Cold email sequences + approach
I have been getting deep into the cold email world, and can see the risk/reward stacks up. I would love thoughts on this current process and sequence, and advice if anyone has it. For those new, perhaps this helps you understand the way this can scale nicely!
Approach
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Domains: We have lancr.co as our main domain, and so we have also bout trylancr.com, getlancr.com, and a few others for minimal prices and linked them to our gsuite and created separate users (not aliases!)
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Warm Up: We use Snov.io to add these domains, which require an app password in gsuite, but then we warm them up. I also send a bunch of emails to myself and teams and have a conversation with myself across a few emails to help - saw deliverability go to like 83 pretty soon. Also used mail-tester.com which is pretty cool. I'm not affiliated with Snov and other options include smartlead.com and instantly.com for this stuff.
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Sequence: I created an intro sequence with some variants, that is an intro flow. The idea is that based on the response (more info, referral, decision making, meeting) I would add them to another flow. But my goal is to get people to the website and self-serve.
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Leads: I used Snov with their database search to find companies involved in advertising and marketing design (we are targeting agencies, as they use international freelancers ad need payments). Also tried tweescrape but the leads seemed so so - there seem to be a lot of sites for leads, hard to asess proper quality, also not fully sure other places to find good agency leads.
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Campaign: Create lists out of these leads and execute a campaign from them. I understand there is a 2,000 limit per day for Gsuite - but I think you want to stay under that anyhow.
PS: Scaling up really well works with sendy.co which uses AWS SES but not there yet.
MY SEQUENCE:
initial Email → T1 → (3d) T2 → (3d) T3
→ Info (prospect requests more info) → T1 → (3d) T2 → (3d) T3
→ Power (prospect identifies themselves as decision maker) → T1 → (3d) T2 → (3d) T3
→ Refferal (prospect refers other decision makers) → T1
→ Future (prospect requests future follow up) → T1 → (3d) T2 → (3d) T3
→ Meeting
INTRO SEQUENCE:
Initial Email Variant A
Subject: 👋 [Name]
Hey [Name],
We automate tracking time and paying your freelancers (no matter where they are).
Interested in learning more?
Qayyum
lancr.co - Effortlessly manage and pay your freelancers
Initial Email Variant B
Subject: 👋 [Name]
Hey [Name],
We automate time tracking and multi currency payouts for agencies to pay their people.
Interested in saving a few hours a week, and a bunch of fees ?
Qayyum
lancr.co - Effortlessly manage and pay your freelancers
Initial T1
Hey again [Name],
Don’t want to bark up the wrong tree here. Do you use any freelancers or contractors in your business?
Qayyum
lancr.co - Effortlessly manage and pay your freelancers
Initial T2
Hey again [Name],
Don’t want to bark up the wrong tree here. Do you use any freelancers or contractors in your business?
Qayyum
lancr.co - Effortlessly manage and pay your freelancers
Initial T3
Hi [Name],
If you ever used other systems to pay your freelancers, you either:
- Used internal tooling like Wise and ended up doing this all manually and monitoring time sheets or
- Used a freelancer platform like Upwork or Freelancer and paid >5% in fees (and your freelancer probably paid ~20%).
We turned this on its head and created a system for simple, cheap and easy freelancer management and payments.
Check us out at lancr.co
Qayyum
lancr.co - Effortlessly manage and pay your freelancers
Look forward to feedback/hope this helped someone. Still looking for the first close, but definitely saw some traffic from the initial 200 emails I sent.
Interesting approach overall.
Recently did a campaign for a SaaS. Had a sequence of 7 emails, spread monthly, however, mentioned the offering in the 1st email itself. Followed by 2-3 emails asking for more information and setting up a demo call.
The entire campaign had 4 sub-campaigns with different offerings.
Final results:
Total Emails: 3.7k
Reply rate: 11.2%
Major Learnings:
Was the reply rate positive or just "stop spamming me responses"
I'd say, 60% positive, 40% negative/neutral.
Just curious, what are the industry standards?
When you say 4 sub campaigns, that was more split on the offer specifically or like by user type?
Different copy on the offer.
Great strategy. We are using Apollo for similar sequence. If you need more than 2000+ emails per day, I recommend Sendgrid.
Good luck with your journey, let us know about the statistics!
How has this performed for you ? Would love any insight on your real world results.
Hmm interesting strategy. Keep us posted on the results 'cause I am interested.
Will do, thanks!
I'm playing around with a similar approach for SEO backlinks and promoting my apps. Here's how I do it:
My learning so far: Full automation is tricky. I'm getting way better result if I separate lead import from sending mails so I can double check the data and fix some data errors before sending mails.
@alloctech super cool folow. I am pretty much doing the same at backlinkgpt.com just having a UI built on top of it. I would love if you could give the service a shot and let me know if you find the results remotely useful 🫠
And would be also curious how they compare to what you generated :)
Email marketing and newsletter is cool but does it bring money?
Thats why with emails and newsletter, funnel is very important. I learnt this from Russel Branson from his book Traffic Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Filling Your Websites and Funnels with Your Dream Customers
Basically it talked about how to structure and have system in your newsletter and email marketing to funnel people into sales and upsell to them to get more revenue. Of course the most important thing here is your product must have value to give to people.
Anybody starting with newsletter it a must to grab the book as it will teach you a lot.
Alternatively you can check this article to understand overall process of funneling newsletter: Getting more sales from email marketing using funnel hacking
Whoa, I'm- depth post thanks! I'm going to check these out as well
Great ideas, exploring this as well.
I am considering to try Apollo.io, have you heard of them? Also thinking of getting some people on Fiverr to find more leads
Used both, same thing end of the day I think. Although not sure if one has better leads than the other
Great strategy. can't wait the result !
Just want to point out a bug (hopefully it's a bug and not intentional) on the Lancr website. When I go to click on something in the navigation menu, a drawer slides down asking me to put my email in. I can't scroll up/down to get rid of it and it covers the navigation, so it's not possible to see/click those links. There is a close button, but the colour of the button is the same as the background colour (white) meaning it's not visible unless all text is selected and the icon is therefore highlighted
Thanks! Fixed that :))
I wonder if adding a free calculator or something might be useful. I would be intrigued to see how much I could save using your service. or have them book a free consultation to see how much they could save.
Really good idea - not first time heard that too
Hey did you write these yourself? Do you think I can automate them with chatgpt
I wrote these myself, I mean just based on our main copy and tagline - was trying to keep it short and sweet.
Sure you can just use chatgpt.with your inputs
Great approach! And also great app, I'll switch to Lancr soon!
It's interesting to see your approach to cold email sequences and how you're leveraging different tools and techniques to improve deliverability and engagement. Your warm-up process and use of Snov and mail-tester seem like effective strategies. It's also great that you have a clear goal of getting people to your website and self-serve. Your sequence and intro emails are well-crafted, providing value and highlighting the benefits of your service. Overall, it seems like you have a well-thought-out strategy in place. Good luck with your campaign and I hope you achieve the desired results!
Appreciate that detailed response! Helps to sense check.
All just making it up as we go along lol