Opt In | Ep. 52

Cold Email Engagement Tactics that Help Reps Build the Trust and Credibility They Need to Succeed.

Every message you send trains people to open or delete your next message. But more importantly, it trains them to view you as a trusted resource or as a nuisance.

Ethan Beute said that in his podcast with us on grabbing attention & building relevance. Those two things – attention and relevance – are gold for SDRs. The more, the better.

Making them a staple part of your email process is tough. It’s not easy becoming a trusted resource, nor is it easy to build credibility.

But it’s really (really) easy to lose them both. And if you do, success will be hard to come by.

That’s why good email copywriting and engagement tactics are so valuable for SDR teams. They help you establish and build the trust and credibility you need to succeed in this modern sales environment.

You have to leverage tactics like:

• Building continuity – not just in your first message but across all messages
• Leaving out the “how” and leveraging relevant case studies
• Making sure preview text hooks your reader

We could go on and on.

And Maggie Blume of Mailshake did just that.

She and AJ tore down a cold email, talked through what tweaks she would make, and shared some additional insight in our latest onDemand event.

There’s a lot wrong with cold email today, and we don’t expect to fix it all in 30 minutes. But we can damn well try

The big theme? Be a human.

Opt In to putting your prospects first in your cold email outreach.

The best way to learn about this is to watch the recording (linked above), but if you’re looking for an abbreviated learning experience we’ve got you covered:

AJ

The more human you are, the better. And while that might seem obvious, it’s easy to slip into “robot mode” as an SDR. Especially if your activity KPIs are on the higher end.

Tiering your outreach can help on the process side of things, but the content side is a whole other beast.

Remember – you’re a human being sending an email to another human being. If you read your email and it doesn’t sound like a human (ideally, you) wrote it, you have to go back to the drawing board.

AI is getting more and more sophisticated (looking at you, ChatGPT), but it’s still pretty obvious when the tone of voice is a human vs. a robot. When your emails are robotic, they don’t grab attention or build relevance. And if they don’t do that, you end up in the trash.

Robots create noise. Humans cut through that noise.

Alex

Deliverability isn’t just an IT issue. And if you’re not thinking about deliverability, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

You could write the world’s greatest cold email of all time…only to have it land in someone’s SPAM folder because your domain reputation is too low. As if SDRs need something else to frustrate them on a day-to-day basis.

A lot of the copy and engagement tactics that Maggie covered go hand-in-hand with deliverability. Being intentional about word choice, building plain-text emails, and not over-complicating your cadence can go a long way to ensure you end up in an inbox.