It’s the process of reaching out to people who’ve never interacted with you in the past via email with a unique proposition, with the intent to book a meeting or close a deal.
Okay no more formal wooha.
It’s no secret cold emailing is harder than warm/inbound marketing just because by law you ended to having at least interact with a prospect 18-24 times before building “familiarity” in this day and age, however that can be overcome if your offer is enticing enough.
To nail cold outreach you need to get 5 elements right:
We’ll be diving into each of these later on in this tutorial. SmartWriter can help you do all of the above in a few simple steps so you don’t need to use 10 different tools to achieve the perfect outcome, from finding leads, verifying emails, personalisation and follow-ups, we’ve got you covered.
So the question begs itself, why does cold email get such a rep, when it looks so dumbfoundedly easy, well thats exactly why. Because it’s so simple to do, people naturally abuse it and exhaust people with unwanted emails.
However, if done right cold email can be the most powerful and effective way to build relationships with very powerful people in the world, raise millions of dollars and even close deals with your dream client.
If I had to give up all my marketing arsenal, the one thing I would not give up is cold email, because there is no algorithm to beat, there’s no fighting the system, its just you and your ability to convince someone on the other side that your offer will make their life better.
And that is exactly why cold email is still so prevalent because it works..and it works really well.
Alright, enough of the hype, here’s how you can win!
- Simply put these are signals set up by you to ensure the receiving email thinks YOU actually sent it and not a masked email provider
The concept of sending programmatic emails between accounts to emulate a healthy inbox’s behaviour
After testing quite literally every one of them in the market we can recommend 2 systems:
- Lemwarm
- Reply
Here’s simply why, unlike the isolated services which you might have heard of the reason why these work better is due to AGED domains.
These companies are primarily email sending services so they have people sending emails from all types of domains vs JUST new bought domains.
The dynamic range of email accounts from which you are communicating with will effect your deliverability.
- Warm up a new domain for at least 3 weeks with a 20 email warmup kick off + 8 per day
- Have around 5-10 different domains and redirect all their webpages to your primary account
- Set up email forwarding from all complimentary accounts to a “master” account
- When someone responds they will ALL show up in the master account which you can use for replies
- According to HBR, you either make your money on the first email or your 5th
- Personalise ALL/Most of your follow ups, we built this in SmartWriter for you, use it!
- Focus on offer and education in all your emails
- 140 words AT MAX
- Call out their problem
- Talk about your results with “SIMILAR” customers
- Mention numbers and facts
- Simple clear CTA at the end asking for a call, demo or free test
- Offer exclusive discount available only via this email
- Make sure the call is within 3-4 days MAX
- Use calendly to set up 2-3 email funnel
- One email sharing a YouTube video or webinar
- 2nd email sharing an eBook or free resource
- This builds up trust prior to the call, removing animosity (DO NOT OVER DO THIS)
- Total email body less than 140 words max
- Never keep a paragraph more than 2 lines
- DO NOT over personalise (one at the start is enough, with a PS at the end)
- Quick intro, remove ALL fluff words
- Write like you speak (I can't stress this), imagine reaching out to someone random on the street, how would you talk to them?
- Read your email once you actually write it
- Sell benefits and proof of work (paragraph 2)
- Lastly but MOST important, a simple, dumb offer. The job of the cold email is for a meeting NOT a sale, offer then a simple straightforward solution
E.g
Money is made in follow-ups, not just the first email
Main thing, remember WHY you ever bought something, and use that same emotional pattern.
Your lead doesn't want to save money, they want to get promoted, they want to go home from work sooner, they want to impress their colleagues or parents
Bad email first:
Hey <firstName>,
My name’s James, and I do Facebook Ads for top tier brands that bring in consistent leads.
We help sales professionals close deals all the time through our proprietary algo hacking system.
I can help you out.
Lets chat over a quick call?
A good email:
Hey <firstName>,
Your monthly targets can be achieved in half the time with our pay per success booking system.
7 other sales reps similar to you use us to consistently fill their calendars with meetings.
You only pay for meetings that succeed, nothing else.
Keen for a 4.6 minute chat?
Remember its a cold email, introducing yourself will make no difference, only thing that will matter is if your offer for them is good enough to beat the completely cold approach
Alight, so now you know what goes into a perfect money making email sequence, let me show you how to do that in a few clicks using SmartWriter.
You need to have a lead list to start with. These will belong to your ideal customer profile, a set of customer persona’s who’re most likely to convert to a paying customer.
There’s 2 ways you can acquire lead.
Use a software like Apollo, Uplead, ZoomInfo, Lusha or more to get a lead list.
Here’s how you can do it with Apollo.
Similarly so, if you don’t want to add a new tool, just use SmartWriter’s free chrome extension to scale LinkedIn leads for free (and get their verified emails too).
Here’a quick tutorial on how to do that, and you can download the extension from here.
Now, in a situation you want to scrape leads off a directory, that also is perfect fine. I would recommend using a software like simple scrape and head over to any directory site and start scraping away.
Once you’ve done the scraping, feel the urls into an apollo.io or hunter.io and find the decision makers of the company, simple.
Equiped with your handy CSV list, you can upload this list to SmartScripts.
SmartScripts is our way of travelling the internet for you to find whatever we can about your prospect so you don’t have to, 45 minutes of research done in a few seconds for you.
You can decide the priority in which you want SmartWriter to find data for you. Simply drag and drop the order you want the engine to start searching.
Important Note*: The first “high quality” data piece SmartWriter finds it will select and exit the rest of the search. In other words, we’re not going to generate outputs for all 4 different options, but rather the first high value data piece we find for you.
Once you’ve decided your order click on continue and upload the CSV.
If you want all options as a choice, these are the csv columns you will need:
That’s all that’s needed, which would be usually be available, depending on the source you fetched data from.
But in any case even if you don’t have the data, that doesn’t matter - you just need either their LinkedIn Url alone (for linkedin personalisation), Website (for company personalisation) or if you want to do Deep personalisation (First, Last Name, Company Name + URL)
With respect to LinkedIn’s personalisation you can decide the order of what matters to you most, personalisation based on their recent activity, their recommendation, bio, job or others?
If you’d like recent activity, we will need you to add a cookie, a cookie is how we can authenticate an account on the system’s behalf to fetch their recent linkedin posts and create a unique personalised message based on that.
Note with cookies, its limited to 100 per day per cookie, this is to protect your account. You can add 10 different cookies if you want, which would mean 1000 profiles per day.
If you don’t want personalisation based on recent activity, you can turn off the option and carry on without doing any cookie business.
We also offer familiary as a personalisation option, which finds commonalities between 2 profiles, and is a fantastic icebreaker, for this you’ll need to give the LinkedIn Url of th person (can be yourself or your client) to which we will run personalisations against.
After this is done, click on continue and start generating the output. Once the output is generated you do a couple of things.
Lets start with the CSV export option
And this is the CSV that is exported for you
We’ve made the process as automated as possible for you. Our AI selects its “prefered output”, but also gives you the option you selected as well as the 2 personalisations done.
(You can individually select your favourite outputs by use of the checkbox)
So if you’re feeling lazy, in your CRM you can just map the SW_SELECTED_OUTPUT and click send, but if you’re particular about your choices, you can map the SELECTED_PERSONALISATION column and feel confident to send your messages.
Next is the option to directly push data to your email sending service
Here are the tutorials on how to do that with your favourite tool
And all you need to do in your email sending service after you’ve mapped the column is incorporate it into your message.
In this case, i’m using lemlist and i’ve mapped the variable “icebreaker” to the column “SELECTED_PERSONALISATION”
Click send, Enjoy
PS If you’re using LinkedIn for personalisation you’d want to check out this LinkedIn Outreach guide, i.e if you’re using LinkedIn personalization in your cold emails (very common)
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