Paul Jattau
The freelancing industry continues to grow every year and is anticipated to represent 43% of the workforce by the end of 2020. This comes as no surprise given its many gains, one among which is its capacity to help people earn extra money. Nonetheless, making money through freelancing can be sometimes challenging. More than 50% of freelancers surveyed by PayPal in 2018 said that their biggest challenge is the sporadic flow of income.
One of the ways to brush-off such inconsistent income in freelancing is to be more proactive in terms of clients hunting, frequently done by sending cold emails to potential clients. This implies soliciting business from clients who have had no prior contact with you.
What is Cold Pitching? Cold pitching is the craft of sending emails to targeted strangers and potential clients to convince them to partner with you or hire you. A cold pitch is an email or email campaign to a possible buyer/client.
Having success with cold emails to potential clients can sometimes become a herculean task and it can fail woefully if you do not know what you’re doing. Your pitches must be as succinct and straight to point as possible. Let the client know within a short time or less that you simply aren’t spam. You must communicate that you are an individual with whom they should try to do business with.
The secret is learning to send cold emails that would get responses from the recipients. Before you send a cold email to a potential client though, you may want to first learn these few tips to avoid making a mess of your emails.
Tips to Good Cold Pitching:
- Personalize your cold-pitch email: Study shows that daily, an average of 147 messages is received per user and 71 of them get deleted in under 5 minutes. Certainly, you do not want your email to be one of those the receivers delete. You create a sample email to send to a client for new business, do your homework first. Not only about the company you are writing to but also about the precise person whose attention you want to gain. People do appreciate the time and energy it took for you to try and do so and can presumably show that appreciation by reading your email at the very least.
- Pitch to the Right audience: Pitching to the wrong person can be an absolute waste of much time and energy and this is why doing your necessary findings before sending a sample email to a potential client is important. To boost your chances of drafting successful cold emails, confirm that you’re contacting the person qualified for the call.
- Have a clear value proposition: According to Forbes, this is the most important part of the cold pitch: the value proposition. Cold pitches will only work well if you’re ready to offer samples of how you’ll be able to help them specifically. Briefly explain how your services may benefit them and their customers. If you have got any stats or numbers to copy your claims, drop them now if appropriate and ensure you demonstrate your expertise in your field.
- Keep it short and Simple: Take cold pitches as the trailer to a movie. They aren’t the main show but provide only enough information that the client you’re pitching thinks, “I think we have a demand for that. Let’s learn more.” Keep your pitches within a couple of sentences maximum. For a good result, use sentence structure and keep things as direct as possible.
- Follow up: Cold-pitching isn’t all about sending pitches. Although sending a sample email to your client for a proposal can help start up a conversation, it is the follow-up email sent after the proposal that helps close the deal. Most times, people are too busy and might end up forgetting to reply to your mail. So don’t fail to follow up on your mails but be sure to do it only once so you do not find yourself annoying the client.
Conclusion: As a freelancer, mastering the perfect way to draft and send cold emails to potential clients is a skill you can’t do without. It doesn’t need to be such an appalling task though, especially if you’ve got access to freelancing tools which will assist you to manage your freelance business better.
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