Cold emails are the emails you send to your prospects for a purpose. The purpose could be anything from educating them about your brand and the product they sell, informing them how your product can cater to their needs or solve an issue they have and more.

Cold emails are effective because even today multiple brands use this method, ‘’Eight out of 10 prospects want to talk to sales reps via email over any other medium.’’

Cold emails were considered to be looked down upon because first it was a traditional method and secondly the rise in social media was thought to overshadow other communication methods being used to engage with prospects.

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This isn’t in the case with cold emails.

Cold emails are used even today for multiple reasons. They haven’t lost their touch because there are reasons why their existence matters even in 2020 and the years to come.

Cold emails will confidently not vanish and to prove this, we have our next category that explains the vital reasons.

1. LET’S YOU REACH PROSPECTS IN THE PLATFORM THEY USE THE MOST

Emails are used at all times. In the business front, emails are used as a great way to schedule meetings, introduce yourself, and multiple other reasons. Emails are a great medium when it comes to communicating professionally. Today emails are checked more because as the reasons stated, brand owners or managers will expect some emails which can interest them.

For instance, emails could be for partnerships, to engage and sell together, and more. 

2. REACHES A WIDER AUDIENCE WITH ONE CLICK

If you're conducting cold calls, you are reaching out to just a minimum number of prospects a day but with cold emails, this isn’t the case. You will have a list of your potential prospects who are the right fit for your business, hence with just one click, you can send all of them your cold email instantly.

It is easy, covers a wider audience, and helps you cater to the right audience on time. 

3. SIMPLE COMMUNICATION PLATFORM

Cold emails are not sent in huge stories. They are simple and to the point. When the prospect receives the cold email and views it, they understand what the agenda of the email is which helps them conduct their actions.

You don’t have to write long statements or crowd your space with multiple information, with cold emails, the communication is relevant and to the point.

4. CREATES CURIOSITY THAT MAKES PROSPECTS REVERT

As stated earlier, when you send cold emails the content is always simple and to the point, this is a great sales strategy as it creates a curiosity in the minds of your prospects. They will be compelled to know more and that’s how their engagement and yours start to happen back to back. 

Cold emails do a great job of capturing the prospect’s attention and making them revert to your brand to learn more.

5. FUNCTIONS BETTER LEAD GENERATION PRACTICES

When it comes to lead generation, cold emails can be your go-to tool. As stated in the previous point, cold emails work like a charm when it comes to capturing the prospect's attention and drawing them towards your brand to learn more.

When you send such cold emails that compel prospects to learn more about what you have to offer, lead generation starts to take an immediate turn towards your route.

6. CREATES BRAND AWARENESS

As stated earlier in the meaning of cold emails, this technique helps your prospects to understand your existence. Your prospects are informed about who you are, how you can help them, and why your existence is something they should look into.

Brand awareness is important as when regular cold emails are sent to serve this purpose, selling takes on an easy route.

Conducting cold emails isn’t difficult, if you have the right strategy in hand, it becomes easy for it to be conducted, we have covered the top ones for you to get started with.

1. FOCUS ON CREATING YOUR COLD EMAILS WITH A CONVERSATIONAL TONE 

Your cold email needs to sound comfortable and not like a sales pitch. The whole point of sending an email is you are trying to get your prospects to invest in your product, making them understand that your product has what it takes to solve their issues or needs.

This can only happen when you try to make your prospects feel the same.

The best way to do this is to speak in a conversational tone. Yoru conversational tone doesn’t have to be so friendly, it can hold the professional touch as well. Ensure that your prospect reads your cold emails, they should be able to understand the agenda of the cold email. 

2. BE STRAIGHT TO THE POINT

As you can see in the image above, you understand that this is a guest post request email and the sender wants to guest post for the brand that the receiver is also writing for. It’s this simple.

Your cold emails are not supposed to have long paragraphs speaking about your brand, your product, your team, and more. Remember the purpose of your cold emails which in this case is capturing leads.

Write your cold email in such a manner where you are able to explain why you are contacting them, what benefit they are receiving, and how they should learn more about what you’re offering them.

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Keep the language simple with easy to understand statements.

3. SHOWCASE AUTHORITY

When you're sending your cold emails, always ensure that your name is on the email address, your photo is shown and conduct more other actions where the prospect is able to understand more about you. This creates a sense of authority and keeps the process more professional. 

The example above where the name of the sender is shown, position, and the photo is displayed which adds the personal touch.

4. END YOUR COLD EMAILS WITH A QUESTION

Do you know a great trick to get your prospects to revert to your emails? Add a question. For instance, if you have sent an email where you're discussing the issues the prospect faces, you could end the email with, ‘would you like to see a demo of how our product can help solve your issue?’

You can use such statements which will compel your prospects to revert. Doing this will give you the opportunity to engage with them once again and convert their interest more towards your product. 

5. CONDUCT REGULAR FOLLOW-UPS

Follow-ups are nothing but sending emails to your prospects to seek their action on the emails they have received from you. It is just a reminder to your prospect to make them conduct an action.

For instance, if you have sent an email to your prospect asking them to join a demo session to understand your product and they have not reverted to you, you can send another email.

That email will be a follow-up reminder to conduct the action. There are multiple reasons why a prospect wouldn’t return your emails, it could be because they are busy or they forgot and more.

Follow-ups are a great way to remind them about your email and your brand. But do remember don’t send much follow up emails, it will annoy them, instead just send a maximum of 2 or 3.

6. BE REGULAR WHEN YOU'RE SENDING COLD EMAILS

If you're going to send your cold emails thrice a week at 9 am, ensure that you send it all the time in this manner. It is important that you are** **consistent with your emails. For instance, you can’t send one cold email and then send another follow-up email after two months, you need to fix a schedule and conduct your cold emails accordingly.

For instance, you could do your follow up every alternate day in the week, you could send your cold emails every Monday or Wednesday and more if needed.

As stated earlier, it’s not easy to capture emails addresses of prospects, thus you require an efficient medium that can help you conduct this process which is what email scraping can help you in.

Email scraping is the process of scraping email addresses from online platforms. It could be any source where bots are used to scrape email details.

This is required because as stated earlier, it’s not easy to get your prospects information until they give it to you and purchasing email lists can trap you whether the email ids are valid or not.

To ensure that none of the above scenarios are created investing in an email scraper tool is a better option. With an email scraping tool you have multiple features that can help you conduct this process better and more efficiently.

We have covered the best for you in our next category.

1. HUNTER.IO

Hunter.io is an email address scraper tool that can help you get started. It is considered as the best email scraping tool that is used by over 2 million professionals. It lets you scrape email addresses as well as verify its deliverability. 

2. SCRAPEBOX EMAIL SCRAPER

This email address scraper tool comes from the brand Scrapebox which is also an SEO scraping tool hence this tool is included in the main software. With this tool crawling any website and scraping them for email addresses is a hassle-free task. 

3. LISTGRABBER

This is another email scraping tool that automatically scrapes email addresses and other information as well such as name, phone number, and more from multiple platforms such as Google maps and more. 

4. EMAIL EXTRACTOR

The email extractor can capture multiple email addresses from the sources you wish to tap from such as web pages within a shorter time. You can avail of this tool by downloading the Google Chrome browser extension.

Despite email scraper helping you scrape emails, there could be a risk attached, the risk of getting caught or your identity being revealed. If this happens, then your account that you use to conduct this process will be blocked.

Refrain this from happening by investing in a reliable proxy server. 

Proxy servers are solutions that ensure that a user’s identities are hidden when trying to access any information which is restricted.

For instance, a user wants to access information online, it will send information to the website but since the website has limitations, it will either block the user's IP address or not share the access. To prevent this from happening using a proxy server can help.

What a proxy server will do is it will receive the request you sent to view a website first. It will change the user's IP address and then finally send the request to the website. Once the website approves the request, the information can then be viewed by the user. 

In the case where one anonymously scrapes data, the proxy server too can be very beneficial in order to conduct this process very smoothly.

When you are scraping emails it is important to understand that this activity is conducted without the website owner even realizing that it’s happening. When you conduct this same activity with copy-pasting the amount of data to be retrieved is huge which hence slows the website of the owner hence hinting them about the action you are performing.

Since modern businesses today require the ‘modern’ solution, email scraping is what grew in popularity.

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For instance, when you use any email scraping tool as stated above conducting it with a proxy server would:

1. Mask your IP address so that even if there are chances of getting blocked, your IP address is unharmed

2. Scrape email addresses without any fear of being considered as suspicious 

Whenever you conduct any email scraping activities, a proxy server ensures that the above actions are being conducted to help you conduct this action much better. There are many proxy servers available online that can help you conduct efficient email scraping activities. Ensure that you choose the one which fits your needs. 

Apart from this issue there is also another issue where there could be chances of your account getting blacklisted in case of email scraping activities.

This could happen because your email scraping activities would be conducted multiple times and you could be seen as spam hence  it’s important that you resolve this issue.

There are multiple ways to avoid getting blacklisted which we covered in our final category.

1. USE A PROXY SERVER

A proxy server is an application where you can access any information you need from a particular source, website or server without having to reveal your identity.

When you want to scrape emails the reason why multiple users get blocked is that their IP address gets revealed, proxy servers are designated to eliminate that from happening.

While you conduct your email scraping activities, let proxy servers function along with it so that your brand stands away from the risk of getting blacklisted while scraping.

2. ELIMINATE LOGINS

Another way where your email scraping activity can be detected is when you try to conduct this action with websites who have logins.

The website you wish to access has login protection and so when you try to access such pages you would be sending some kind of information or cookies that showcases the website owners from where the access is coming from.

When the website owner realizes that the request is coming multiple times from the same IP address, you get blocked. It’s wiser to avoid email scraping from pages who have logins so that you don’t fall in the risk trap. 

3. KEEP DISTANCE FROM HONEY POT TRAPS

The concept with honey pot traps is that it is installed for the purpose of capturing hackers and users who want to access information but are not authorized to do so. It is an application that duplicates a real system where the links are not seen by normal users but can be witnessed by web scrapers.

When you see that it is better to take a step back, because, once you try to go further you will fall in its trap and get blocked easily.

The only way to break through this barrier is to conduct some serious programming tactics which in itself is difficult and hard to crack. 

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4. MAKE USE OF HEADLESS BROWSERS

Headless browsers help you to scrape information by attempting a one-line command interface. It functions like any other browser but the only thing is it doesn’t show any graphical interfaces.

The reason why using a headless browser is necessary because when you want to scrape from a website the content presented on such websites would differ and the reason being they depend highly on JS codes and CC.

Since they are not the actual way how an HTML link would display information, chances are your email scraping activity can be blacklisted.

Avoid this from happening with the use of a headless browser since many of the information you wish to scrape falls under the browser information.

5. BEWARE OF WEBSITE LAYOUTS

Another way you can prevent yourself from getting blacklisted while scraping emails is to check whether the websites you are scraping have different layouts.

This is a tricky tactic because when you don’t scrape according to the layouts listed, you can be detected as suspicious and hence blacklisted.

Avoid that by ensuring that you are aware of all the website layouts and are scraping according to that format.