Successful Cold Email Trends for 2022 | Salesman Podcast

Jason Bay is the Chief Prospecting Officer at Blissful Prospecting. He’s on a mission to help reps and sales teams turn complete strangers into paying customers. In this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Jason explains what is and what isn’t working in the world of cold email sales outreach in 2022. Resources: Blissfulprospecting.com Jason’s LinkedIn BombBomb – Video messaging platform Transcript Will Barron: Hi, I'm Will, and welcome to the Salesman Podcast. On today's episode, we're diving into successful cold email trends for 2022. And our guest is Jason Bay. Jason is the chief prospecting officer over at Blissful Prospecting. He's on a mission to help reps and sales teams turn complete strangers into paying customers. And with that, Jason, welcome to the show.   Jason Bay: I'm excited to be back, Will.   Will Barron: I'm excited to have you back on, mate.   Jason Bay: We were just talking. It's been a couple of years since we jammed last on a podcast, so I'm looking forward to being back.   Will Barron: A couple of years. You are perfectly suited for this topic of cold email, cold outreach. Perhaps we'll touch on other areas of cold outreach as well. We'll dive into some trends.   Will Barron: It'd be interesting to see the difference between what worked last time we spoke and then what's perhaps working in the marketplace right now in, what? We're in February 2022 as we record this. So let's start by setting some benchmarks.   The Average Cold Email Response Rate in 2022 · [01:00]    Will Barron: We want to measure our cold outreach. We want to see if we're having success or not. I don't know if you've got finite numbers on this. If not, the gist of things will be more than appropriate. Jason, what is an average cold email response/reply rate in 2022? And then what should we be aiming for? How do we know if we're having success?   Jason Bay: Yeah. It's really hard to find good data on this actually. Clearbit's got some stuff that you could take a look at. I've noticed a downward trajectory in the data in the last two or three years.   Jason Bay: So Clearbit's data says less than a 1% reply rate to a cold email. And you think about that, and I don't know about you, that's a lot of work to get a response. You've got to send a hundred emails out to get a response. That's a lot of work.   Jason Bay: Right now with Outreach, Salesloft, any of the traditional sales engagement vendors, they're all seeing a very similar pattern of that reply rate going down. Now, what is good? Depends. It depends on what you're selling, the transaction size, how many meetings that you need to get, the level of personalization.   Jason Bay: And to give you a range here, if you were selling enterprise, let's say, some of my clients, and they're selling, let's say, a customer experience or employee experience solution into a large company where the deal size might be 500,000-plus at a minimum size, I'm going to expect 10% to 20% reply rates on those emails because I'm working 20 accounts at a time.   Jason Bay: And I'm taking the time to actually look for triggers in the company, I'm researching the individual. Maybe I'm listening to a podcast interview with them. I would expect the reply rates to be much higher on those and meeting volume to be much lower in that case.   Jason Bay: And at the very other end of the spectrum, you have people selling stuff that's very transactional, very SMB type of thing. And if what you're selling has at least a 10,000 to 12,