{"id":4116,"date":"2017-10-26T14:30:06","date_gmt":"2017-10-26T12:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodpecker.co\/blog\/?p=4116"},"modified":"2025-01-21T10:26:23","modified_gmt":"2025-01-21T09:26:23","slug":"dont-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodpecker.co\/blog\/dont-work\/","title":{"rendered":"What to Do if You Feel Like Cold Emails Don’t Work for You?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever felt like that? You’ve sent\u00a0a cold email<\/span><\/a> campaign and you’ve got poor response. “Argh, this just doesn’t work for me…” I bet most of us have thought that to themselves at least once.\u00a0In moments like that, we are usually demotivated and we feel helpless. We feel like we want to give up. But if you give up too soon,\u00a0you might miss a lot of opportunities.<\/p>\n

Before giving up on cold emailing<\/span>,\u00a0you can do at least\u00a012 things to\u00a0verify if cold emails<\/span> really<\/em> don’t work for you, or if they haven’t work for you because you were missing something in your approach. See what you can do.<\/p>\n

For starters, one crucial realization<\/h2>\n

Cold emailing<\/span> is not supposed to be easy.<\/p>\n

I know you might have read or heard somewhere that it is the gold solution for lead generation. But no one says how much time and research it takes to work out a system for outbound emailing<\/span> that actually brings a steady influx of leads to a company.<\/p>\n

In fact, I haven’t heard of a person who launched their first cold email<\/span> campaign and immediately got amazing results. It takes a lot of strenuous research and numerous tests to make cold email<\/span> outreach\u00a0truly\u00a0work. The research takes time. The tests take even more time.<\/p>\n

So if you’ve been expecting immediate results from your first campaign, you may (and probably will) be sorely dissapointed.<\/p>\n

The first thing to realize is that: if your first campaign didn’t work the way you expected, you may have had wrong expectations.<\/p>\n

Expectations vs. reality<\/h3>\n

If you had expected a spectacular success and hundreds of new hot leads, and instead you got just a bunch of negative responses or no responses at all \u2013<\/span> trust me, you’ve just become a member of a very large group of cold email<\/span> senders.<\/p>\n

In truth, when starting with cold emailing<\/span>, you should be rather prepared for numerous attempts and tests that will end up with failure before you will see positive responses.<\/p>\n

That’s weird, right? Everyday I’m working on marketing a cold email<\/span> automation software, so why would I tell you it’s difficult? I should be telling you cold emailing<\/span> is a simple, no-brainer solution for all your sales<\/span> problems. You just write a couple emails<\/span>, set them up to be sent, and you get tons of positive replies, right?<\/p>\n

Well, I could say that. But that would be just wishful thinking.<\/p>\n

And I don’t want you to plan your sales<\/span> outreach process on wishful thinking. I want you to take a realistic look at cold emailing<\/span>, and I need you to accept that an essential part of mastering cold email<\/span> outreach is failing.<\/p>\n

The good thing about failing, though, is that…<\/h2>\n

Failure is the first step towards making cold emails<\/span> work for you. Negative responses, lack of responses, low open rates, high bounce rates, and all the bad stuff that may have happened to you \u2013<\/span> they’re all feedback.<\/p>\n

The good things, like high open and response rates, high deliverability, numerous positive responses \u2013<\/span> those are feedback as well.<\/p>\n

And you need to be prepared for both kinds of feedback.<\/p>\n

The feedback, both positive and negative, helps you learn. And the only way to get feedback in this particular context \u2013 cold emailing (with your product\/service and your prospect group)\u00a0\u2013 is a lot of practice.<\/p>\n

Come to think of it, practice and feedback are necessary to master\u00a0any field. That’s something I learned from\u00a0Daniel Kahneman, psychologist, Nobel Prize Award winner.<\/p>\n