Growth hackers typically turn to social tools to engage a community and grow a product following. But there’s one growth strategy that many businesses overlook: growth hacking emails in the form of cold outreach.

At the end of the day, a growth marketer’s role is to acquire customers, measure and implement methods on how to retain those customers, and help scale the growth of the company.

They look at what’s working, what’s not and how successes can be duplicated. The overlap between sales and marketing has never been greater. Sending effective, targeted cold emails to recruit partners, bring in new users and get feedback can be an effective piece of the puzzle.

It’s the ‘growth hacking email.’

How Growth Hacking Emails Can Boost Your Growth

Email outreach doesn’t have to be limited to sending weekly emails to your subscribers. There’s another very effective way to use email for growth: cold emailing.

Despite the popular belief that cold emails get lost in the noise of digital marketing, the numbers say otherwise. According to both  MailChimp and ConstantContact, subscribers open business-related mass emails, on average, about 14-23% of the time.

Those are decent open rates, but cold emails can have a much better open rate. If you write a cold email the right way, you can get open rates of nearly 50%, according to a test done by Jon Youshaei of EveryVowel and Shane Snow of Contently.

With highly targeted lists and personalized messaging, you can see a lot of success in cold email.

The Growth Hacking Email: How To Use Cold Emails

Just like there isn’t one way to go about growth hacking, there isn’t one way you can get value out of growth hacking emails in cold outreach.

• Get eyeballs on your content. If you produced an awesome infographic or stellar podcast episode, start conversations with those who may be interested in your content.
• Form partnerships. Reach out to the decision-makers at big companies and CXOs at smaller companies to broach the subject of partnerships. Just form the relationship first.
• Get featured on lists and resources. Want your product featured on all those “Top X Tools For Y” posts on page 1 of Google? All you have to do is ask.
• Ask for guest post opportunities. Establish your authority and get organic traffic by reaching out to top industry blogs and publications.
• Get feedback on your product. Avoid the C-Suite on this one. If your tool is aimed at SDRs, send out 10,000 emails offering free access in exchange for feedback.

No matter the purpose behind your growth-oriented cold email, I recommend three critical steps for sending out cold emails.

Step One: Generate Leads with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

With Sales Nav, you can easily collect hundreds of emails in minutes while narrowing in on a specific audience for each email.

• Use advanced filters to narrow your search by role, industry, location, keywords and more.
• Vet each person according to your criteria. If you’re going for content outreach, look for a decision-maker within marketing. If you’re looking for partnerships, target higher-ups at smaller companies.
• As you identify the most promising people, save them to a list for each use case.
• Hit ‘Export with Wiza’ to get email addresses, social media handles and more.

Once you have those emails, you can start reaching out to each person individually. It’s somewhat time-consuming, but it’s low-cost and effective. If you have a large list, use a mail merge tool to speed things up.

Step Two: Create an email template

In order to minimize the time you spend sending growth hacking emails, it’s a good idea to create an email template. This would be an email draft that you can copy/paste into every email you send. Then you can just insert the personal and specific touches you need to.

Here’s a basic email template you can try:

• Address the email as “Dear {first_name}”.
• Introduce yourself and start by complimenting them on something specific.
• Give them a little more info about yourself for context (not too much, but enough).
• Ask your question or make your pitch. Make it direct and unobtrusive.

Make sure you write a catchy subject line! The email body is important, but the subject line is equally important. You want responses, so you’ll need people to open your emails. And the title is often the determining factor for whether the email gets opened or trashed.

The email subject should be short and relevant to the person. It could be something like, “Quick question for you” or “Did you hear about ___?” You can even use the person’s name in the subject line to pique their curiosity even more.

Step Three: Personalize each of your growth hacking emails

Whether or not you personalize the subject line, you should definitely use the person’s name and the company name within the email.

Go even further and mention, in the opening line, something specific to the recipient. This could be their career accomplishments or an article they published.

Let them know that you did some research and that your email is going to be relevant to them.

Hopefully, now you can see why cold emails need to be a part of your growth hacking strategy. A growth hacking email be an effective form of outreach for community building, winning partnerships and content marketing.

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