Cold emails are so badly/under-used... Here's how you can make them work 🚀
We're halfway through Q2, but you struggle to speak to your user/customers?
You're on the right page. Here are actionable tips to start your week strong.
But let's start with some context first ⬇️
Cold emails are extremely useful as an outbound channel:
✅ You can get in touch with anyone
✅ You can scale them (vs cold calling)
✅ The investment is low compared to ads
✅ You can get results very quickly.
In fact it's not a matter of whether they work , rather how to make them work.
Most founders, marketers and sales do it wrong:
❌ Copy pasting the same message
❌ Writing a lengthy generic message
❌ Can't resist the temptation to say everything about their product
❌ Focus on them, not the prospect
❌ Don't follow up
From sending over 100K cold emails and making a business out of it (www.thescalelab.com 420K ARR), there's a lot we figured out.
Here are the essentials.
PREPARATION
1/ Deliverability
First, verify your deliverability (aka do your emails actually reach your prospects' inboxes or do they land in spam, worse do they bounce because the email addresses you have are not valid...).
What to do:
mxtoolbox.com - to check your domain health.
usebouncer.com - to verify your email list before sending.
💡 Verifying your email list is like quality checking ingredients before cooking. Leave the bad ones out or it's going to hurt.
2/ Custom Variables
You have to ensure you at least have
- First Names
- Company Names
- Roles
- Industry
- Location
Most sales only personalize the "First Name", and think they're on top of the game when they add “Company Names" to their arsenal.
Well, 99% of sales already do that with little results.
The 1% remaining are those going the step further 😉
3/ Goal
Use email to connect with people. Not to sell. A sale can only happen when you first connect with someone.
No one will insert their credit card somewhere after receiving an email from someone they don't know 🙂
I mean, would you? ...
In a world of Business to Business sales, we tend to forget that behind each business lies a human.
So be human.
PERSONALIZATION
It's all about standing out from the crowd.
If you cold-email someone, you can be sure you're not the first one to do so.
You will not only compete with others, but also with any kind of notification they receive: texts, calls, instagram, facebook messenger, twitter, linkedin etc...
The key is to:
1/ leverage creative subject lines (see in templates below)
2/ "icebreakers" on your first lines (because that's also what appears on someone's inbox or phone notification before even opening the email)
=> the goal is to talk about the prospect before you talk about yourself.
Everyone starts with the standard: "Hello X, my name is Y and I do Z".
I suggest to only talk about yourself when you first acknowledge the prospect with something specific to them.
Spend time crafting those icebreakers manually. Just a one liner about them.
Example, go to their website and check what they offer to say:
"From Service 1 to Service 2, you've got the X industry nicely covered"
You can also use this tool to generate icebreakers on your prospects:
www.smartwriter.ai
The talking ratio should be 80% about the prospects 20% about you - with the first sentences always being about them.
💡Resist the urge to pitch. Connect first. Pitching will come later, if you don't force it onto someone.
AUTOMATION
If you send each email 1 by 1 and copy paste the text. Please stop now.
❌ You're wasting your time
❌ We're in 2022...
❌ You're likely not tracking open & reply rates.
There are far more productive ways to do so.
It's called Email Automation.
Here are tools I'd recommend:
lemlist.com
apollo.io
woodpecker.co
Now over to you with this.
If you'd like to get some free template ideas for Subject Lines and body, feel free to get them from www.thescalelab.com/templates
We're soon putting together an ultimate list of the best templates we saw.
Happy cold emailing 🚀
Nailed the whole process down mate. Another tool I've begun to like is mailmeteor to cut down on spam triggers
Great post @theyouss! you should also try mailstand.com. A new cold email sender product made by an Indiehacker (aka me).
Mailstand has built in checkers for SPF DKIM and DMARC to cut down on some of the deliverability steps above. It also merges mailboxes so you can easily scale sending.
I also bootstrapped and sold Warmup Inbox which is one of the biggest warm up networks so I’ve been in the space a while. :)
Happy to extend trials to any Indiehacker if they just write into support.
Awesome man, congrats on the Warmup exit and for mailstand.com
I just checked it out. Quick question: when you say you can merge multiple mailboxes, does it mean I can send an outreach to X prospect from 2 different emails?
For instance:
Curious :-)
@theyouss In theory it can do that, but it’s more meant for auto balancing. So let’s say you have a list of 10,000 contacts and you want to reach out to them over the course of 2 weeks. Most tools you have to create multiple campaigns, copy and paste templates and manually assign each mailbox to the campaign to hit any kind of scale.
With mailstand it’s one campaign, one list, and just select as many inboxes as you want and we auto balance them all and send based on your sending schedule. The analytics on the campaign are much cleaner as well.
Here’s a manifesto that also outlines it: mailstand.com/manifesto
Oh I also forgot to mention @theyouss that we’re super super cheap. The cheapest cold email tool out there. We did this on purpose.
Ooookay got it ! Thanks for sharing, I've sent it to our head of growth to take a look.
In our case we do highly target (a lot less volume) but I can see how this can play out very nicely for larger scale actions (event promotion, roadshow prep etc...).
That's cool well done on this one.
Thanks for the kind words @theyouss! We’re rolling out a feature next week to easily personalize at smaller scale too 👍 so you can do 1 to 1 personalization
. Think lemlist and mailshake features at 1/6 the cost with a better UI.
Nice catch thanks @veebuv !
I'll take a look 100%. Always keen to try new ones :)
Great stuff Youssef! EverMail AI is another great option as well for personalizing emails at scale.
Where do even find the email contacts? I am looking to find emails of people in the international development community and nonprofits, communications and CEOs. Have been searching them one by one an its take forever.
Hi @extrachill, thanks for your question.
The natural way of approaching email finding is indeed manual, but it takes literally FOREVER. I'm sorry you've had to go through this.
But fear not, luckily there are many other ways that are far more scalable to do this and here are some options:
Use email finders (these are tools that will find emails of contacts you want):
List builders (basically companies who would do this for you at scale)
It's basically creating custom recurring databases for you.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR YOU:
Whatever option you choose, ALWAYS verify the deliverability of your emails.
Otherwise sending emails to an unvalid email will harm your domain badly.
Tool of choice: www.usebouncer.com
As list builders we double verify the emails with two tools before we use any of the emails.
Hope it helps and happy scaling !
Thank you!!! I have ok success with getting on calls with people, honestly looking to learn more before I offer them my service, but i am done emailing each time I find an email, I am going to make a my own list first then use this system thank you again ! @theyouss
How do you build an email list?
If it's opt-in what the point of cold emailing (is it even cold in that case)?
Do you manually add emails by browsing prospects websites? Or buy in bulk from, for example, builtwith (if you target users of a specific tech)?
What's the best (whitehat, nonspammy) approach to build a list of prospects for cold emailing?
Hey @smirnovam ! Thanks for the question. Very good one actually.
Building a contact list is a core function of the cold emailing game. It's like your ingredients for cooking, if you have bad ones, then nothing good is going to come out.
We use our proprietary stack for scraping, enriching and cleaning.
Basically the process:
Next step for us is to integrate with a www.smartwriter.ai or similar to generate unique 1 liners on each prospects.
But you have 3 options, from low to high price:
What's your current struggle if any?
Awesome, thanks :)
Tnx for mentioning the tools.
Thanks for flagging Smartwriter! It's actually quite impressive. But I'm wondering if with these different intros, the founder would still take me seriously?
Have you had founders reply that they felt these intros were too random?
Loved the detailed post. Are you still using that tool to validate your emails?
@jonathan4653 that's right yes and it's very good in my opinion :)
Nice article Youssef. BTW, I built tailyai.co to write daily emails with AI. It's not mainly for mass cold emails but is highly useful if sending cold emails manually via Gmail. It's a chrome extension and you can try it out for free.
Thanks for sharing @SNRU_VEVO ! I'll take a look and send on our slack ;)
Thanks for this!!
@Deeves you're welcome!
Hope it helps ;)
This piece of content is a gem for anyone who wants to generate leads and convert.
Loved it Youssef.
Thanks @digitalactually !
Great guide @theyouss! Currently in the process of starting up on my cold emails and I couldn't find this post at a better time!
I'm interested in what you think about the degree of personalising a cold email. Would you say it's better to send 100 personalized emails or 1000 emails with less personalization? I know a lot of factors come into place but I was wondering if you had any data on this.
I literally just made a meme post about this on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6932585585861607424/
Take a look :)
But answering here too: Quality over Quantity, always.
Reasons:
Would you rather spend a whole day to generate 10 meetings out of the 100 you contact.
Or spend 1 hour and generate 10 meetings out of the 1000 you contact.
Remember we said 1000 is 10 batches of 100. So if you generate 10 meetings every 100 email, you'll get to 100 meetings total (with better personalisation) instead of 10 (with low personalisation).
Plus: little personalisation means you'll probably annoy everyone and burn your bridges. Better personalisation means you might get nos, but politely, without burning bridges.
Love that meme lol! What you mentioned is exactly what I always worry about, losing potential clients just because I didn't spend time to reach out to them properly. Although it will take much longer to reach out to 1000 people with better personalization, I think it'll be worth it!
As you said, quality over quantity.
Let me know how it goes ;)
Thank you! That's a helpful summary. I will say from experience that I always look for a specific department or user's mail, I try not to send mailings to mailings like info... they don't give feedback
ANd you're absolutely right. All the generic emails "contact@" "info@" rarely give responses and it's difficult to personalise because you don't know who's behind it...
Thanks for this Youssef! I've subscribed to your newsletter and look forward to more outreach hacks!
Nice to hear @Anubhavsarker - stay in touch then ;)
Good tips! will use them
Cool! Let me know when you do and what results you get @Wyatteast.
Happy to elaborate if needed.
Thank you for such a detailed article and tool recommendations. We are in the Beta Stage of our product. Do you have any recommendations on whether or not cold emails is a good strategy for acquiring Beta Users?
Hi @wondrfly first of all congrats on launching the Beta.
Quick answer: 100%.
If you're looking for Beta users AND you want to engage with them in the sense of building a connection to get feedback, cold emailing is going to be your game.
The ground rule is: "cold emails are not to be used to sell, but to connect with someone".
The selling happens after, and only if, you connect.
Think about:
As Brian Chesky likes to say: when you get started, do things that don't scale.
How are you otherwise approaching getting your beta users? Happy to elaborate.
Thanks for the valuable tips. We've been mostly reaching out to inner circle and their referrals, and now we're looking to reach out to more people. So exploring cold emails is one of the various approaches we're considering.
Just saw your post, would love to get your thoughts on this https://www.indiehackers.com/post/ask-for-early-feedback-free-email-deliverability-open-rate-checklist-da3bad6429
P.S. I used Lemlist also and love their scheduling feature. No one should be sending "email blasts" anymore.
P.P.S. Another automation tool I just found which I like is https://bentonow.com/
Hi @ismaelyws thanks a lot for sharing and congrats on Hello Inbox.
Email deliverability is such an underated part of the process, when it's actually so critical.
=> What is sending an email worth, if it has no chance to land on someone's inbox...
Feedback:
Not sure what the issue is - please try and let me know :)
I just tried it with thescalelab.com (not www.thescalelab.com) and it worked. I think I know what may have happened. I need to add some validation since it's using the PHP dns_get_record() function and it only accepts the root domain and not the full FQDN. Thanks for catching that. Rly appreciate your feedback :)
P.S. It's not detecting your SSL however, need to fix that too.
Thanks for checking !
Definitely keep me looped in. Deliverability checks are a critical step of our client onboarding process.
You'd be surprised how many don't know...
Will do, i'll be launching on PH in the next few days. I didn't know either until I got frustrated and decided to do a deep-dive and i'm in tech. So yah I believe there's more ppl than we think who don't know.
This is a great overview. I've personally used Woodpecker for email automation and I'm a huge fan. Curious if you would have data on good open / response rates for cold emails related to low price point vs high price point products and services?
Great to hear @FinanceGuy and congrats !
Good question.
GENERAL DATA
Our checklist for cold email success is as follows:
If you have less than 50% open rate, it's likely that you have a deliverability issue (unverified emails, or your domain is blacklisted etc...)
If you have less than 5-10% reply rate, usually it's 2 options:
(given that you have 50%+ open rate of course, otherwise you need to fix this first).
What matters ultimately is your interest rate (aka: actual leads generated).
LOW V.S HIGH
The truth is we're not working much with low price point products ourselves so have limited data on this.
But, what I see is that there is not much difference in terms of stats to aim for.
The issue is rather on the approach:
Because of the salesy approach on low price point product, you might get less leads generated (although similar open and reply rates - replies likely being "thanks" "no" "unsubscribe").
Curious: what have you been using cold emails for?
I use it to reach out to business owners and managers to start a conversation about buying their businesses. Also for a higher ticket consulting-type of service that provides tools and resources to help growth companies raise money. Both are long sales cycle type of solutions and with very different audiences.
Perfect, it sounds like cold email is the right fit for this.
Hope you're getting the results you expect :)
Thanks for the tips!
I guess cold emailing to VC & Angels are different strategy a bit?
Good question @nekromarko
It actually is the same for VCs & Angels, where you need to be all the more diligent with your personalisation.
We do a lot of cold outreaches to VC/Angels and even work with some VCs for dealflow.
In fact, what matters is not necessarily the target. Cold email is an outbound channel that works for any target.
The question is rather whether your sales/engagement process is self serve (ex: ecom, direct sign up for events, very low ticket saas without sales interaction...) or requires multiple interactions (ex: demos, meeting etc...).
For the latter, cold email can be a game changer.
Because the ground rule is: "cold emails are not to be used to sell, but to connect with someone".
The selling happens after, and only if, you connect.
What is your hesitation about? Happy to expand.
So nice!
Thanks for the detailed feedback.
Sure thing! Have you tried reaching out to VCs / Angels?
Curious about results or possible issues :)
Yes, it was with not-so-good results. Not many replied.
Now, I don't work on fundraising, but I'm interested in getting knowledge of cold emailing :).
May I write to you when I'll work on cold emailing to get your feedback? It would be so helpful to me.
Absolutely, happy to help!
In preparation you can also take a look at the Cold Email Mastery course I launched last year.
Scroll down to Module 3 (writing cold emails)- there are 2 free videos you can watch that will give you a good structure to start with.
https://courses.thescalelab.com/cold-email-mastery
Would you suggest this for lower price point SaaS businesses? I've contemplated using cold email, but don't really know where to start.
That's a great question @JamesB
Cold emailing works very well for sales cycles that require multiple touch points with a given customer (ex: scheduling a call, demo'ing the service).
This is typically the case for higher price point Saas businesses and even more so true for enterprise software.
This said, for lower price point Saas, outbound can still work at an early stage where you need traction and can (even should) afford to speak to your early users.
An easy question is: Are you using a CRM pipeline with 3-5 steps minimum ?
If not, then outbound will serve you only in the early days.
If yes, then outbound will serve you throughout the lifetime of your business.
It's a matter of time invested v.s return.
One way to look at it is to weigh this against your expected customer lifetime value. In other words, how much time do you spend in the sales process v.s how much you're getting out of it.
You can also think of:
In the long term, lower price point Saas have a better chance to generate leads through inbound rather than outbound. But in the meantime, outbound can help strike a spark.
What is your hesitation about? Happy to guide.
Looking for a VM with experience for cold outreach