Let’s talk about cold emailing.
I love it and I hate it. I love it because it is your free foot in the door with anyone on the planet. I hate it because I get dozens per day and 99.99% of them get marked as spam. But I’ll help you with that. By the end of this email you’ll know 80% of what I’ve learned about cold emailing over the last 15 years, including:
When to use cold email
I can’t think of any situation where it wouldn’t hurt to know how to cold email. And when I say cold email, I mean all of the following situations:
Cold email is most effective when you’re selling either a high-ticket or recurring product or service. It doesn’t make sense to send cold emails for a product or service that has a lifetime value of $100 or less. Why? Because here’s how the numbers will break down for a $100 product:
Ok, this is embarrassing. As I typed out the above I think I disproved my own logic. Once you set up the campaign above, it will be almost fully automated. If you can find enough emails to fill that campaign and your margins are good, then why not send 1,000 emails to make $500?
This is awkward. I could delete the above, but I want to walk you through my thinking. Let’s pivot my logic a tad. I’ll say this, the product or service you’re selling via cold email most depends on the amount of high quality, relevant email addresses you are able to acquire.
So if you’re selling a $100 product and have 1,000,000 active, relevant emails of potential buyers, then go for it! That would make you $500k at the same numbers. But is a $500k one time revenue bump enough to build a sustainable business? Likely not, so you see my point. And 1,000,000 targeted email addresses isn’t easy to get.
Cold emailing is best when you’re selling something that requires someone to book a call to close a deal. Maybe you’re a fractional CFO and you charge $5k/month. Cold emailing is perfect for you. Email > open > interested reply > book a call > close the sale.
If you only close .5% of your emails then you only need 2,000 relevant emails to build a $50k/month business.
So where do you get valid emails?
Ah, so many places. My favorite is a bit under the radar, however, and very, very cheap.
Now I’m not talking about hiring a Filipino VA on Upwork to scale emails, although that works too. It just takes too long and I’m impatient. This is an actual post of mine on Upwork from January
That was for a project I was helping a friend with.
You’re looking for something that is already found. You just need to find the Upwork VA that already did this job for someone else so you can buy their CSV for $20.
I’ve done this about a dozen times and it almost always works. So your job post might say,
“I need names and email addresses of veterinary clinic owners in Ohio.”
And then buy the CSV for $20 instead of waiting 2 months and paying $500.
You can message relevant freelancers on Fiverr with the same request.
If this doesn’t work then just use something like Apollo, Clearbit or a Chrome extension that can scrape them from LinkedIn such as Hunter.
Once you have your emails DO NOT EMAIL THEM until you have validated them. You have no clue how old they are, and about ~5% of emails go bad every year, so please validate them. I have been using Bulk Email Checker for years and it’s the best and cheapest I’ve found, but there are dozens of options.
If you can, get as much info on these emails as possible. At a bare minimum get their first name, because you’ll be including that in the email and it makes a massive difference on response rates and deliverability.
How to stand out from the crowd
I almost never see a good cold email. Literally, maybe I see one per year. I’ll help you fix that. Here’s the whole purpose of any cold email:
Start a conversation, don’t try to sell.
You won’t sell from the first cold email, you just won’t. You have to build some semblance of a relationship first, so seek to start a conversation. And yes, this logic holds true whether your product is $100 or $100,000. Let’s use the example of my tree biz bootcamp because it’s top of mind right now. I’m not doing any outreach for it aside from the occasional tweet, but if I were I would do this:
I’d start with landscaping owner emails, and first email would look something like this
First name,
Do you still own (landscaping business name)?
Chris Koerner
That’s it. That’s the whole first email. No link! Wow. Brilliant, right? Hah, just kidding. This would be my first email, that’s it, really! Why? Because I’m starting a conversation and qualifying the lead at the same time!
If they say yes, I respond. If they say no, I don’t. If they don’t respond, I’ll send automated follow ups (more on this later.)
Let’s say they say yes, my next email would be,
Awesome. Do you offer tree trimming? The reason I ask is because we’re hosting a tree biz bootcamp in Dallas and I’d love to see if you’d like to either attend or speak at it. We're happy to pay. Would love to chat either way!
Ok, so here’s my thinking here.
I could keep up the bait and switch-ish vibe by just asking “Do you offer tree trimming?” But that’s a bridge too far in my opinion. That’s too much, too many emails. You will lose trust. I’ll just hit them with the pitch in email #2 because I don’t want to feel slimy.
If they respond once their chance of responding twice is much, much higher.
Most cold emails lead with the pitch. STOP DOING THAT! The sunk cost fallacy is real. They’ve already spent the time responding to you once, might as well see this through.
My other strategy is that I’m offering to pay them to speak. That’s a real offer. If they already trim trees and know a ton about operations, I literally need them to speak and am willing to pay them.
Humans need to know what’s in it for them. In the case of this 2nd email, they can either be paid to speak or get more jobs by learning new marketing tactics and adding a 2nd service line.
Emails 3+ would be to get them on the phone to close the sale, since it’s high ticket you won’t really close it online very effectively.
What about the subject line? Keep it short, stupid.
Quick question used to rule them all, but it’s played out now. For this one I would simply do, trees?
3 words or less is my rule. Seek to pique their curiosity, not to convince them to open directly.
Which software options to choose?
I love Mixmax and Lemlist, but Mixmax gets the nod. Both offer mail merge and automated follow ups, and that’s what really matters. But Mixmax is cheaper and more user friendly. I've used both for many years.
What’s freaking cool is that you can spend an hour setting up a campaign and then get leads in your inbox on autopilot for months to come, without ever having to login to the software again.
Automated follow-ups turn off when the person replies. As my British friend Zach would say, “It’s brilliant.”
How to set the tech up on the backend so you don’t get sent to spam
This one is really easy, just follow these exact instructions:
Conclusion
Whew, ok, that’s about it. I feel like there’s many thousands more words I could put in this, but there’s only so much time. You can also just use a cold emailing agency to do everything for you, but a lot of them make the same dumb mistakes that we all see in our inboxes daily. My friend has a solid agency, so if you’d like an introduction, let me know.
Cold emailing is awesome because it’s scalable and on autopilot. Once you figure out what the formula is for your offer, it’s just simple math. Send 1,000 emails, get 200 replies, get 20 calls, get 2 sales, etc. Then it’s just a matter of finding enough solid emails.
I hope this helps someone and that you found good value here. Please let me know if you have any cold emailing wins based on this email!
If you have any feedback for me or my newsletters, good or bad, hit reply and LMK! I'm always trying to get better.
Chris