Marketing is often one of the most intimidating and confusing aspects of running your own business as a voice-over talent, but also one of the most essential. There are many ways to do so, and one that can be extremely beneficial to your business is email marketing. Once you've identified some great people to contact, your next step is to reach out and make that initial contact with a potential client, that could lead to a job or even an ongoing client relationship.

As a Professional VO Talent, and the founder of an Audio Post-Production Company, I am on both sides of these emails. I constantly market myself through email and also receive marketing emails from VO talent interested in being cast for projects by my Audio Post company. Through these experiences I've learned some of the best practices for email marketing which we'll explore in this post.

I've also included some free email templates that you can use yourself in addition to the e-book version of this post, as part of the resource package, which can be downloaded by clicking the button at the bottom of the post.

The Purpose of a Cold Contact Email

Before we get into what should make up the content of your marketing emails, it's important to first outline what the actual purpose of these emails is. It may seem obvious, but here is a way of looking at it, that you may not have thought of.

The purpose of a Cold Contact Marketing Email is not to get you a job, not directly anyways. It is extremely, extremely improbable that someone with no knowledge of your existence is going to receive an email from you out of the blue, read only the content of the email and nothing more, and respond back offering you a job. Instead, think of the purpose of your marketing emails as the following:

Get the attention of a potential client, make them aware of your existence, and put you on their radar. Present you as a professional - someone who is capable of fulfilling a need that they have. Get them to take action - either by visiting your website or listening to your demos.

Those 3 items are the direct tasks you are trying to accomplish with your marketing emails. A successful email should make the potential client interested enough in you to seek more information by visiting your site or listening to your reels. Then it is the job of those items, to convince them to hire you, add you to their roster of talent or request an audition.

Formatting your Email