Does cold email still work?

Look, cold email is a superpower, but its not as straight forward as just doing a cold email campaign.

You need to first make sure you're emails aren't heading into spam. And you need to make sure you're audience reads their emails (white collar workers like developers, marketers, executives, lawyers, journalists, VC's, founders etc)

Once you know your emails are delivered and your audience uses email on a frequent basis, the only thing that matters is the content:

1. Subject line
2. First line
3. Value and Pitch
4. Call to action

If you're not getting results one or more of them need help. The most common reasons I see cold emails not working:

1. Subject line is not relevant so it's not even getting opened
2. First line doesn't "hook"
3. Entire message is a pitch fest trying to extract value instead of giving
4. Not enough reason for prospect to take the time to reply back
5. Call to action is too "hard"
6. Not enough follow ups or outreach volume

You can fix it the following ways:

1. Make the subject line relevant - add their name or company name, use a keyword they are obsessed about, talk about a specific goal hyper relevant to them
2. Almost same as 1 but make sure you don't come across "salesy" this means don't just say "found you on linkedin" or "saw you're into fishing" etc. That is not "personalization, but being absolutely pedantic. Either talk about specific PAIN POINTS they have or complement them on something about them that is ALSO related to the pain point and your value prop
3. Same concepts apply here where you need stop focusing on what you can do. Write the exact benefit you can give them not the features or who you've worked with. Be very specific with the exact value your product or service is providing. Keep it short.
4. If you've done the above by focusing on THEM through addressing THEIR pain points, goals, values, then they will respond.
5. Go for soft closes "are you interested in some more details?" "can i send you some more info regarding this" "would you be interested to hear more about this". Get them to reply back the first time.
6. Follow up at least 5 times unless they tell you to unsubscribe.

Check this thred it's really good

Cold emails are extremely useful as an outbound channel:

• You can get in touch with anyone
• You can scale them (vs cold calling)
• The investment is low compared to ads

Bonus: you can get results very quickly.

In fact it's not a matter of whether they work , rather how to make them work :)

Here's what I suggest.

PREPARATION

1/ Deliverability
First, verify your deliverability (aka do your emails actually reach your prospects' inboxes or do they land in spam, worse do they bounce because the email addresses you have are not valid...).

What to do:
MXtoolbox - to check your domain health
UseBouncer or NeverBounce - to check your email list before sending

2/ Custom Variables

You have to ensure you at least have

First Names
Company Names
Roles
Industry
Location
Most emails only personalize the "First Name", and think they're on top of the game when they add “Company Names" to their arsenal.

Well, 90% of sales already do that with little results. The 10% remaining are those going the step further :)

3/ Goal

Use email to connect with people. Not to sell. The sales can only happen when you first connect with someone.

No one will insert their credit card somewhere after receiving an email from someone they don't know :)

In a world of Business to Business sales, we tend to forget that behind each business lies a human.

So be human.

PERSONALIZATION

It's all about standing out from the crowd. If you cold-email someone, you can be sure you're not the first one to do so.

You will not only compete with others, but also with any kind of notification we all receive: texts, calls, instagram, facebook messenger, twitter, linkedin etc...

The key is to:

• leverage creative subject lines (see in templates below)

-"icebreakers" on your first lines (because that's also what appears on someone's inbox or phone notification before even opening the email)
=> goal is to talk about the prospect before you talk about yourself.

• Everyone starts with the standard: "Hello X, my name is Y and I do Z".

• I suggest to only talk about yourself when you first acknowledge the prospect with something specific to them.

The talking ratio should be 80% about them 20% about you - with the first sentences always being about them.

AUTOMATION

If you send each email 1 by 1 and copy paste the text. Please stop now.

There's far more productive ways to do so. Email Automation tools I'd recommend:
lemlist.com
reply.io
outreach.io

If you'd like to get some free template ideas for Subject Lines and body, feel free to get them from www.thescalelab.com/templates

Happy cold emailing :)

I think for bootstrapped founders, cold-emailing is most likely the best way to be able to grow with enough mix of automation mixed in.

Here is my process (meant for B2B):

1. Use LinkedIn Sales Nav or Apollo (using their $0 plan right now just to get emails) (or any other lead-gen tool) to get emails based on company and roles that fit your target persona.
2. I'm using MixMax (their $29/month plan) (you can use any mail-merge type of tool) to import the contacts you found from step 1.
3. Create 3-5 step sequence with follow-ups spread out between 2 days on average. Ideally the subject and first line should be personalized (I've found that works the best for high open rates). Do at least 2-3 mins of research for each contact. Just find out if there is anything new they posted, if they're hiring, or anything that is related to what you're trying to sell and solves their problem. Trust me, it's better to send 50 emails with some quality content versus 500 with exact same email body.
4. These tools also let you track opens, link clicks etc... When someone opens you email more than 3 times (even if they don't reply), just manual send them a follow-up with some customer proof on top of that first email. The point isn't to book a meeting here, just get them to reply back and share anything about their current situation or interest.
5. Just be consistent. Try to spend 1-1.5 hour every day just monitoring the stats, adding new contacts to your sequences. If you can send 30-40 new emails a day, you'll get a steady pipeline within the first 2 weeks of few prospects who are interested.

Once you get comfortable, this becomes very quick thing to just set up because the rules are simple, you understand your customer type, and know exactly what type of emails perform better.

Best part is, even if you hire someone after, they can literally follow your playbook and get started in very short amount of time (if you plan to outsource this to some VA) or even part-time employee.

Cold email is the most underrated acquisition channel. I grew my last company, Contentellect, to $25K MRR almost exclusively through cold email outreach. We made many mistakes in the beginning which compromised deliverability, as well as open and reply rates. But over time, through a ton of reading and A/B testing we were able to refine a formula that ended up producing conversion rates well above the industry benchmark (0.3%). I've now taken those learnings and experience to launch my newest venture which is cold email outreach agency, SmartOutreach.

Absolutely! I've done it to find sponsors for several newsletters and it worked wonders. I've also done it to validate SaaS ideas quickly and more recently go grow my own SaaS.

I recently wrote a guide on how to validate ideas and get your first customers with cold email. Feel free to check it out here.

In short: Figure out where you can find leads for your target market, keep the email short and simple and don't forget to follow up. That's it! No large audience or other magic required.

Think it always REALLY depends on the target audience. In my country we're still a bit behind on the digital landscape – especially in the sectors of the so called old economy. So I'd say with the guides linked here there is a good chance of success when the product fits well!

Recommend this:

https://trends.co/video/cold-email-lecture-playback-notes-the-lecture-and-presentation/

It works when done right. Many of the advices here will make it work.

yes

you can use tools like scrapybird.com apollo.io etc. to find & send relevant emails

many will tell you to personalize, I don't but maybe that's just me. keep it short

I tried to engage digital marketing people with my AI/ML/Analytics proposal literally for free. From 175 e-mails got 3 negative answers (others did not reply, few read). Replaced email to LinkedIn messages: result was the same. Tried compliment messages with phone calls (ZoomInfo provided private phone numbers) -- people do not pick up, those who do (2) did not listen the pitch: one hanged up immediately, the other asked never call back.

I think I did most what other people suggested, but my result was strikingly different: Negative.
Good Luck!

I used to send cold email before to entrepreneurs before. Hadn't tried sales for my product with cold email though. As it might seem intrusive to people.

But on the other hand I try twitter DMs

short & sweet, non-intrusive / salesy / pushy works.

I'm using it successfully to bootstrap a Discord community. It's getting saturated, but it still works.