BASHO Email: The Ultimate Cold Email Strategy

Sending out cold emails to connect with prospects you’ve never met or known can be tricky. Getting responses doesn’t come easy – since a lot of such emails either get ignored or don’t land in your prospect’s primary inbox.

But Cold emails do get 30% response rates on average. To get good at it, you need a solid strategy, thorough research, and actionable content. And learning how to write a BASHO email is a great start.

BASHO is a cold email technique known for providing exceptional response rates. This article will give you a detailed overview of the BASHO email, its benefits, and how to craft them. We have also added a special technique at the end that will make your BASHO emails more effective.

What is BASHO email strategy?

BASHO email is a term used to describe personalized emails directed to decision-makers for booking appointments or calls. It is commonly used with B2B cold emails where the sales reps try to get the prospect’s attention and build long term relationships.

BASHO was coined by Jeff Hoffmann, a sales consultant, and an entrepreneur. The name was inspired by the Basho brand. It became popular among SDRs, helping them book more calls and close more deals.

Why should we implement a BASHO email strategy?

Everyone loves to read well-written emails. Hence adding personalization to cold emails makes it more likely to grab your prospect’s attention and get a response. Implementing the BASHO email strategy on your cold emails will help personalize them better and provide you with benefits as mentioned below.

1. Easy to implement

BASHO emails can be implemented quickly and effectively. Compared to other strategies that require tools, training, and practice, the BASHO technique isn’t as demanding. 

The BASHO technique consists of a few basic steps in research and email writing. Hence it’s simpler to grasp, making it easy to adopt and implement.

2. Get in touch with decision-makers quickly

The goal of BASHO email is to connect with decision-makers. It helps you make a clear, concise pitch and get their attention. The idea is to decrease the number of mediators and make the sales cycle faster.

The technique is focused more on researching the decision-maker rather than everyone else. Communicating with the decision-makers using BASHO email increases your chances of getting a response, and consequently, connecting with them.

3. Increase conversion to boost revenue

In continuation to the last point, your response rate increases when you address the decision-makers’ pain point. This enables you to nurture and build relationships with them.

Once you’ve connected with decision-makers, value-added nurturing will help you increase the chances of closure. This will ultimately boost your conversion rates.

Excited to get results from your cold emails? Follow the steps below to implement BASHO email strategy to your cold email outreach.

How to build a high-quality BASHO email strategy?

To help you out with the BASHO email, we have divided the guide into 5 parts. All the 5 parts of the strategy when implemented as intended will make for a BASHO email that will help you connect with decision-makers and close deals.

1. Conduct detailed research

Abraham Lincoln once said,” Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”. In this case, you need to spend the most time researching your prospect rather than writing an email.

While working on prospecting, you first need to find the decision-maker. You can check their social accounts, and recent activities to know more about them. You should also check their company profile to learn if they are an ideal fit for your solution. Try to find as many details as you can – all this information will help you in personalizing your emails better.

For better understanding, let’s look at the example below for doing prospect research to sell a sales engagement tool.

The above account belongs to a prospect who’s also VP of sales at the target account. She works with channel partners which makes her ideal to sell a sales engagement product. From her social account, we also found that she takes part in the company’s strategic decision-making, which signals her authority. Upon further research, we noticed that she is attending an event that can help us know more about her. After collecting all the information, the SDRs can use it in the email to draft a super-personalized email.

2. Add a catchy subject line

Your prospect notices the subject line before they open an email. 47% of recipients open their emails based on the subject line alone. So make your subject line catchy and personalized enough to urge your prospect to open the email.

The BASHO email subject line should be relevant to them or to their pain points. Adding these elements helps you in getting your prospect’s attention and urges them to open the email. You can also personalize further by adding the First Name of the prospect in the subject line.

Following our last example, the above subject line was created to appeal to their need for appreciation for their efforts(event participation in this case). This will make the prospect believe your email to be authentic and worth reading. The SDR has added trigger words like “Thanks” which will flatter and nudge them to click and open the email. 

3. Draft a personalized email with a hook

Personalization is the core of a BASHO email. When you personalize your email, the prospect will see the effort you put into knowing them. You can address your prospect’s needs and pain points, which can attract them towards engaging with you further. 

In the above example, the sales rep had researched the event their prospect is attending. Later they added this information in the email making it personal and relevant for the prospect. This disarms your prospects of their guard regarding cold sales emails, lends you a good impression, and gets you connected to them.

4. Add value for your prospect

After getting connected with the prospect, your next step has to be to offer them value-based solutions and consulting. Show them their path to success with your product/service. Provide them with valuable resources that can be beneficial. Help them in solving small problems, which will enable you build trust in the relationship. 

Following the same example, the sales rep asked the prospect about their engagement solution. Later, he showcased SalesHandy by sharing its existing customers’ experience and proven track record of success with sales engagement and nurturing. Later on, to prove his authenticity, he added links to case studies, which will help him build trust and guide the prospect to take the next steps.

5. A single CTA towards your goal

Once you’ve convinced your prospect and primed them to move ahead – it’s time to enable them to do just that. Adding a CTA will help the decision-maker to take necessary actions to move them to the next stages of the sales funnel. Make sure your CTAs are clear and easy to understand. 

While sending a cold email with the BASHO technique, the CTA should either be focussed on getting a phone call or scheduling a meeting. If you follow everything correctly up until this point, they’re quite likely to get back to you and book a meeting.

After connecting with the prospect and having nurtured them to move further, the SDR in this example nudges the prospect to get on a call. He set the call for 10 minutes making it a smaller, less-risky commitment for the prospect. 

BASHO sales email strategy has been proven to give fantastic results and is used by various professionals in bigger companies, like Google and Oracle. 

In the next section, we will showcase how to optimize your BASHO email technique to make sure you close multiple deals together. If you have multiple engagements running concurrently, research and email personalization might take time. So, let’s learn how to optimize your productivity while scaling on BASHO emails across your pipeline.

Optimize your BASHO email strategy with SalesHandy

BASHO emails can help you get excellent results from your cold emails. But if you are working on a long list, the personalization can be tedious. This could compromise your research quality, which defeats the purpose. You can use SalesHandy to automate the personalization tasks and spend your valuable time on researching your prospects and closing them.

SalesHandy is a sales engagement tool that helps in sending personalized mass emails to your prospects. You can easily upload your email list, add your research and personalization as merge tags, and send emails to all your prospects in one click. You can also automate follow-up emails up to 9 stages, freeing you of having to do so manually, and increasing your response rates. SalesHandy also provides email analytics and template management, making it an all-in-one tool for implementing the BASHO email strategy to your cold sales emails.

You can refer to the video below to check a step-by-step process to schedule a personalized email with SalesHandy.

We all know, cold emails are challenging. While reaching out to multiple prospects it gets even harder. 

You can now reach out to your decision-makers directly by using BASHO email with tools like SalesHandy while saving more time and generating more responses. You can focus on lead nurturing to close more deals, once you start getting responses.

We hope you found this guide useful. Share it among your connections and comment if you’ve gotten results from using any of the strategies we listed throughout the article.