Do you tailor cold-emails to individual prospects? If so, how much?
I'm starting to reach out to cold prospects for reviewy.co.
I'm trying to personalize each email a bit, but I keep finding that 90% of the email ends up being exactly the same.
Do y'all have a good process for doing that? How customized should each email be?
Josh, great to see your still working on this!
I'm pretty experienced when it comes to cold emails (sent a few hundred thousand of them). Happy to take 30min or so and point you in the right direction - just shoot me an email and I'll make some time next week :)
I think the problem you could have is that if you are in a very early stage and you are not targeting any specific niche. Normally when cold emailing doesn't work (you don't get enough replies or conversions) the problem resides in another place. I see your landing page and it tells me nothing, I don't know who is your target customer, how do you deliver the message, what are the results, etc.
I would rather focus on very specific users and tell a story: Are you targeting Android Apps owners, to improve the number and quality of the public comments and rating? Chrome Extensions owners? Restaurants in Tripadvisor? Coworking spaces in Google Maps? If you don't know your customer, you can't develop a tailored product, and you can't write a tailored message, you don't have anything to attract them, to show them what they are doing wrong.
For example, I have a product focused on recruiters, I know how they daily work is, what tools they normally use, what they have to do if they are a big company or freelancers, what tooling they are probably using based on where they live, and I can customize my message based on all the things I see in their Linkedin profiles.
I definitely do.
one great resources was a recent podcast on Predictable Revenue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8K_IR5b8DM
Yea, loads of discussion about highly personalizing your cold emails.
It really depends what you're doing:
If you have 6 prospects that could convert to a high dollar amount, you should spend a couple of hours personalizing each email (e.g. 2 to 3 days for those 6 prospects). Create a highly personalized proposal, attach it, go to the extreme and spend the time.
If you're pitching a SaaS with a monthly cost of $100 or below, you'd be better served by a different approach (IMO).
Find a high volume of prospects (100 or more, 1k or more?) that have some common theme amongst them. Instead of a highly personalized email, instead provide them a ton of value. Yea, I know, such generic advice ;)
Here's what I mean...
Let's say you are cold emailing for broken links. Meaning, swap out the broken link on your blog for my very related product.
Make your pitch in a cold email to swap out that link for yours. Then add a TON of value.
What's worked for me in the past is telling them how I'm going to then promote their newly updated blog post with my VERY LARGE social media audience (i.e. I'm about to send them a bunch of free traffic). I'm then going to blast my HUGE email list promoting their site (since my product just got listed of course). Again, ton's of traffic.
So on and so forth....
You could come up with a TON of ways to add significant value for that person receiving your cold email once you figure out the common theme amongst those 100+ (1k+) prospects.
Slam all of that into a cold email sequence that's auto sent. Best results I've had are ~5 emails sent over 30 days.
Good luck!