the needs of each client and generate revenue.

Some of these strategies include inbound marketing, content marketing, lead scoring, lead management, cold email, sales nurturing, and more. 

They also offer appointment-setting services to generate warm leads and close deals. They set up appointments with qualified prospects who have enough budget to buy from you and streamline the sales process. 

In addition, they offer outbound lead generation service — cold calling and cold emails — to generate leads for you.

Their team of email specialists writes effective emails that engage your prospects to “warm them up” and boost conversion. They also have a cold calling team that handles cold calling lead generation campaigns from scratch to produce results.

To get the pricing details of this company, you will have to book a call with them on their website.

6 – Cience

Cience is a B2B lead generation service that provides sales development and appointment-setting services for various B2B companies in over 150 industries.

They offer both outbound and inbound sales development to improve sales pipelines and generate revenue for different companies. 

Their outbound sales development service enables them to validate your ICP, target highly qualified leads through a multi-channel approach, and optimize SDR activities to generate sales opportunities. 

Meanwhile, their inbound sales development service involves validating your ICP, identifying your needs, developing well-structured messages that engage your inbound leads, and setting up a meeting for your business. 

Contrary to Nerdy Joe’s pricing plan, Cience offers a contractual plan — a minimum of 3 months — for their clients.

Although they don’t have an exact price for their websites on their services, you can use their ROI calculator to calculate and give an estimate on how much you will spend with the organization. 

7 – KlientBoost

KlientBoost is a performance marketing agency that provides various marketing services (paid advertising, search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, and more) to grow businesses.

They have worked for various agencies such as Upwork, Lytx, Juniper, Airbnb, Stanford University, and more.

One of the prominent marketing services they deliver is email marketing where they use emails to generate revenues for businesses. They research and build campaigns to bring your prospects closer to your marketing funnel. 

Whether it is crafting various types of emails to A/B testing, they manage your email marketing services through the heat ladder approach to get more opens, have a higher CTR, and generate more revenue.

They also perform email audits and ensure it performs well.

If you want to know about their pricing details, you have to use their ROI calculator to get an estimate. 

8 – Milia Marketing

Milia marketing is a digital marketing agency offering lead generation services for B2B and B2C companies.

Their goal is to give their clients a solid presence across all digital presence, build brand awareness, increase audience engagement, and drive more sales for businesses. 

They offer both long and short-term solutions, based on creative and innovative approaches to create relevant content that suits the needs of their clients.

They also use high-quality tracking tools to improve content optimization, search performance, and website conversion. 

They also work within your budget to deliver personalized services that maximize ROI. If you want to know their pricing details and work with the company, you have to schedule a 30-minute call with them. 

Why you need to outsource lead generation to a digital agency

As a business owner, you may find lead generation to be challenging and time-consuming, especially when you have a lot of tasks to handle on your desk.

In this case, you have to assess your capabilities and determine whether you should hire in–house marketers to do it for you or outsource your lead generation efforts. 

Although the struggle behind making the decision is real, there are numerous advantages you can derive when you outsource your marketing efforts.

In this section, we will explore the benefits of outsourcing your lead generation efforts to a digital agency. 

1 – Evolve with current trends and experts

The world is always evolving. If you want to be in the race and stay updated with current trends, you may have to outsource your lead generation efforts.

Outsourcing efforts enable you to stay aware of the latest technologies in the market. You also connect with experts that can use these technologies to improve and achieve your goals. 

Lead generation companies may specialize in one area. However, they are multi-facet experts who provide different services such as content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, SEO, content creation, and SEO.

Evolving with these experts allows you to improve visibility and stay updated with the changes in the marketing world.

2 – It saves time

Targeting the right audience is extremely important if you want to drive revenue. Your in-house team can spend more time researching the right audience for your company.

But by outsourcing the efforts, you can achieve such tasks within a smaller time frame through the data your outsourced team already possesses. 

Lead generation agencies only target your ideal customer profile or prospects who are interested in using your products or services.

This prevents your in-house team from wasting time on irrelevant leads that won’t yield results. 

3 – It minimizes workload and stress

When you outsource your lead generation efforts to a digital agency, you can have your in-house team concentrate on those leads and convert them into paying customers.

Not only does this process reduce workload, but it also decreases stress in the work environment. 

Less stress equals better mental health which can subsequently increase workforce productivity.

Besides, accomplishing your goals and avoiding irrelevant targets boosts their morale and improves their satisfaction. This enables them to feel motivated and more dedicated toward their following goals.  

4 – It is cost effective

If you plan to hire an in-house team to collect leads yourself, you have to pay for the visible costs — salaries, sick days, software, insurance, office electricity bills, and more.

However, outsourcing your lead generation efforts strips away some of these expenses. You can spend the saved money on other departments or other expenses that can contribute to your overall ROI.

5 – Access to the right technologies

If you want your in–house team to carry out lead generation, you must have various software and technological gadgets. However, outsourcing to an agency implies that you don’t have to worry about the tools they will use. 

They have all the tools you need to get the job done. This encourages productivity and contributes to the growth of your business.

6 – You don’t have to hire someone

Lead generation is the lifeline of many businesses. Creating a sales funnel, setting up an email, launching offers, or capturing lead assets may be some of the tactics you must implement before you can generate leads.

But the truth is that all the aforementioned factors require significant investment and expertise. 

Most times, it takes time to train someone, at least three times. In some cases, it takes a longer time for the trainee to develop the skills required to achieve success for your business. 

But outsourcing your lead generation efforts to another team doesn’t allow you to go through this process. You don’t have to waste time training someone.

Most digital agencies already have experts that will focus solely on your company. As soon as you give them the job, they jump on the board right away and bring you qualified leads.

7 – You can evaluate their results

Outsourcing your lead generation efforts means hiring a team that understands data management.

Irrespective of the service you pay for (inbound or outbound lead generation), they will present their results as a detailed report and evaluate it against your marketing goals.

This means you can see whether the campaign run by the outreach team is a success or a failure. 

You can also review the performance of their B2B campaigns and ensure there is improvement in their activities (numbers and quality of leads).

This doesn’t only help you to generate more and better-qualified leads, but also helps you to create a successful marketing strategy. 

Let Nerdy Joe generate sales qualified leads for you

There are a lot of great companies featured in this list and you can choose based on your needs. We are a digital marketing agency specializing in outbound lead generation. We use cold emails to generate sales qualified leads for companies. 

So, if you are looking for:

• An agency that uses cold email to bring your qualified leads
• An agency that charges you for results, not tasks.
• An agency that doesn’t require you to commit to a contract.
• An agency that does not waste your time and that’s affordable.
• A group of experts that care about your company’s reputation and relationship with prospects.

Nerdy Joe is the digital agency you’re looking for. 

calendar with 6 meetings with high-quality leads at only $999. Let’s fill your calendar now!

It’s almost impossible to get B2B executives to buy a SaaS or e-commerce product they didn’t know about with mere sales emails. 

Among other things, you need to: 

• Create a good first impression and get them to engage with your messages.
• Show them why your offer is relevant by highlighting the unique pain points you solve.
• Educate them on the product and how they can use it.
• Create some product experience to show them the lifestyle they can have using your product.
• Highlight the values they can expect from using your product.
• Handle their objections. 
• Show your unique advantage over competing products.
• And more.

So, as you build your product and are on the cusp of launching a marketing campaign to sell it, it can be challenging to nail all these components down into your messaging strategy.

And that’s why you need a cold email sequence.

A cold email sequence allows you to build a step-by-step cold email campaign, a messaging system that feeds your prospects with the right message at the right time throughout a well-designed sales process and eventually gets them into paying customers. 

In this article, you’ll learn how to create highly converting sales emails you can use to close your potential clients in the B2B space.

Among other things, we also incorporate cold email templates you can use as inspiration to come up with a killer cold email sequence that will generate leads and paying customers. 

Note: Struggling to get replies or book meetings with prospects that fit in your ICP? We’ll help you get 6 SQLs or book 6 meetings with prospects that are ready to buy for only $999/month. Book a 15-minute consultation now.

What Is A Cold Email Sequence? 

A cold email sequence is a series of cold emails that you program using a time interval and/or based on triggers/events and sends automatically to your prospects. 

The true power of a cold email sequence is that it works like the buyer’s journey. It involves funnel-like messaging with a nurturing email sequence that moves your prospects through stages of the buyer’s journey — from the first touch to the step you close them and turns them into customers. 

Throughout the cold email outreach process, your job is to feed your targets with the necessary information to learn about your product offer, build a relationship, and eventually get them to buy from you.

Read more: How to Generate B2b Leads With Cold Outreach [Case Study]

Why Sending Cold Email Sequences Is Important?

The whole value of sending cold email sequences revolves around the fact that sending a single cold email and calling it quits won’t get you any results. 

Statistics show that it takes a sales rep an average of 5-7 cold emails before closing a client. 

Think about cold calls. You cannot get a customer to buy from a single call. No matter what you sell or what value you provide during the call. 

Case in point, a study by The Brevet Group confirmed that 80% of sales require five follow-up calls after the meeting. The same goes for cold emailing. 

As the marketing and sales adage goes, the fortune is in the follow-up. You need to send follow-up emails after the first touch email before expecting results. 

And the best way to do this is to write a powerful follow-up email sequence. This means creating cold email campaigns with the appropriate number of follow-up emails.

There are a lot of success stories and statistics out there, but here is the main reason why this is how it needs to be. 

When cold emailing prospects for the first time, there are a couple of boxes you need to check off before they can trust and buy from you. 

Here are the main considerations. 

• They didn’t know who you are
• They didn’t know about your product
• They didn’t know about your brand
• They might not be aware of the problem you’re trying to solve
• They’re not ready to buy right away
• They don’t trust you right away
• And more and more objections

So you need a cold email sequence, a funnel to break the ice, move prospects from problem aware to solution aware, create a nurturing email sequence to convince them of the value of your offer, handle their objections, and get them to buy. 

This process is the very reason you need a follow-up email sequence to make your communications more impactful and stay on top of your prospects’ minds. 

You can provide more value as you move your prospects between stages with your email sequence, easily build a relationship with them, and eventually win them over. 

Read more: 30+ Effective Sales Email Subject Lines To Get Opens

The Anatomy Of a Great Cold Email Sequence

Here are a few traits and characteristics of an effective cold email sequence. 

It’s run on autopilot

You create your email sequence and compose it with X cold emails, follow up as many times as your cold email campaigns require, and have it all running on autopilot — without having to send them manually or one on one. 

You can also incorporate trigger-based follow-up emails in the sequence to send specific emails to prospects if they reply or want out of your mailing list. 

Keep in mind that this isn’t anything like “set it up in a cold email software and forget it” because you’ll have to monitor campaign results and move prospects to different segments based on how they reply or react to the previous emails in the sequence. 

It works like a chain

Unlike a single cold email, cold email campaigns with multi-step follow-up emails allow you to nurture your prospects and provide value and gain credibility that leads them to buy. 

As we mentioned in the intro, cold email sequences aim to provide your prospects with step-by-step information about a product or service they did not know existed.

The whole idea is that your prospects are not ready to buy right away. And so, the email sequence helps you build a stairway up to purchase — going from education to product integration. 

You get to include several email touches with different marketing materials and calls to action (CTAs) that help you move your potential customers along the process. 

The biggest value of this strategy lies in the value it provides to your prospects and the relationship you build with them. 

Using email sequences allows you to provide information that answers prospects’ questions and provides ways they can solve their pain points or grow their business. 

It fosters trust and lets you move prospects throughout your sales cycle, which ends up with them buying and you getting new customers.

This makes it a great tool for creating long-term relationships that build trust and brand loyalty. 

Read more: 650+ Power Words to Boost Your Conversion (+ Templates)

It incorporates the sales funnel and the buyer’s journey

If you know a thing or two about B2B marketing, you probably know that conversion doesn’t happen overnight. It takes multi-step strategies to get most companies and B2B executives to buy a product, and that’s true for any type of content marketing. 

Let’s take content marketing, for example. Selling a SaaS tool will require a blog content calendar that includes:

• Top of the funnel content: (Awareness stage) For example, an informational blog post about your tool and how it is the solution that solves your customer’s biggest pain point, etc. 
• Middle of the funnel content: (Consideration stage) Posts that have both informational and commercial value. Here, marketers don’t aggressively push for product integration but show your value (over the competition, for example).
• Bottom of the funnel content: (Decision stage) Posts with commercial value and aggressive marketing. Generally, a blog post is filled with social proof, pain points, solutions, etc. And more content for fulfillment and retention.  

An email sequence work (almost) the same way. So first thing, it’s not anything like sending one cold email and sending random follow-ups. 

You will need to create a structured, well-thought-out, and streamlined message sequence using the buyer’s journey and the sales funnel. 

And for this, you will need to create a certain number of emails spread over a well-defined period — usually from an initial email to a breakup email.

Think of it like a content calendar that you deploy for a specific result at the end of the quarter. 

Each email in the sequence should build up on the previous email and move your prospects one step ahead in the funnel — from awareness to decision to loyalty.

Here is an example of a well-structured cold email sequence. 

You can see how each email builds on the previous one and how they all form one sales funnel. 

That said, here are a few goals you may need to keep in mind while writing your cold email sequence to make it impactful and set yourself up for maximum results:

• Assist them in their purchase path, educate them
• Handle any objections or reservations they have along the way
• Establish authority and credibility in the industry
• Make you an expert so that you become their provider of choice when they’re ready to buy

Note: Struggling to get replies or book meetings with prospects that fit in your ICP? We’ll help you get 6 SQLs or book 6 meetings with prospects that are ready to buy for only $999/month. Book a 15-minute consultation now.

How To Create An Excellent Cold Email Sequence in 4 steps

So, how do you create a cold email sequence that’s so good that people want to read it and buy from you?

In our experience, there are three main things that you need to nail down to perfection:

• Know who you’re selling to
• Provide the right content at the right time
• Know how and when to introduce your product

If you do these right, everything else will fall into place, and you’ll be able to sell your product like never before. 

That cleared; here are specific actions you need to take to ace your cold email sequence. 

1- Build your target audience / Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

If your cold outreach strategy targets the wrong person, you might as well bang your head against a wall. Nailing down the right person to target is the first step to ensuring good results for your email campaign. 

If you target the wrong people, it doesn’t matter how compelling you make the offer and the cold email; it all goes downhill from there. So, how do you find your audience segment? 

Your target audience is the companies that will best benefit from your solution. So simply ask yourself about the needs or problems your product or solution solves. The answer will let you know who your product is important too, and that’s the very audience you should target with your cold emails.

Your competitors’ customers are also ideal for your business. These are ideally the customers of companies that sell a product or service that addresses the same pain point as yours. So you can look for companies that use your competitors’ products and target them with your cold email outreach.

Next, ask yourself about who or the companies that CAN actually adopt your product or are eligible to do so. Simply because a target has a problem you can solve doesn’t mean they CAN buy or they will be able to adopt your solution. Why? 

• Budget: The company needs your product or service. Great!! But can they pay for it? Do they have the financial means to buy your product?
• Geography: Are they geographically eligible for your product? Can they access your product? Or will the product work where they are?
• Logistics: Are they logistically eligible for your product? Can they actually use your product? Do they have the necessary talent and tools for it?

Figuring this out will help you check off-targets that will be useless to target and get you to focus on the right customer profile. 

2- Research your buyer persona

The question you need to answer here is who are you going to target at the company?

Suppose you sell a Fin-Tech piece of software specific to digital marketing agencies. Should you be sending your cold email to the CEO? The marketers at the company? Or the accountant? 

The point is to send your cold email to someone with the expertise to understand your product and, with the decision, power to further your cause. 

In this very instance, your cold outreach will best make sense to the accountant. And that’s your buyer persona. 

For every company you target with your Fin-Tech software, you should always seek people in the finance department with the decision-making power to adopt your product.

Also, in the B2B space, depending on what product you sell, the decision-making power may not be attributed to a single person but rather to a buying committee — which will propose and amend ideas before implementation. 

And so, you need to target these companies accordingly. This is also important because you’ll have to write your emails according to their personas. 

3- Create powerful icebreakers for your first touch email in the sequence

As the name implies, icebreakers are designed to help you break the ice between you and your prospects and make them more receptive to your message. Using icebreakers is all about making basic research to make your leads feel valued.

For most sales reps and marketers, the prospects or leads they will be targeting don’t know about them or their product. The same applies to you.

Creating icebreakers allows you to have a good first impression and set yourself apart. It reinforces the statement that you did your homework before reaching out to them. 

Here is how we do it at Nerdy Joe before launching our campaigns.

Check their social media

We start by checking prospects’ activities on social platforms and popular online communities. In most cases, LinkedIn and Twitter work for most B2B professionals. 

Record their activity

Next, we look at their latest activities, their company’s activity, or anything else. The idea is to find a recent interesting aspect or element from their life and spark it at the beginning of the message to smoothen the conversation. 

So, we look at things like posts, likes, comments, recent promotions, job recommendations, impressive career paths, a share, mention, a selfie, and whatever data we can talk about to create a unique first touch.

Put everything in a spreadsheet

Here is an example of how we keep it all in a spreadsheet before the campaign.

Read more: How to Write Cold Email Opening Lines That Get Replies

4- Always add a clear and simple call to action (CTA).

This is an engagement email sequence, adding a call to action should be a must. You always want your prospects to take a specific action. That’s the whole interest of reaching out to them. 

Adding a CTA should be simple and straightforward. 

• Want your prospects to buy?: Add a purchase button and urge them to click it. 
• Want your prospects to reply?: Ask them to do so.
• Want your prospects to perform a specific action?: Add a button pertaining to that action and ask them to take it.

Read more: How to End an Email: 20+ Best Ending Phrases and Ways to Sign Off

5- Factor in the Buyer’s Journey Stages

Now that you know who you’re reaching out to, it’s time to learn how to reach out to them and the best practices for doing it. 

As we mentioned earlier, you can only convert most buyers with multi-step marketing strategies, especially in the B2B area. 

They don’t know about you or your products, and when you do tell them, they will have doubts and constraints. 

That’s why you need to create a follow-up email sequence that factors in the buyer’s journey. 

Creating a cold outreach sequence with the buyer’s journey in mind allows you to take your prospects from point A, where they are not aware of your product, to point B, where they are product aware, and then to the next points until they purchase your product. 

Doing so helps you cover all the steps in an average sales cycle that are necessary for your success, and in the end, your prospects will be the most compelled to consider you. 

Let’s reiterate all the steps you have to take your prospects through. 

• They don’t know who you are, what you offer, or even your company.
• They might not be aware of the problem you’re trying to solve.
• They’re not ready to buy right away.
• They don’t trust you right away.
• And more and more objections.

With that in mind, your cold email sequence should look like a slope that mirrors the buyer’s journey. Here are the different stages of the buyers’ journey. 

Unaware – Pain – Solution – Product – Most aware

Now, here is a visual representation of an example of a cold email sequence based on the entire buyer’s journey. 

Also, depending on your target audience and product, it can be that your prospects are already deep in the buyer’s journey—in which case you’ll have to prepare your emails accordingly. Maybe they’re unaware and still facing the pain. 

Maybe they’re facing a problem and looking for a solution.

Let’s say, for example, that before you, your target prospects were using a competitor’s product or tool. In this case, your email shouldn’t include all the steps in the buyer’s journey. 

You should build a specific sequence with relevant messages starting from the solution stage. 

A good idea is to create one email that rapidly goes through all the previous stages and slides directly to the solution stage. 

You should always take the time to properly identify which stage of the buyer’s journey your target prospects are in before kicking off the campaign. 

This way, you can customize your email body to reflect each stage.

Otherwise, your campaign will be a hot mess with messages not relevant and provide no value to the readers. 

6- Make relevant offers

First of all, not all offers are great for your target audience. Your offers are only welcome when they’re relevant and appealing to the target audience. 

So first thing, you cannot make the same offer to prospects in different stages of the buyer’s journey. Since they’re not on the same journey, you should create different segments and feed them accordingly. 

This means you have to design specific emails and offers tailored to where they are on the buyer’s journey. 

For example, for prospects that are at the “Unaware” stage, your main goal is to build product knowledge. 

It makes little sense to offer anything at that stage.

But for your prospects who are already at the “Solution” stage, your goal is to create a product experience that leads to adoption. And so your 40% off offer is welcome here. 

Also, since your goal is to create a product experience, you can create another segment for prospects who are reluctant, have objections, or must go through leadership to get buy-in for product adoption, etc. 

Ideally, those prospects are already at the solution stage.

And so, for these people, it can be a great idea to offer extended free trials (7, 14 days, or one month), free coupons, etc., to get them to act on your offers and give your product a chance. 

3 cold email templates with different touches

Your cold email sequence should be composed of several emails riddled with product advantages, objections and doubt handling, soft and aggressive selling, and more.

Cold Email Campaign 1

Here is a visual representation of the cold email sequence template, along with the buyer’s journey you can use.

Now, here are cold email templates that you can include in this sequence. 

1st touch: Intro email

2nd touch: More advantages

3rd touch: Handling objection

4th touch: Adding more value

5th touch: Selling softly

6th touch: Selling aggressively

7th touch: Breaking up

Cold Email Campaign 2

1st touch: Intro email

2nd touch: More advantages

3rd touch: Handling objections

4th touch: Providing value

5th touch: Gentle reminder email

6th touch: Soft selling

7th touch: Soft sell and breakup

Cold Email Campaign 3

1st touch: Intro

2nd touch: More advantages

3rd touch: Handling objections

4th touch: Low-risk offer

5th touch: Right person, right direction

6th touch: Selling

7th touch: Breakup

It’s Time to Create Cold Outreach Sequence That Close Deals

• There is no doubt that you can get tremendous marketing results using cold email sequences. With a good cold email sequence, you can convert a prospect into a paying customer and improve the loyalty of current customers. 
• Keep in mind that your main objective is to always make your prospects want to go to the next step. Each sentence in your email body should prepare and make them more open to receiving the next message.
• The main advantage of email sequences is that once configured, they work for you. The sending is totally automated and spread over a predetermined period of time. This is the great advantage of Marketing automation.