Learn About the Best Times to Cold Call Customers after Opening Your Mail

By Erika Desmond | 08/10/2015

Sales calls can be more or less effective depending on the time of day you choose to make a cold call. On your best day, you will put your phone down with a smile on your face because your cold call led to a conversion. However, the sad truth is that not every day will be your best day. That's why we decided to teach you to identify the best time to call prospects when you know that they have read your sales pitch email.

What Constitutes a Good Day to Make Cold Calls?

If you wake up on Monday and notice that not many people have responded to or even opened your emails, then this might not be the best day to cold-call potential customers. Send a few more emails that day and make sure to track open rates. Continue sending emails until Wednesday or Thursday, and keep tracking who opened your emails and who didn't.

By Friday, you will have a list of prospects who have opened your email and shown interest in what you have to offer. Depending on their geo-location, you can wait for a suitable time of the day before or after lunch to make the call. People tend to be very responsive in the afternoon around 4 pm.

The best sales reps can intuitively identify the best day to cold call. They have a well-prepared and practiced call script, and their cold-calling efforts usually result in better lead generation numbers.

How to Identify the Right Customers and Increase Your Success Rate?

Even if you are working in a solid sales team and you think that you have identified the best time for cold calling, this does not guarantee success. On certain days, the best time of day for a call might actually be the worst time. That's why you need a little outside help. That's how many businesses operate today.

If you're already using Cirrus Insight, then you have an edge. With this tool, you can enjoy the benefits of email and link tracking. When you send an email, you'll know the exact time when your recipient opened the email and in which time zone. You'll also have insight into when they click on the links you've placed in the message.

Take a look at our detailed email tracking guide to get a better understanding of Cirrus Insight's capabilities. The insights you get with this tool give you enough ammo to cold call prospects that seem interested in your offer. You will have a much easier time identifying prospects that will actually help you make a sale, the best days for cold calling them, and the best script to use.

You can adjust your strategy according to the data you gather with Cirrus. A common tactic is to send out your emails and then call the prospects who open them. You have also chosen the best day of the week to call. We should be talking about people who are most interested in what you have to offer, correct? Well, that's not guaranteed.

Calling someone after they've opened your email, either right away or later, doesn't always lead to a positive conversation, especially if you're not extremely careful. Let's take a look at the psychology behind opening emails and what it means.

Targeting Prospects: When to Pick up The Phone and Expect Cold Calling Success?

The ideal scenario goes something like this. Someone opens your email, and they like what they see. Then, they're in awe because they are magically receiving a call from you. However, the fact that someone opened an email doesn't mean that they are interested in your product or service. It only means one simple thing. They've opened the email, and that's it.

If this is their first time opening the email, then a successful call is not to be expected. There's a chance they're just glancing at it before deleting or archiving. A good trick to sort out the truly interested prospects is to see who has opened your email multiple times over a particular period. If there is a link in the email and the prospect opens it, this indicates that they are interested.

So, if you notice a prospect who keeps coming back to the email, then you know there's something to work with. Pick the best day to make sales calls, go for a time from 3 pm to 5 pm, and let your sales pitch unfold.

Otherwise, if you notice that your email has only been opened once, you cannot be sure what happened. The prospect could have immediately deleted it, quickly glanced at it, and then forgotten about it. They might have actually read it, but you simply cannot be sure. If you pick up the phone and call them, you risk another failed call attempt, which is certainly not good.

When you do identify someone who is showing interest in what you have to offer, you can employ two distinct strategies, depending on your assessment of the best time of the day to make a successful cold call.

The Call Immediately Strategy to Turn Prospects into Customers

If you want to increase your chances of a prospect having your email on their mind, call briefly after they've opened your email. This is reserved for prospects who have opened your email and clicked on the link inside, thus showing a general interest in what you're selling.

You don't want to call before they've had a chance to look over the email. Prospects are often wary of new offers, and if you're too quick, you can seem a little off-putting. People don't like to feel like they're under surveillance. The right time to make a cold call is a few minutes after they opened the link in your email.

Even if you do everything by the book, the most likely negative response you'll get from people when you call right away is that they're not interested. A solid tactic for dealing with this is agreeing that the prospect shouldn't be interested based on the email you sent, and then switching to telling exactly how you can help their specific company.

You need to do your homework for that specific business to identify the right set of products or services to offer, but if the person on the other end of the line is talkative, you can try asking a couple of questions to get more information about their needs. This will help you offer the right product.

The Call Later Strategy for Making Your Cold Calls

You might want to take it slow and wait for an appropriate time to call a prospect. Keep tracking the email you sent to them and follow their engagement. Some prospects will reply to your email a few days after they receive it, and calling them after that would be considered warm calling. In any case, some interested parties are more likely to answer if you wait a week to cold call.

So, maybe you've been giving your prospects space to see if they engage, or maybe you've been busy, but either way, you've ended up waiting a little while before calling. You could have waited a couple of days or even an entire week. In that case, you need to avoid early mornings and late afternoons. Instead, wait for an ideal time on Wednesdays and Thursdays around noon to make calls.

The first thing you'll want to do is see if you can jog their memory, but make sure not to press too hard. If the person doesn't remember your email or doesn't think they got an email from you, don't worry about it. Agree with them and tell them that the email must have gotten lost, but that's why you wanted a chance to talk, instead of sending another email and potentially flooding their inbox.

The best course of action is to embrace the prospect's response and go with it when you make a sales call.

Since you have patiently waited for the call, if you catch the prospect you're calling at an inconvenient time, you might ask for a good time to make a follow-up call. Ask them specifically what hour of the day they prefer and take note. When you call them again, the response time should be shorter, as they might have added your number to their contacts.

Quick Conclusion

As we all know, cold calling is still only part of a larger puzzle called digital marketing. Focus on cold calling at the right time when you have enough data showing that the person on the other end is genuinely interested in what you are selling. Follow your cold calling statistics and find ways to improve. In the end, one call does make a difference. Sometimes, even if you had several unsuccessful calls in one business day, a successful call might switch things around.

But with Cirrys Insight by your side, you will have the opportunity to make data-driven decisions, thus increasing your chances of landing a sale. Good luck!