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17 Comments

Considering Cold Mailing? Here's My Personal Experience! ๐Ÿ“ง

Disclaimer - I don't like cold mails personally.

Before someone jumps at me, yes I know that cold mails work but is it really worth the efforts? That's the biggest thought that I'm trying to question through this post.

If you're wondering that I'm just going on a rant, then let me share with you ๐Ÿ‘‡

My experience with cold mails

In the inital phase of user acquisition for both my products- Brutask and Ruttl, my team and I did all the hustle most email marketers talk about. We did market research, found companies that would be suitable for our products, collected mails and made a mailing schedule.

We must've sent out cold mails to 700+ B2B decision makers over the course of 1.5 months. Out of those, we got around 10-12 respones. In those leads, few booked demo calls and never showed up. P.S Yes, we did all the A/B testing, even followed amazing conversion principles for cold mailing like first para personalization, follow ups, etc.

So what went wrong? It's simple. This is not the "ideal way" to sell anything.

Here are few reasons why I DISLIKE the method -
โŒ No phase of building relationship with the person you are reaching out to
โŒ One mistake and the person might get wrong impression about you
โŒ High probablity that you will have 5-10% positive response rates
โŒ Jumps directly into selling mode and that's what humans hate
โŒ Risk of getting domain blacklisted
โŒ Even if you're skilled, the person might consider you spammy/scammy

Not trying to black list this method at all. Sure there are hundreds of people I've seen on twitter who are making big bucks using this method but you need to also understand that in order for this to work, a lot of effort needs to go into prospecting and understanding the person you are mailing.

Thinking what I would rather recommend? Try putting out organic, valuable content. It's slow but gets you much higher quality results. Create a blog, put out social media posts, start a podcasts. Those are all great ways to build the first stage of relationship with potential buyers. And then you guide them down your sales funnel.

What your thoughts on cold mailing? Have you ever tried or considered doing it? If yes, how has your experience been? If no, why not? ๐Ÿค”

Love,
Siddhita โค๏ธ

  1. 6

    Your mileage may vary, learned a lot from cold emailing and have made progress with it via old projects. I usually get roughly 10% in response rate. You just have to be aware of the above drawbacks. Email to learn, never to pitch.

    Here are my tips:

    • Don't ever pitch in email, that first email should have the goal of talking to the person or learning more about what they do.
    • Smaller lists are better. If you email 500 people the same generic crap, no one will respond. Email 10 people and 2 of them are perfect people to learn from? Much better.
    • Answer "why this particular person"
    • Follow up, some people genuinely want to help but get busy.

    Met my current cofounder this way because he was interested in the problem I was learning about. Was able to learn quickly during my last (failed) project.

  2. 5

    Of these 700+ B2B decision makers, who is actually paying the bill? I had this problem a couple years ago when I was doing affiliate marketing in my newsletter. So the situation is that I pitched an event that 100% the newsletter readers would go to. In fact I heard from many that they indeed go. Readers of my newsletter even talked at the event. Some brought their whole company. Some made huge connections at the event and heard about it through my newsletter.

    but I got $0 of affiliate revenue from tickets sold.

    Zero. Zilch. Nada.

    Why?

    Because the people who went were VPs, C-suite, managers. All Decision makers in their company. But the person paying was always someone else. Accounting, VA, Executive assistant.

    The link in my newsletter was not the last click.

    Why does this matter to your sales calls? Because you might need to choose a different market to market to to get to your B2B decision makers. Who influences them? Who uses products on their own and brings them to a company? Who in the company actually makes the decision... might be an accountant.

    When I did cold emails for selling newsletter sponsorships I never knew who was the actual person at the company who I would sell to. I'd email sometimes a dozen people at a single company asking who is the person I should talk to?

    Sometimes I'd find out it's definitely not the CMO making these tactical decisions, in fact it's the Social Media Manager. I was selling newsletter sponsorships for a developer oriented newsletter and I'd get some interesting paths to the decision maker. Sometimes it's a "Developer Advocate" not a Marketing Manager who wants to get into the newsletter. I once had 2 separate conversations with people who wanted to buy a sponsorship from the same company, but wanted different marketing tactics. So I got to advertise the same company twice! and it worked!

    One Weird Trick to Cold Emailing

    This won't work for everyone but I thought I'd share it. Emails with the Subject: Interview Request, get opened at a HIGH request. Start a blog for your company. Set a goal to publish an interview with 1 person in your industry every week. Email those 700 B2B decisions makers again, and ask if they will be interviewed. Send them a google doc with 5 questions to fill out. and publish it in your blog, on your email list.

    Now your cold email is to promote them. You find out more about them (by actually asking them questions you're into) and you promoted their company. If they want to use your product they might try. because they read your blog, saw others, and sent the link to 2 or 3 people in their company to try it out.

    Out of 700 Decision Makers you should be able to get 52 who want to promote their own company and will answer 5 questions in a google doc.

  3. 5

    I couldn't agree more. I have tried cold email multiple different times. I thought it was my pitch, my product, or something else. I could never figure out why no one would reply to my emails. Not even the emails where where I'm just looking to build rapport. If they did reply it was a small minority of the total emails I sent.

    I found almost instant product-market fit on Facebook Groups. Just looking to connect with the community I'm serving and providing useful value wherever I can. Slowly I built up a following and was able to better understand the kinds of problems their facing.

    1. 0

      Kindly ask you to show the example of your letter.

      Bet it's impossible to read, all about you and your great product.

      1. 2

        Did you not see where I mentioned that hardly anyone would reply even when I was looking to simply build rapport? The entire point I was trying to make was that depending on the product, there is a lot of friction in trying to get users/clients/customers via email.

        If your offer is good, you are solving a problem, then selling should not be a 1-5% response rate lol. I think a lot of IH'ers are working harder than need be to get customers using email. But hey, if you're happy with less than 10% response rate, keep at it!

  4. 2

    Cold email is only one of the ways to get leads/clients.
    Cold emailing is working great, but depends of your product, the content of the email if the content is ultra personalized, tool you are using to send emails, your sender reputation,.....
    In fact, I'm doing cold emailing for years, and for me, with SEO, it's the best way to get leads/clients. But both required a lot of experiences, and the learning curve is high.

    For other ways, that the point, need to think out the box (quora, reddit, fb groups, linkedin groups,...), and of course ads!

    By the way, I worked for some competitors of brutask, it's one the most competitive fields I have noticed (in the b2b online service)
    When someone is using daily such tool, he doesn't want to change (afraid to lose the history of the task, learn how to use the tool....). That's why the CPC for think kind of service (notion,trello, monday...) is high.

    Also, I guess it's your marketing/sales strategy do not display the pricing of your tool brutask, but, speaking for my own experience, I'm testing almost 10/15 new tools each day (ph,beta,....) , but I never test tool that doesn't display the pricing before I signup...

    Good luck

  5. 2

    I see people saying "cold emails don't work" but then I see those same people saying "I only got a couple responses out of a hundred emails."

    Guys, the response rate is expected to be 1-2%. That's not doing it wrong. That's exactly what is expected.

    So if you're willing to put up with that - and why not? it's cheap, and you can get plenty o' emails - it seems like it can work, where work means "assuming 1-2% response rate, here's how you build a strategy to work off of that, and make money."

  6. 2

    It probably depends on the market you're trying to target.

    Personally, I ignore almost all cold emails, and I'm sure a lot of other people do the same. If you're a B2C business trying to get me to spend my personal money, then you're not going to have much success.

    If you're a B2B business emailing my company email and offering to solve a real pain point for me (which my company would pay for), then you might have better luck. But prepare to spend a lot of time emailing and finding the right customers.

  7. 2

    Yeah, no matter your personal opinion, I will actually do it.
    In fact, my idea is to do cold emailing with videos -- since I'm selling a video editor.

    Try putting out organic, valuable content. It's slow but gets you much higher quality results. Create a blog, put out social media posts, start a podcasts.

    Is this just stuff you've heard, or something that you're actually doing?

    Because the idea is -- with cold emailing, if you get replies, you get instant feedback. If you don't, you need to change the strategy, and do it until it clicks.

    While with organic reach, it's so hard to get traction, and not only that, but you may need to pivot several times during the process -- which can be months, and you could go bankrupt.

    So while in theory you're right, in practice you can go broke until you actually sell anything.

  8. 2

    Also highly likely your process was broken.

    Rather than booking a demo you should have booked a short call and then sold the demo on that call no wonder they didn't show up.

    "This is not the ideal way to sell anything"
    Like seriously?
    I don't know about you but phone calls and Emails are the best way to sell high ticket items.

  9. 2

    People hate on cold emails and discourage others because THEY suck at sending cold emails.

    I have personally generated more than $10k dollars using cold email. So if they don't work for you too bad.

    Also people love buying thing when you solve a painpoint.

    If your cold emails are not working it's time to look at your offer.

    1. 1

      Cold mails are subject to a ton of variables - Copy, offer, set of audience, how the audience reacts, send & open timing, & a lot more things.

      That being said, we have tried cold emails for demo calls to ultimately lead to conversions, but there were people that agreed to turn up for calls, yet they never turned up.

      Point is, just like cold emails worked for a few (example here - you), it didn't work for a few others. If it worked for you, splendid! If it didn't work for others, nothing major. We're trying other methods (SEO, Google ads, LinkedIn) & they're working out really well for us. ๐Ÿ˜Š

  10. 1

    I'm a big fan of sending out new ideas or questions to people that inspire me. And even if I don't get a response, I feel like it's a helpful way for me to "Take action" on my ideas. As long as it's genuine and respectful, I think the worst thing that can happen is that you don't hear a response.

    If the person likes it, it can spark a new relationship, a new job or even a cool collab in the future. So there's my 2 cents.

  11. 1

    if you use it as a large blunt Hammer, then yes you can expect shit results.
    if you craft it like a fine scalpal then you will have positive results.

    Every email drip we create has these 3 personalized items:

    1 - Their {{First Name}} in the Subject line

    2 - Their {{Title}} and unique {{Spintext}} in the copy * this makes every email 100% unique.

    3 - A custom-made sample sitemap of THEIR website. <<<- this is clutch as it is literally made for them. Example: https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/5d9e9eba602ae06acd13b265f986081a

    We spread the 3 drips over a 30-day period, as to not be too annoying.
    Snovio is ok to start with, BUT they have a +35% bounce rate on their "VALID" emails, so you will need to clean them after via NeverBonce or ZeroBounce.

    YMMV.

  12. 1

    You CAN'T SELL THE PRODUCT via Cold Email. You simply BUY THEIR TIME to close during the zoom call.

    700 is a low number.

    Try 70.000 in a week and see how it goes.

    Check this hack snov.io

    Don't give up, it works better than you blog anyway

  13. 1

    Thanks for sharing!
    My main issue with cold mailing for my projects was that I couldn't figure out where to get addresses for sending out cold mails. I hear other founders getting their initial users after throwing 1000 messages into nowhere, but I don't believe they collect email manually. Have you?

  14. 2

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  15. 2

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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