7 tips for boosting your cold email open rate

And get more replies.

Elric Legloire - Outbound Chef

Oct 23, 2022

Read time: 4:51

[Update] This Wednesday, I launch my podcast: SDR Game.

To make sure you don’t miss the launch, subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

We‘re just getting started!

I’ll publish 3 episodes on Wednesday:

Episode #1: Prospecting, what's working at Mosaic, selling to a new persona, and sales books with Matthew Roberts
Episode #2: Building a personal brand as a rep with Tom Alaimo
Episode #3: How to be authentic as an SDR with Mattia Schaper

This week, I want to give you 7 to improve your open rate.

As I’m working with the Enterprise SDR team, with a lot of noise in our prospects inboxes, we have been able to almost double our open rate and reply rate in the past 3 weeks at Chili Piper.

With improving your open rates, the more opens you get, the fewer emails you need to send to get a reply so you can send more emails or spend time on other Revenue Generating Activities.

Improving your open rate is the easiest way to get more replies from your prospects

3 weeks ago I finished a course on Pavilion, where Florin Tatuela showed us why improving your open rate is important.

I underestimated the impact on my results and our team's results.

If you get 1 reply with a 30% open rate and send 100 emails

With 60% open rate, to get 1 reply you need to send 50 emails or send 100 emails and get 2 replies.

That’s massive.

Here are common issues I’m seeing with a low open rate:

Misleading subject lines
Just using 1 channel
Generic first line
High bounce rate
Using “ACME inc”

If you just use 1 channel, With no game plan, you don’t know if you are working towards your goals. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just not very productive to get a reply.

To increase your reply rate, you need to test subject lines but not only.

For the past weeks, with the Enterprise SDR team, we’ve been experimenting with different ways to improve our open rates. I want to share what we use to help us improve our results.

This week, we did a training on how to improve our open rate.

Our open rate was low. Here are the results from the previous weeks in October:

Week 1: 21%
Week 2: 25%
Week 3: 34.9%

Those results already lead to more demos booked and replies, for example: this week's reply rate: 3.5% vs 2% in week 1.

Here are 7 ways you can use to boost your open rate.

Let’s go!

1) Reduce your bounce Rate

The first thing to check, make sure that your bounce rate is lower than 3%.

The fewer bounces you get, the higher opens you’ll get.

How:

Verify email addresses with a tool like Hunter.io or Mailtester Ninja
If an email bounced, check if you have a verified email from another colleague of the prospect

2) Avoid spam filters

Email servers are smarter than ever, so anticipate getting into spam filters. The fewer bounces you get, the higher opens you’ll get.

Here’s how:

Avoid spam trigger words:
- “Earn $”,
- “Make money”,
- “Increase your sales”
- Hubspot wrote an article about this: The Ultimate List of 394 Email Spam Trigger Words to Avoid
Remove links/images from your emails/signatures

3) Time

Think about when your prospects are opening their emails. If your prospects spend 8h per day in meetings they won’t open your emails during those meetings.

How:

Ideally in the mornings or end of workdays.
Schedule your emails
Weekends - Executives reads often their emails on Sundays at 7-9pm

4) Subject line

A subject line's goal is to tell the prospect what the email is about and create curiosity.

Try and use what works for you.

Here are some examples that work for us and we are trying:

Personal

Mentioning something about the person or interaction you had with them.

It’s not 1 specific subject line but a lot of different ones. Amina of one our top SDRs has a 60-70% open rate with those subject lines with companies with 1k+ employees.

voicemail
my LinkedIn message
our short conversation

Or mentioning 1 thing from a phone conversation.

Mention direct reports

I got this one from Florin Tatuela: his open rates are around 70-90% for engineering personas and 60-70% for sales personas. (that’s high)

2 things you should leverage when coming up with this type of subject line:

Prospect Persona: SDR director

Direct reports: SDR manager

Examples:

round robin for SDR MANAGER 1 and SDR MANAGER 2
fair distribution for SDR MANAGER 1 and SDR MANAGER 2 teams

Problems

People naturally like to avoid problems. Include a pain a prospect deals with on a daily basis in the subject line, it’ll create curiosity.

Examples:

no show rate
pipeline distribution
SDR productivity

Mention executives

We are trying this one right now and got interesting results so far. I’ll share our results later.

Sometimes you won’t find anything about your prospects but you can about an executive or the boss of your prospects. If something is important for them, it might be for your prospect too.

Example with our CEOs or our SVP, Sale at Chili Piper:

Alina Vandenberghe words, not mine
Nicolas Vandenberghe article
Tom Rowe interview

Referrals

If you get a referral or info from a prospect, mention their name in your subject line.

Example:

Elric suggested I contact you
Elric said we should talk

5) Nail your first line

In a Gmail inbox, a prospect can read 18 words from your emails. Then click the “delete” button without opening your email.

Start with an observation to create curiosity and make them want to open it.

Here are some examples you can use:

Listening to your podcast episode with … Enjoyed your two cents on…
Was scrolling on your website and saw {{observation}} on your demo form.
Scrolling on your careers page. Looks like you're hiring a bunch of new BDRs this quarter.
Was scrolling on LinkedIn and saw your article, one line that stood out to me was {{line that stood out to you}}

6) Are your fields mapped correctly?

At Chili Piper, we use a lot of fields in our emails.

If you use custom fields, make sure to map them correctly to avoid using the wrong ones.

If you use company names in your subject line, clean the “inc, LLC” from your CRM.

7) Use different channels

It creates familiarity with your name/face/voice.

It gives different ways to interact with your prospect so they can engage with their preferred communication channel. It’ll create curiosity and make them open your email.

Something we are testing with our sequences is calling first, before sending an email.

Before sending your email:

LinkedIn Message

Voicemail:

Bob, I’m gonna send you a note right after this.
No need to call me back, mind replying and letting me know if it's interesting (or not)?
It’s Elric at Chili Piper.

After sending your email

LinkedIn Message

Voicemail

Bob, I just sent you an email with the subjet line: fair distribution.
No need to call me back, mind replying and letting me know if it's interesting (or not)?
It’s Elric at Chili Piper.

To recap:

Reduce your bounce Rate
Avoid spam filters
Test when is the best time to send your emails
Subject line
Nail your first line
Are your fields mapped correctly?
Use different channels

The open rate is not only affected by subject lines.

Increasing your open rate is important but not as important as getting a reply so don’t be misleading.

Try and let me know what works for you.

That's all for this Sunday. I hope you find these 7 tips helpful in boosting your open rate.

Quick Reminder: If you like my emails please do “add to address book” or reply.

See you next week.

Happy prospecting,

Elric

PS: Here're the 3 last issues if you miss them:

If you want to read the previous ones, you can here.

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