Ban This Line From Your Cold Emails to Avoid Being Labeled a Spammer
If you run a business, you’ve definitely gotten an email like this within the past few years:
For the part I highlighted at the end of this cold email I received, you’ll see variations people use that make the same ask. A similar line I’ve seen recently is:
PS - If you’re not interested, let me know, and I won’t reach back out.
If emails like the one above with that kind of a line at the end are part of your email strategy, you are hurting yourself in (at least) two ways:
Most importantly, you create a high likelihood that you will be marked by your recipients as Spam, and your future emails will never see the light of day in their inbox again. Even worse, a recipient can report your email address. (This is worse because if your email service provider receives too many reports of contacts blocking you, your send address could be blacklisted and your email inbox/account could be suspended.)
If your strategy for this cold email tactic includes multiple emails in a drip campaign — that might not end until a recipient responds positively, buys from you, or replies asking you to “get lost” — you will waste a ton of time setting up and optimizing over time all the emails in the sequence that you want to send after the first email. (As I shared on The Business Library podcast, for my own email marketing strategy, my opinion is that my time that could be spent on this is better spent researching and sending to new leads.)
My bottom line on this is…
Never make it incumbent upon your lead to take an action in order for your spigot of offers to stop flowing to him/her/them if this person has not signed up to receive emails from you.
Instead, send the best one-off email you can. In terms of getting your lead into your sales ecosystem in the most ethical — and least time-consuming way for you — I recommend that you use only one call to action (CTA) in your email, and that the best landing page to send your lead to is a value-added lead capture form, such as for a lead magnet like a free assessment, report, white paper, or case study. If you use the CAN-SPAM-friendly practice of a double opt in — where the second opt in is an email you set to send your lead after they fill out your form, where they click to confirm that they want to join your email list — then you’ll be golden to send as many emails to your new lead as you want, as frequently as you want.
If too many of your emails are going to spam…
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