94% opens; 42% replies: How I used cold email to land 20+ B2B partnerships in 3 months (with my exact templates)
Hey Indiehackers,
Cold email has been one of the most profitable marketing and sales channels for us since we launched, but generally, it gets a bad rap.
I want to change that and help you get better at it.
Lemlist featured me and one of our first B2B cold email campaigns on their website a few weeks back. This campaign clocked 94% opens and held a 42% reply rate (over 122 leads), which ultimately booked 30+ B2B meetings with our target audience and landed over 20 deals in 3 months.
Without cold email, we'd be dead.
I started putting together a braindump of everything that went into making our campaign successful with the intention of sharing, since I've been lucky enough to learn so much (about everything) from this community - especially @danbe and @louisxavierl from Growth Design, whose UX insights I find myself thinking about in almost every facet of my work now.
So, here's the completed braindump, compiled into a neatly organised post, including the exact processes that went into creating our campaigns, the verbatim email scripts I used, and some brief psych tips at play behind the copy: https://cloutly.org/blog/cold-email-template/
Would love your comments, and if you have any questions or want some feedback on your cold email campaigns, leave a note below and I'll do my best to help you out.
I'm just about to embark on the cold emailing journey, your article comes at the perfect time. Thanks for the inspiration / motivation 🔥
Do you have any idea if it can work with LTV of ~$60?
are you now!
Yes ORACLE 🙏
everyone works with them, check any Saas website!
Sure, I don't see why not, but at that LTV, I'd probably consider looking at cold email as a channel to form partnerships or open up opportunities, rather than make direct sales :)
Amazing results. Congrats.
After 8 years in software sales I can agree that cold email works...sometimes :)
I don't know your space but these are aspects that increase your chances of success:
Recently, I've sold in the DevOps space and teams have at least 15 alternatives to what I was selling plus building it on their own. I was selling monitoring. These same teams also buy a huge amount of products. So in my case, no 3 and 4.
Same would happen if you were selling a marketing analytics tool to heads of marketing at billion dollar companies.
Cold email is mostly done directly to end users and response rates tend to be lower. You likely have dozens or hundreds of sales guys reaching the same people to talk about the same thing. It's possible but differentiation is harder.
Thank you @ameneres! You're 100% correct. Great points. Ultimately success boils down to having a great product and having the right audience for that product - you'll never win without those two nailed. Cold email is just the messenger.
Targeted leads. Without them you have no chance. Our subject was getting a 40.04% open rate cold. What we learned is the message, the pain point, and the lead must be very aligned. Without an open, you can't progress further. Getting leads by scraping will result in failure. How you get your leads and the quality of the lead matters most. We are building a marketing tool to go further. We build a knowledge model of properties about each email address, that provides us with personalization beyond what is currently available. Behavioral intent properties.
Amazing campaign!
👏👏👏
Super helpful tips!
Great article! short & consise about the cold emailing.
Personaly, I think that sending the same day 2 emails is too much, but your stats proove that it can be good also.
And I guess that the 2 agencies that joined to your plateform are enough big to me famous and speak to your prospects.
Good job
Thanks @Tim12! Just to confirm - we didn't send two emails on the same day. Is that what you meant?
I think I misunderstood your step 3 and 4. the X days later, is the X days after the last email, and not the first email so. (so it's D,D+3,D+8,D+13)
Ah, gotcha! Yep, you're right. Each step was X days after the last.
Thanks for sharing Lachlan! Two questions I have, I suppose:
What's your take on the personalisation vs quantity approach? Clearly it worked for you with these 122 leads, but if you need to reach 1000 prospects perhaps it would be too much work to create an icebreaker for each?
What is the reason that you use 4 steps? I currently use 3, but I'm always wondering how often you should follow-up before the 'breakup email'. If someone doesn't respond, technically you could keep following-up every week... what is best practice / what is your opinion?
Hey @jochemg, great questions:
If you discover that by doing this you can achieve 30-40% reply rates, or 20% meeting rates, it's worth doing over a more scattergun approach which might only net you 5% meeting rates and land you in the spam folder.
Thanks very much for sharing. Nice!
My pleasure! Glad it helped :)
These are impressive stats. I like your structured approach, and that personal icebreaker is something I'd need to add to my emails. Thanks!
The icebreaker is a must-have to stand out amongst the noise. Thanks @sadamiak!
Fantastic article, Lachlan! This really persuaded me to try more cold emailing in the future. Definitely agree with your point about making sure to personalise the email; that's the secret to it all! Wishing you continued success with Cloutly :D
Thanks, @silvi - glad you enjoyed reading! Excited to hear you'll give it a go in future. Best of luck :)