I wonder if anyone thinks that email marketing to cold prospects is still a good idea? I don’t mean contacting people who are genuinely engaged in what you sell. Newsletters, sales promotions and insight sharing are great ways to stay in contact with your customer base. Just so long as those people are have made the decision to listen.

It may be a shock to some, but even your most loyal customers are probably not that bothered about hearing the latest internal hires and account wins at your business. For your prospects, there is probably little they could care about less.

‘But surely they will be interested in our latest product launch? After all, it’s the answer to all their problems!?…’ Well, maybe they would if they didn’t have hundreds of other generic emails clogging their inbox every day (assuming they even manage their own emails of course).

If you want to get the attention of someone who doesn’t know you, it requires more than just words. It requires building a bond of respect, trust and a real, meaningful human connection.

Email might be the way that business gets done. But it certainly isn’t the way that cold introductions are done. It’s just too overloaded with junk. It doesn’t matter if you have the best product in the world, if you bomb people with email, they won’t hear you. Probably the only thing that will is their email inbox rules.

It’s the reason that a response rate of less than 3% is considered ‘exceptional ’ for any type of email campaign, even the ones where people have chosen to hear from you.

Cold introductions require something new and thought-provoking that captures the prospect’s imagination. Who thinks email is still capable of offering that?