Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

When done well, cold email is a goldmine for generating leads. By implementing consistent cold email strategies, businesses can put themselves in front of their ideal customers and solicit a direct response.

With click-through and response rates rising, agencies could benefit from using cold emails to build brand awareness. Having worked with nearly 3000 clients in under two and a half years, cold emails have done wonders in getting my agency in front of its ideal customers.

If you’re unsure where to start, here are four steps to scale your business with cold emails.

Related: 3 Cold Email Strategies With High Response Rates

1. Understand your niche

What makes cold email such an effective lead-generation tool is that it is highly targeted. Ensuring you’re solely focused on those interested in your product or service saves time and energy. You must first create your ideal customer avatar to reach out to those people. Think about your product and service and the pain points it provides a solution to. Next, identify the potential people or businesses experiencing these pain points by answering the following questions:

  • What market does my product or service best serve?
  • What does the typical customer within that market have in common?
  • What does an ordinary day look like for them?
  • What sets them on edge?
  • What type of language do they respond/don’t respond to?
  • What existing products or services do they find appealing?

Vital for any marketing strategy, having a clear customer profile will be the key to creating an effective cold email strategy.

Related: The Step-By-Step Guide to Finding Your Niche and Target Market

2. Create new domains

Emails can get messy. To better track cold emails, create new domains that will be used only for cold emailing. Aside from separating your inboxes, a custom domain can improve your email deliverability and open rates, increasing your ROI.

According to a Google survey, 60% of small businesses experienced an increase in customer engagement after creating a new custom domain, with 42% experiencing an increase in sales.

When creating a new domain, ensure it looks professional and is still associated with your business. Avoid using numbers or anything that could be interpreted as spam. As emails have daily send limits, make sure to set up a few emails with your new domain. This will not only help the volume of cold emails you send out but will help you split-test your messaging.

3. Create an effective system

Like everything with business, having suitable systems is essential when creating your cold email strategy. The best cold email strategy to implement ensures the following three things:

  • Convenience: It’s quick and easy for prospects to do business with you.
  • Personalization: Appeal to prospects on a personal level.
  • Belonging: Prospects feel like part of a community

If you’re not good with words, it might be best to hire a copywriter or use AI software to convey your messaging in a way that appeals to your prospects. Be sure to have a few different versions to split-test. Never assume low response rates mean your potential buyers aren’t interested in your product because of your outreach message. The money is in the follow-up, and carefully drafting follow-up email responses for your campaign will help prompt more responses.

Once you have your messaging, it’s time to find leads and start cold emailing. You can find leads through web searches, LinkedIn, social media, etc. You may also find it helpful and time-saving to use a lead generator, like Salesforce, to scrape emails for you to reach out to.

Again, use software to automate your cold email campaigns to save time. Using software will automate follow-up messages and allow you to view and track metrics such as deliverability and open and reply rates across your different campaigns. Like any marketing campaign, tracking ROI is significant for any cold email campaign. To ensure your campaigns are successful, implement an ROI tracking strategy to understand better what works and what may require further attention.

4. Test, Scale, and Test Again

By split-testing your messaging, you’ll be able to determine what works and what doesn’t. Referring to your email metrics as a guide, start scaling the outflow of the messaging that works best.

It’s important not to get too complacent here. With evolving trends or different offerings in your product or service, you will need to adjust and test your cold email messaging every now and then.