Growth Hacking Series -7 Steps to Cold Emails That Generate Enrollments

As digital marketers we believe in the power of the digital ad machines beyond any marketing/advertising medium available in the world. If there were a more powerful platform we’d be there. However, there’s good marketing strategies to complement your digital advertising efforts. One of the alternative strategies out there is sending cold emails to a highly in-market lead list. 

I preface with the fact that it’s better to build your email list that came from nurtured digital ad funnels. The lifetime value and open rates of this nurtured email list (through a lead magnet opt in such as a syllabus) is exponentially higher than any other method out there. 

The first step is making sure you don’t send the email blast from your main email domain you use everyday to your internal team, students, etc. Create a new alternate domain name that will only specifically be used for email blasts. For example if your domain name is xyzschool.com possible options are xyzschool.info,  xyzschool.org,  xyzschool.co,  xyzschoolNY.com, xyzschoolWA.com. Make sure prospects can still recognize your email. 

Step two, forward this new alternative domain name you created to your main domain name. That way if a prospect goes to that alternate domain name to check you out they see the real website. 

Step three, create an email account in this alternate domain name. You can use gmail. Then make sure all the emails in this new inbox are forwarded to your main email inbox if you don’t plan on checking this new inbox everyday. 

Step four, edit the “from” line. The “from” line is as much a part of a cold email as the body, and that’s because it plays an important role. It shows the message recipients who exactly sent the email. It’s a part that affects their first impression. What follows is that they decide whether to open the message and read it or put it in the trash and forget it. Full name + school name is usually a good approach here.  

Step five, write an intriguing subject line. A cold email subject line could be seen as the key that unlocks the door to our message. Our prospects form their first impression of us while reading the subject line. That’s why we need to make it a good one.

Step six, write a short and direct message. Talk about the benefits your schools offers and then have a call to action. The call to action can be an invite to an open house or a call with an admission advisor. The email should be no longer than 4 sentences. 

Step seven, polish your cold email signature to make sure it makes you look trustworthy – too little information and no hints on where to find you will definitely lower your chances for a response. Include only necessary information: cut out information that just takes space, but doesn’t bring much value. Sometimes your phone number may be crucial, but other times it’s completely unnecessary. Think about the usefulness of each piece of info in the signature. Delete the one that’s useless in your email campaign. if you decide to use HTML, make sure it’s clean – a messy HTML signature may actually cause some deliverability issues. That’s because your message is short. If the signature includes a lot of HTML, you can mess up the text-to-HTML ratio. If you don’t have anyone who can check your signature HTML and clean it up, it’s safer to go for a simple text signature.