From 0 to 2.6K MRR: How 3 Tools And A Change In Thinking Helped Me Succeed with Cold Emailing in 2 Months

I know cold emailing can be a controversial topic. Some people love it, some people hate it. I'll admit it, I used to be in the ‘hate it’ group. But then I started noticing more and more companies using it successfully, and I decided to test it out for myself. To my surprise, it's been working incredibly well for me.

I know this may be obvious to some, but I've discovered that cold emailing is most effective when you first take a lot of time in creating highly specific ideal customer profiles and buyer personas for your product or service and targeting ONLY those in that very very specific demographic.

If you're sending messages to a broad audience without a proper understanding of your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas, it's considered SPAM. However, if your product or service is highly relevant to the recipient, then your cold email will likely be well received.

This can get pretty tricky to accomplish but these are the 3 tools that helped me do just that and generate 2.6K MRR in 2 months. While I can't guarantee that these tools will work for everyone, I am hoping my small success may inspire some of you to try out these strategies for yourself and perhaps have some success as well.

Step 1: Understand your Ideal Customer Profiles and Buyer Personas (The most important step)

You might be thinking what is the difference? In layman's terms,

Ideal Customer Profiles represent an ideal business that you want to pitch to. Here you can define properties such as industry, employee count, revenue, specific pain points in the company, etc...

Buyer Personas are a detailed analysis of a specific buyer or decision-maker within your Ideal Customer Profile. Think of this as the person who will be receiving your email. You should define properties such as name, job title, age, gender, goals, frustrations, and more.

For a detailed comparison between ICP and personas, check out this resource: https://rockcontent.com/blog/icp-vs-persona

Additionally, Hubspot offers a visual tool to create personas that may be useful (https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona), although it appears to blend the attributes of ICP and buyer personas.

Step 2: Get their emails

Now that you have very very specific ICPs and Buyer personas, you need to get their emails. My tool of choice is.

Apollo.io ($49/m)

For targeting B2B enterprise clients, I find that Apollo.io is the best tool. It's user-friendly and allows me to easily input my ideal customer profiles and buyer personas that I developed in Step 1 and many other specific attributes that are highly relevant to my product.

Note: Although it also mixes the attributes of ICPs in the persona tab, the overall functionality of apollo.io is excellent.

NOTE: Keep in mind that Apollo.io limits you to add 25 people to your list at a time. To work around this, I use a Chrome extension Apollo List Builder (https://myapollolistbuilder.gumroad.com) to automate the process, allowing me to generate about 1000 leads in just a few minutes.

Step 2: Write an email that speaks directly to the pain points and goals of your Buyer persona.

Option 1: Chat GPT (Free)

I don’t think I need to go into much detail about ChatGPT’s copywriting capabilities. Of course, you can give it a very detailed prompt like…

“Generate 5 different cold emails to promote a new called [name] to my ideal customer profile: [insert attributes here] and buyer persona: [insert attributes here]. The email should highlight the benefits of the benefits [insert benefits], while also addressing the customer's problems [include customer problem] include a personalized call-to-action [describe the call to action], and provide a clear explanation of the product's features… etc.. ”

But personally, I find creating and writing these super-specific prompts to be a bit of a chore, especially trying to fit all the details of my product, buyer persona, ICP, pain points, etc. More often than not, the prompts end up being too broad and unspecific. And its follow-up emails are sometimes on the cringy side. That's why my preferred approach is to use...

Coldly.ai ($19/m)

I personally prefer to use Coldly for email copywriting. It's similar to Apollo.io in that it lets me input data from my Buyer personas and Ideal customer profile details.

Coldly can be quite slow when generating emails at times, often taking up to 30 seconds which can be quite frustrating if you're impatient like me.

However, its unique feature of allowing me to easily add specific details about my product and my customer's challenges, frustrations, and even my social proof, then it crafting multiple highly targeted email variations with follow-ups has made it indispensable for my outreach efforts.

Having multiple email variants is crucial for my last step.

Step 3: Send out emails

Instantly.ai ($30/m)

I absolutely love Instantly. It streamlines cold email campaigns with unlimited sending accounts and unlimited warmups. This helps you not get flagged by Google as spam.

There is a great guide that shows you how to set up instantly here (https://help.instantly.ai/en/articles/5975326-instantly-cold-email-strategy)

Once you are all set up instantly, and your new email domains have been warmed up for at least 2 weeks, you can finally create a campaign, The trick is to utilize the different variants generated by coldly.ai and plug those in as variants on the sequence page.

This makes it super easy to A/B test which copy converts the best without doing any extra work.

Conclusion

The template I shared above has been instrumental in helping me achieve 2.6K MRR. While I'm still learning, I can confidently say that cold emailing can yield fantastic results when executed correctly. To ensure success, I believe it's essential to create highly specific ideal customer profiles and buyer personas that help you reach the right audience and tailor your messages to them.

Above all, avoid spammy messages targeted to a broad audience. Rather, focus on delivering targeted, value-driven content to your prospects and you can get great results as well.