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Getting people to respond to cold outreach messages isn't easy. You need to find a way to make your cold emails stand out in your prospects' inboxes and make it easy for them to reply.
In this article, weâll show you actionable strategies you can implement to improve your response rate and grow your sales pipeline using outreach.
Let's dive in.
What Outreach Response Rate Should You Aim For?
When measuring outreach, the best benchmark is against your existing campaigns.
That said, here are some key metrics on response rates from 65+ million journeys sent with QuickMail.
The best 25% of campaigns have a 20% reply rate or more
Around 50% of all cold outreach campaigns have a reply rate of less than 10%
Approximately 25% of campaigns have a reply rate of 10-20%
If you can see a 10-20% reply rate, that's already a good start. It shows that you've chosen the right people to reach out to, and it proves that your email template resonates with that audience.
But, if you want to get to the next level and consistently get a reply rate of 20% or above, you'll need to ensure you're abiding by best practices and focused on using your outreach to deliver massive value to your recipients.
In the next section, letâs look at actionable tips you can follow to get more people to respond to outreach and grow your business with cold email.
10 Powerful Ways to Get More Responses to Outreach
1. Warm Up Your Cold Email Inbox to Improve Deliverability
The first step to getting people to respond to outreach is landing in their inbox in the first place.
To ensure your emails always arrive in the primary inbox, you need to warm up your inbox. This process shows email service providers (ESPs) that youâre a trustworthy sender and ensure you donât regularly get caught in spam filters.
The best way to do this is with email warm-up software. Most are paid, but QuickMail offers a native integration with Mailflow's free email warmup tool.
You'll first need to sign up for an account and connect your cold email domain to use it. Then, join the Auto Warmer group.
Once you join, your inbox will send and receive emails from other real inboxes in MailFlow's Auto Warmer network.
If your email lands in the spam folder, it will be automatically marked as ânot spamâ and then replied to.
You can track how effectively your inbox is being warmed up in the MailFlow's Auto Warmer reports.
Itâll show you where your emails land: Spam, Primary Inbox, or Other Folders.
When your report shows that most of your emails are landing in the primary inbox, you know your inbox is ready to start sending cold outreach emails.
Good email deliverability is the foundation for getting replies to any cold email campaign, so donât slip this step.
2. Only Email Highly Qualified Prospects
The next key step in getting responses is to build a targeted prospect list.
Itâs easy to compromise at this stage.
We all want to reach out to more potential customers and win as much new business as possible from our sales emails.
But if you keep your prospect list highly targeted to small segments of your target market, you can improve your personalization and make your offer as relevant as possible to every recipient.
You'll reach out to fewer total prospects but will get a higher positive response rate.
When choosing your prospects, find ways to narrow your selection down.
Consider selecting potential clients based on criteria like:
How much influence a person has on an organization
The size of the company
The number of employees a company has
Their open roles and vacancies
The technology they use on their website
The more granular you can get, the better.
This also means you can spend more time researching each person on your list. When your prospect sees your email, theyâll immediately see that youâre reaching out to solve a pain point they have and arenât just putting them on an email blast with thousands of other people.
To build a highly targeted prospect list of email recipients, you can use prospecting tools like:
These tools will help you identify prospects based on key criteria about them and their company and will show you verified contact information, including an email address.
3. Save Your Prospectâs Time with Simple and Direct Templates
The people youâre reaching out to are busy. They donât have time to read a long email, particularly if they donât already know you.
It's crucial that you respect their time by keeping your email focused and only including essential information.
In most cases, you can keep your email structure simple and only include:
A personalized icebreaker that shows youâve done your research into them
A sentence explaining what problem you can solve for them
Mentioning some social proof, like dropping a similar client
A call-to-action with a clear next step
Combine this with a simple email copy, and your recipient will instantly know what youâre reaching out about.
Itâll be easy for them to reply and take the next steps.
4.
One of the significant challenges of cold emailing is building trust with prospects. This is because there are many scams out there, from tech support scams to people trying to steal your identity.
Adding social proof to your emails is the best way to do this.
Social proof is anything that shows your recipient that youâre a trustworthy person. This could include:
Mentioning a past result you had for a client
Adding names of one or two notable clients to your email template
Mentioning a mutual connection with your prospect
In an email, this might be as simple as a sentence like:
Our agency recently helped [similar client] generate 35 leads per month with our lead generation services
We helped a similar e-commerce brand increase product page conversion rates by 154% with our CRO audit
I put together a case study showing how we helped [similar client] grow their revenue using our recommendations â shall I send it over?
Your social proof will help quickly build trust and improve your chances of getting a response.
5. Make it All About Your Recipient
Your cold email needs to be all about the person on the receiving end. Your prospects want to know how you can help them. In your first email, they won't be interested in learning about all your products or services, how long you've been in business, or even pricing.
They want to know:
Why are you explicitly reaching out to them
What results can they expect from your product or service
What the next steps are
For example, take this podcast invite email template from The Top:
Itâs straight to the point and mentions the prospectâs name and company name. Itâs tailored to the industry (SaaS), and ideally, the recipient will have heard of the people mentioned as social proof.
If the recipient felt they were a fit for the podcast, it would be an easy email to respond to.
On the other hand, if the email was describing their podcast, past guests, and who the host is, it wouldnât be as interesting to the recipient.
6. Use Personalization to Show You Care About Each Recipient
Your prospects know that theyâre not the only person on your email list, but itâs vital that you make them feel like they are.
The best way to do this is with either:
A unique email opening line
A personalized P.S. note at the end of your email
Including either of these elements will make your email unique and show every prospect that your email is only being sent to them.
This is going to add time to your prospecting process, but the result will be an increase in response rates, so itâs worth it.
The easiest way to do this at scale is to add a new column to your prospect list titled âOpening_Line.â
Whenever you add a new prospect to your list, spend five minutes researching their background and finding ways to personalize your emails. Write a one-sentence reference to this in your Opening_Line column, and that will be how your emails start.
When creating your email template in QuickMail, add your Opening_Line attribute. When your email is sent, it will automatically populate with text from your spreadsheet.
AI email writing tools like Lyne.ai can help you speed up the opening line writing process. These tools are helpful, but if you rely on them, always make sure to verify that the information they generate is factual.
7. Donât Overthink Your Subject Line
Your subject line is the first thing your prospect sees.
You don't want it to be too formal, so use camel caps or include emojisâthose will blend in with the marketing emails that your prospect is receiving.
When crafting one, you need to keep it straightforward. It will frame your prospect's expectations for when they open the email.
If you need some inspiration, we shared 55 examples of cold email subject lines here.
Some options you could use include:
Solving [problem] for {{company.name}}?
Quick question {{prospect.first_name}}
Follow up after {{event/conference}}
Wondering about your sales goals for Q4?
Options like these work nicely because they frame what your cold email will be about and show that you're a real person.
Iâd recommend keeping it simple and casual. If you think your subject line is causing problems, you can always A/B test different variations in your cold email software.
8. Add Follow-Up Emails to Boost Reply Rates
Data from millions of emails sent using QuickMail found that 55% of replies to campaigns come from a follow-up email step.
We also saw that the optimal number of follow-ups to get responses to your outreach is three.
The reason for this is simple.
Your prospects are busy, and replying to a cold email isnât a priority, even if theyâre interested in your product or service.
Your follow-up emails prove to your prospects that you have something of value. If not, you wouldnât be going out of your way to remind them.
Thereâs no exact science as to what makes a follow-up effective.
But, you can use your follow-ups to:
Reiterate the problem you can solve
Bring in a case study or add new social proof
Try a new call-to-action thatâs lower commitment
Your email will be bumped to the top of your prospect's inbox, and you'll have an extra chance to get a reply.
For example, check out this follow-up example from RepurposeHouse:
It brings in a case study and explains the benefits
The benefits are specific and timely: grow site sessions by 100% in 90 days
The call-to-action is simple: book a call
To send a follow-up, add a new campaign step in QuickMail after your first cold email.
Choose âWait,'then select the days, hours, or minutes you want to wait before sending your next email or LinkedIn step.
After that, add a new email step and write up your template.
Check the âInclude previous email' to ensure the email is in the same thread and you're ready to go.
If a prospect replies, theyâre automatically removed from the sequence, so they wonât receive unnecessary extra emails from you.
9. Increase Your Sending Volume with Inbox Rotation
If you see good results from your campaigns, itâs time to scale up.
To do this, youâll need to send emails from multiple inboxes at once, as ESPs have sending limits. However, most tools only let you send your campaigns from one inbox at a time.
In QuickMail, you can add new inboxes to your account and add those to the same campaign.
You wonât need to copy-paste your campaigns, risk making mistakes, or have to deal with logistical headaches.
Once your new inboxes are connected, all you need to do is select which ones you want to use in any campaign.
As your campaign runs, the Inbox Rotation tool will automatically spread your sending volume across all selected inboxes.
You can track and manage all of your replies inside QuickMail, so there wonât be a risk of replies getting lost in different inboxes.
This is a powerful way to scale campaign volume and ensure technical limitations are not holding you back.
10. Use QuickMail for Omni-Channel Outreach
You canât do outreach marketing and email outreach campaigns manually. It would take hours to write out each email or LinkedIn message and send them one by one.
Thatâs where QuickMail comes in. You can automate everything you need to in one place, from sending LinkedIn connection requests to prospects to following up through email or LinkedIn messages.
You can use it to:
Automate your entire process in one place
Send personalized cold emails to a list of prospects at scale
Connect with prospects on LinkedIn and follow up with an InMail message or email
Automatically follow up at custom intervals if someone doesn't reply
Track your campaign metrics like open rate and reply rate
The platform includes everything you need for omnichannel outreach.
If you follow the best practices weâve looked at for getting people to respond to outreach, it wonât be long before your inbox is full of interested leads.
You can try QuickMail for free with a 14-day trial.
Wrapping Up
The foundation for any successful outreach campaign is a product or service that can solve the actual pain points of the people you're reaching out to.
Once you have that, you can follow these steps and best practices to optimize your approach and maximize your reply rate.
When you have a formula that works and regularly see a 15-20% or higher reply rate, you can start scaling your sending volume by adding new inboxes to each campaign.
If you're ready to set up omnichannel outreach across email and LinkedIn that gets replies,click here to start your 14-day trial of QuickMail.
