Just like with fishing, you need to have patience, good bait, and the right spot for your cold emails to be successful.
It’s one of the publicly known secrets that no director talks about yet everyone does it.
- Patience = grinding and sending emails at specific intervals during the day
- Bait = your offer and how it’s packaged
- Right spot = choosing the best sources and people to target
Face it, with cold emailing you’re fishing in cold water and if you have all of the three traits mentioned above, then you’d be getting something like this:
But enough of fishing.
The following tips and tricks will give you a very good idea as to what a good bait looks like. I’ll cover the other 2 traits in a different post.
5 Facts About This List
- It’s a 10-minute read that will change your understanding of life as you know it.
- Every tip has been tested and tried in over 44,000 emails sent throughout the last years.
- Structured in a way where it covers tips and tricks for
- Key Message
- Subject line
- Content
- General Emailing
- BONUS – a checklist to do after every email
Let’s go.
What is Cold Emailing?
Cold Emailing is the art of convincing someone that you don’t know and never met in your life, that you will genuinely help him solve his greatest problems while seeming like his best friend – through one email.
The No. 1 Challenge in Cold Emailing?
You have to get in the shoes of the client, feel his pain, and reinvent the same solution your client is providing to them, in your own voice. Give him a solution that will put him as the leader of the industry eventually and eons ahead of the competition. Let him know that you understand his home playing field.
The 2 Part Purpose of Cold Emailing
- Test the waters and see what’s your best spot to fish, in the shortest time possible.
- Weed out the uninterested fish and get the clients that need your service on the phone and sell them.
2 Key Tips For Your Message
- Tailor your message to the goal of the person you’re writing to. That goal depends on their job and seniority level. Example:
- A CEO or founder cares about the big picture and getting more clients (aka long-term growth).
- A marketing manager who desires to become a marketing director cares about looking awesome to her boss.
- The message understands and solves their pain.
4 Tips for Cold Emailing as a Whole
- When you write a cold email that’s relevant to your reader, THAT’S damn persuasive.
- Relevance shows your reader that you GET them. And by getting them, you’re a partner aligned toward success. You just might make their lives easier. And you just might make them more money.
- Find out what they do and then try to help them.
- Use informal language.
The 4 Structure Tips You Should be Following in Every Email
- Paint the picture of the future – Makes them picture or envision something positive happening.
- Paint the current market need – Psychological – mentioning the fact that we have experience with increasing sales so much that other companies couldn’t handle them – but without coming right out and saying that.
- Explain why us – Highly focused on ROI and revenue/sales AKA drivers of the bottom line. Also mentions not just increasing sales but helping to maintain the things that support it.
- Get them intrigued to answer – Shows interest in them, and then hopefully makes them intrigued about the ideas you have.
4 Subject Line Tips
- It has to be disruptive and get their attention through the clutter they have in their inbox.
- The subject line is like the title of the book which means the whole content follows the subject.
- Subject lines are meant to tell recipients exactly what they’re going to get in the email body.
- No punctuation at the end of subject lines.
44 Content Tips & Tricks
- Make sure there’s value in the content, to the person you are sending it to.
- Cold email is a story. The recipient is the hero. You need to help him resolve his conflict.
- Avoid going for the sale too soon – get them to download something (a case study, reference material) and this way get to know them.
- Ask yourself, what is the biggest pain they solve for their clients? Put this in the content.
- Reduce the chance that they will THINK before they act on what you want them to act on.
- Make it easy for them to respond.
- Make it harder for them to leave the email than to reply to it because it’s so simple.
- From the moment they open the email their brain fights to close that email by asking a million questions. Answer every question with every sentence.
- Guilt-free as possible content.
- Don’t give them the option to read the email in an aggressive voice in their head.
- Compliment in the first paragraph.
- Ask for something that can be answered with a YES OR NO.
- Don’t write “just checking in” – what are you checking?
- Reference time in the emails. Like writing to you in regards to the email from 2 days ago.
- First, decide what you want them to do after reading the content – the action they should take and give them reasons why they should do it. Is it a:
- Call?
- Email?
- Meeting?
- Don’t be vague – be very specific in your offer and what you want from them.
- Ignore the rules of traditional email composition and be human, honest, and funny.
- Use a conversational tone (be the person I would LOVE to talk to).
- Don’t stuff in tech jargon and buzzwords (simply explain what you can do for me).
- Don’t write in formal and defensive language – (phrases like “thanks for consideration” or “looking forward to your positive answer” indicate your lack of confidence).
- Don’t start sentences with “I” – Use we or if possible use your potential client.
- Make it much more about them or at least way less about our clients. Lots of the templates included long lines about all the stuff they do – don’t do this.
- Casual tone, professional text – keep the conversation style casual but don’t do casual things like multiple periods.
- When writing the CTA, don’t say “next week” but sometime over the next week.
- Always avoid self-serving CTA’s – it’s always getting on a call to learn more about them, never just “I would love to talk with you”.
- Don’t use the word “free” when asking if someone is available for a call.
- Keep emails as brief as possible. Always say what you want in as few words as possible and remove unnecessary words or phrases that don’t add to the meaning of your sentence/paragraph. Like the previous sentence. I already told you what to do in the first one.
- Always use contractions whenever possible (it’s vs it is). Read the templates back to yourself out loud to catch things like this and other awkward-sounding phrases.
- Imagine talking to the person face to face – would you say ” I have had” or “I’ve had”? Don’t be a sophisticated douche.
- Always lead with something about the prospect, their company, or their industry, not about yourself.
- Keep the blame off of the recipient when mentioning you didn’t hear a response. It’s always “I didn’t hear back” or “I haven’t gotten a reply”, not “you haven’t responded back yet”.
- Keep the emails outcome-focused rather than service-focused.
- The ask in the first email should be something simple – what do you think about this?
- Read the content out loud to see if it makes sense.
- Read the content in a way where it would sound ok to tell it to someone you meet on the street – is it casual?
- Read it again as a grammar nazi.
- Don’t guess things you don’t know.
- Do not condescend.
- Talk about them in the first lines.
- Don’t sell them. Show them that you know them and understand their PAIN and want to help them overcome that pain by showing the results of your solution.
- Make them feel as if you are best friends and know what the fuck is wrong and needs fixing and how.
- Always have in mind what do their clients really want?
- Don’t sell them names and concepts. Tell them what the concept will provide them and how much.
- Explain how your offer benefits your prospect’s business goals. Sounds like you’re gonna be mind-reading, and whoa, that’s not possible yet. Take a deep breath. It’s easier than you’re imagining. Most often, their business goal is one of these (focus on ONE for a stronger, more succinct message):
- Make more money
- Get more clients
- Reduce expenses
- Grow their business (reach, market share)
- Look awesome to their boss/clients
- Break off the text into short paragraphs. Imagine getting a one-paragraph email when you’re in a rush? DELETE.
5 Key Questions to Ask After Writing Each Sentence:
- Is this about helping them?
- Is this about them?
- Is it simple straightforward and to the point?
- Is it outcome-based?
- Does it sound as if you are talking to him face to face?
1 Tip to Use When Personalizing the Emails
- Research
- The person I’m emailing (aka my reader)
- Their job position
- How long they’ve been in that position
- Recent news/accomplishments about that person (aka flattery)
- Recent news about their company (aka flattery)
- Any new projects their company is working on releasing or has just released
- Info about them that’s directly related to my offer
6 Tips For Structuring All Emails
- In each email state one benefit for them.
- First, relate to their business.
- Then ask a question that relates to their pain to trigger interest.
- Give an idea of how we can solve it for them.
- Mention how we solved it for someone else in their industry.
- Ask for a meeting.
4 Key Tips For Follow Up Emails
- It’s quick and to the point. Your goal is 3 sentences max.
- Make your follow-up email’s CTA relevant to your first email’s CTA.
- Have only 1 question in your follow up CTA.
- Don’t condescend or accuse – they don’t even know you man!
- Express the enthusiasm with teaser information of the previous email you sent to them (concerns follow up emails)
BONUS: 7 Things to Check Before You Click Send
- How would I react to getting this email from out of nowhere, from someone I don’t know?
- Am I talking TO them or AT them?
- Does this seem like a “blast” or an email a human sent to another human?
- Is this email too long?
- Is this readable AND actionable from a small mobile device?
- Am I starting out with too big of an ask?
- Am I trying to circumvent the process by jumping to that ask too quickly?
Think about it this way.
Your potential client is on the phone, walking to the airport terminal to catch an early flight, and opens his inbox. In between the shitstorm of emails, he finds the following:
Subject: {name}, we can improve your PPC campaigns’ ROI by 44%
Hi {{first}},
My team researches companies that are working with Google Adwords campaigns, and I recently saw {company name} brought up. Being the curious marketer that I am, decided to head over to your website and see what you’ve got going on. Looks like you have a great operation!
I wanted to ask though, how your Adword campaign efforts for clients over the past few years has been?
I ask because at (your company), we help our clients increase the ROI of their Adword campaigns by 44% over a longer period of time with the help of our white label solution.
We perform the heavy lifting for you, you build in a healthy margin for your clients and they stay for longer and become more loyal.
Do you have a few minutes over the next week, so we can connect and I can learn a bit more about {company name} as well as explain how we work?
Just let me know when is best for you,
Jim
Cheers,
bb
If you need help with creating a ROI driven cold mailing sequence, you better check this out.