Cold emailing prospects for SaaS idea feedback
Hey IH,
I have an idea for a SaaS and have defined a target ideal customer profile. However, I want to get a few user interviews in place before I start coding. I went on LinkedIn and created a sheet with email addresses of around 100 prospects.
Has anyone here sent cold email campaigns for the validation phase of your SaaS journey? What tools did you use (e.g. mailchimp, sendgrid, mailshake etc.) and what were your results like (open rates/reply rates/ meetings set)?
I emailed about 100 people before for ContentCord (my now failed SaaS). I didn't track the open rates. I just used a Google Spreadsheet and Google Apps with the details (no need for fancy tools).
I had a reply rate of 1-3%, so it wasn't terrible. It helped me figure out that I didn't have a good product-market fit.
Instead of email, you can try reaching on LinkedIn. It is underestimated and underutilized and that's where the opportunity is. The chances of getting somewhere are much higher than cold emails.
The reason it is not in fashion is that emails are easy, while LinkedIn is all manual and takes time. To solve the pain created LINKDRA (https://linkdra.com)
Have seen people hit ~60% accept rates easily if you have a relevant profile with some content and have a good intro message.
So, anyone working on saas and early feedback, prospecting etc, should give it a go. Very affordable as well starting $15 (this month) with of course a free forever plan to try out.
Awesome initiative @sagup - appreciate your effort! Yes, I've tried. And it's how I get it done for a little passion project back then:
Stat:
Prospect size: 100
Open rate: ~64%
Reply rate: ~25%
Meetings: N/A
I've played around email marketing and B2B email sales for 5+ years.
You don't have to send out 100 emails in one go. I would suggest you breakdown the 100 prospects into 5 to 10 groups based on their characteristics. For example, seniority, industry, job title, etc.
If you use e-mail software as you mentioned above. There's a chance that you will be classified as spam and you waste your effort. What I do differently (no rocket science) is schedule personalized email template, short, sweet and incl. a clear call to action.
I would recommend using tools like HubSpot Gmail plug-in, Streak or Snov.io to track the email performance.
I do that a lot these days. And I already have a product online. All the reach is done manually, sometimes via email, sometimes via LinkedIn, sometimes via phone. I research my prospects a lot before contacting them, and every message is personal.
I also don't care about open rates because it doesn't really matter (for me) if the person has read it or not, what I do care is whether I get a reply. I don't want to follow up hoping that they might have just forgotten to reply only to find myself blocked completely.
It's hard, and many people don't reply at all. But it might also mean that your (and mine) research wasn't good enough. Or you weren't just luck enough.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I do want to ask though, why don't you follow up? I mean, people are busy, they might be genuinely interested but simply never gotten around to replying. Who knows, you may get a reply after 5-6 touches!
Personal reason. I myself hate these followups. Yes, there is a slim chance that a person forgot or didn't see your email, but if they did it would make people more angry at you. I'd rather lose prospect than make another person angry and potentially spread that opinion on their friends and colleagues.
In "Nail It then Scale It" they say that if less than 50% of the people you email don't respond, that the problem isn't urgent enough.
What kind of cold email campaign has a 50% response rate?
You'd be lucky if you get a 50% open rate.
The kind that end up with product/market fit, evidently. That's the whole point: if most people don't respond, then do they really have the problem you're emailing them about? If they really care they'll respond!
It's not just about the problem, it's about the whole thing with email overload. I rarely open emails from unknown people, I never open (and either unsubscribe or create a spam filter) emails from services I signed up to because you get a flood of automated (or a request to have a 1-on-1 call) messages with some crap.
Whenever I have a problem I research it myself and do not wait for someone to mail it for me. So it's either me finding the solution myself or I get contacted on some event or forum where I explicitly asked for help.
Email is really hard no matter whether that problem is urgent or not.
This is really bad advice, especially if you're selling a B2B product to folks who receive a lot of inbound marketing emails.
As noted below, most email campaigns have open rates below 50% and reply rates below 5%.
You can improve these numbers a bit if you are rigorous about the folks you target and customize the messages to the recipient, but in B2B you should not expect high reply rates.
Most buyers are not early adopters and don't want to be bothered until you're an established company selling a mature product to a set of customers they trust not to buy crap.
In the early days, you need to find 1) experienced folks who get off on a bit of ego stroking and like to "mentor" younger folks in their industry and 2) early adopters who are curious about anything new and don't mind having their time wasted.
For early sales, yes, you'll want to find desperate people, but also look for the 3 Fs of startup sales: friends, family and fools.
Anyway, do not overthink -- just start sending simple. short emails out, and don't use a template as you shouldn't need one to send 200-300 emails over a few days and those automated systems encourage impersonal cookie cutter emails that folks will delete straight off.