How A Noob Like Me Made $110k (yep, true story) Using This Cold Email Guide
The Anatomy Of A High Converting Cold Email
The science behind the best cold emails.
Each email is broken down into 4 attention / emotional layers. Each section's goal is to drive/intrigue the user enough to go to the next section and thats about it.
Before we jump into this, remember two main rules:
People buy with emotion and justify with logic
Always focus on WIIFT, Whats In It For Them
Okay back at it. We have 4 attention layers
- The subject line needs to be strong / valuable enough to get the user to click into the email. So all the effort needs to be putting into driving up intrigue so they click. You'd be surprised how simple this can be.
2) The first line / icebreaker needs to be personal enough or compliment focused so the reader knows you've done research about them. The icebreaker is also the preview the user reads before they open the email and if done right can significantly assist your open rates and reply rates. A good litmus test for personalisation should be the fact that you can't send this email to any one else.
3) The angle is how you pitch your product or service, what makes you different from the 100s of other emails. Remember you're not writing a life story, its a quick pitch about how you can help them achieve what they want to achieve in a faster/better/cheaper/easier way than they already are. You will be really pressing on their existing pain points and/or focusing on the amazing outcome they'll get if they work with you. The goal isn't to create a desire but to channel it to the CTA
4) The CTA is the last layer of action where we want to drive up FOMO or emotional calls to get the recipient to reply or click a link
So with that brief intro, lets kick-off
The Science Behind Cold Email Subject Lines That Convert
The goal of the subject line is to drive intrigue and desire. FOMO works well but usually for B2C, hence why you probably get emails headlined "Grab the 40% discount soon" from your usual ecommerce brand, however that doesn't as much with B2B.
So lets break down the core requirements of the subject line:
Unique spin
Include their first name
Mention their business
Speak of an outcome
Engage in conversation
Lets look at some examples:
"{{Outcome}}, {{how easy to achieve}}"
If you're selling a review tool for shopify owners this would turn to. "23% bump in sales with our no code shopify review tool"
People don't care about what you have, they care about what you can do for them. This formula's job is to offer a desirable outcome and immediately shut down any large investment the user things they have to make to achieve it. It plays of the classic marketing formula "How to achieve x without doing y"
"Question about {{companyName}}"
Drives intrigue, and there's no mention about what you're offering. To the end user it sounds like you're just curious about something they do or how they do it. Nothing about what you have to offer.
The personalisation prevents this looking like it's meant to go somewhere else and targeted just for the user
The quick question can be about anything your product is currently trying to solve. If you're selling lead gen services, then the following line up can be
"Hey FirstName, <personalised Icebreaker>, we've been using <unique approach by you> to generate <metric based number> leads, I know your industry (you're showing your position as an expert) and this approach can boost your sales significantly. I can do a quick demo over a 5 minute call if you'd like?"
"{{firstName}}, {{numeric success and outcome}}"
"Patricia, close 4X more leads and drive topline revenue with this strat"
You're driving intrigue, and this subject line won't be a hard sell, the goal is to share a value based blog that they can read. Once they read the blog, track the link clicks and send a follow up email asking if they want a demo on how you can do the same for them
{{question about a problem you're solving}}
"Are you outsourcing your sales copy"?
This works really well because, if they are doing the above then they'll feel like you've got something very specific for them to read that might be better or a gotcha they need to be aware of. Even if they're not doing that, its still a great title that drives intrigue, enough to get people to ask
{{companyName}} <w> {{ProductName}}
Simple and effective, this is the most common pattern used by VCs across the market and it works really well.
{{FirstName}}, Quick question about {{Company}}'s {{Function}}
"Aaron, Quick question about SEOMarketings Outreach process"
This is an upgrade of the previous version where you're hyper targeting the exact problem you're trying to solve with your service or problem. The goal again is to drive just enough intrigue or emotional interest about what you have to offer or say
All these formulas work great and if you want to generate 1000s of more high converting formulas you can use smartwriter's
AI engine to create powerful, eye grabbing subject lines that we've seen boost over 137 sales teams open rates in the last week
Icebreakers responsible for 81% open rates
This is THE most important aspect of the cold email. This needs to be hyper-personalised and the entire goal is to bring comfort to the end reader that you have done research into them, and put in the time. Humans are naturally inclined to investment outputs, its the same reason why "length is wealth" works at times in sales. People feel inclined to support high investment products, products that look like people have put in 100s of hours into something vs just 1 hour.
Personal ice breakers that work best are usually compliments or a mention about what their company do and why its great they are doing so (compliment again). The goal is purely to make them feel comfortable. The icebreaker process is what will separate you from everyone else in the market sending out cold emails. If you're messaging executives, you should damn well know so is everyone else, so the way you stand out is through personalisation.
So how do you actually personalise your ice breakers, theres 2 ways to get this going at scale
Approach 1
Create an excel or google sheet, ideally given you've used the right scraping tools you'll get key meta data about the end prospect you can use for hydrating your icebreaker
The column format can be firstname, lastname, domain, linkedin, twitter, recent news, company description, icebreaker (as an example)
Fill these columns in using scraper tools like Snov, Phantombuster, Wiza, Meetalfred or Lusha (more of which I'll mention towards the end) . These tools will scrape data from Linkedin profiles as well as other avenues and create an enriched excel sheet for you
Once setup, you're going to create the first icebreaker by focusing on something unique about the person, ideally you should check out their linkedin profile, find something unique about them (their education, previous jobs, something they've interacted with on linkedin) and compliment them on it.
PS be careful about referencing something someone likes, people like a lot of things impulsively and it won't stick in their head, if you want to reference an interaction they've made on linkedin, make sure you're referencing a comment or a recent article they shared.
Once you've created 1 or 2 icebreakers to set the tone, head over to upwork and create a job for an english writing lead gen specialist. Create a job description expressing you're looking to hire someone who has done linkedin research and can create angles of interest for 1 liner introductions.
You'll have several people apply and make sure you give each one of them a task of filling up atleast 10 rows, (you should pay them for this to be fair, consider it cost of quality control). Once you've gone through your candidates and their quality, which will significantly vary, narrow down to the top 1-3 people. Repeat the process except this time around give them a test of 50 one liners to write for you
This process is important because finding the right VA will 10x your entire system and make your life significantly easier. After this you should have condensed down which person you want to work with. Hire them on a short term contract and build a pipeline process where you automatically add leads to a sheet which notifies them via email for them to complete and notify you as soon as they're done
Take the output you've created and download them into a CSV which you'll upload into one of the popular mailmerge tools like Lemlist, Mailshake or Woodpecker to reach out to your potential customer base.
Approach 2
Paste in the urls of the companies you're targeting and smartwriter's
AI will generate hyper personalised cold emails using the best angle for the type of outreach you have in mind (sales, SEO, podcast interviews)
The entire process will take a couple of seconds and you'll also have Linkedin profiles, news article mentions as well as verified emails all ready for you in about 1 or 2 button clicks.
Here's some quick examples we used to generate 10 personalised icebreakers in 27 seconds
Hey Domm , It's great to see Fast solve the issue of passwords and long form entry with your 1-click login solution
Hey Ramesh, I'm a big fan of data-driven decision making and cenario is a great tool for that. It's really easy to connect it with your Stripe account, which makes it an awesome addition to any business.
Hey Henrique, I'm really excited to see that Brex is simplifying the process of managing your business finances. It's great to see you taking a unique approach building this company, and the no account fees and no personal guarantee seems like a great idea!
Hey Ryan, It's not easy to move freight around the world, so it's great to see Flexport make this a little more manageable with their plug and play solution.
Hey Aaron, I've seen first hand how difficult data management can get with devs and marketers wanting different things. Segment's honestly such a simple yet genius solution, kudos to you!
Hey Patrick , I first heard about Stripe when I was researching payment processing solutions for my SaaS startup, and after reading your blog post on building a payments API from scratch, it seems to be a great solution for me.
Hey Wade , I've been looking for a way to automate my workflow and zapier honestly is the best product i could find, congrats on building such a great product
Hey Apoorva , I'm a fan of Instacart's app and it's good to see the company focusing on improving their delivery times.
I came across your service and thought you might be interested in how [we] have been using it. We've been using Remoteworkly to replace many of our meetings with asynchronous video calls. It's helped us reduce travel, save time and improve the quality of our meetings.
Hey Chris , I'm a huge fan of your BaaS technology. It's so much easier to get started than building from scratch. I'd love to see how you're using the APIs and what else you're working on to help banks and fintechs.
As you can see the accuracy is high and the compliments are genuine. This is what has lead to almost 80% on average open rates across all our email campaigns and 30% reply rates in some situations even if we were sharing a link. 1-2 Demo campaigns had 58% reply rates when the intent was booking a meeting
Pitches that get people opening their wallet
This defines everything when you're looking at the complete success rate of your cold email. The pitch is the outcome you're offering them. The reason they should care to even bother listening to you. This is the part your "WIIFT" effect comes to full play, they need to understand in clear concise terms what's in it for them.
This will be one of the most important aspects of your cold email campaign and one you'll be testing quite rigorously.
I'll reiterate the quote I mentioned at the start of this series "If you're messaging this person, so is someone else". In this effort to stand out from all the cluster the prospect receives you need to work out how you will be the one that hooks their eyes.
Lets walk through some examples of me pitching smartwriter to a marketing or sales lead:
"Double your email open rate"
"Generate more leads for your sales team"
"Save time with automated cold emailing"
"Automate your sales outreach job"
Look, they're alright, but I can assure you, that I wouldn't get the best open rates or reply rates if I went with this angle. Literally any potato with a list of emails can promise the above, and I assure you someone probably has already promised the above.
Lets spice it up using metrics, relevance and knowledge (I'll explain this in a second)
If you don't have results:
"Reach 3x your audience using our conversational DM strategy"
"Close ~25% more SEO leads using contextual AI in your funnel"
Once you have results:
"Competitors like <xyz> got 77% booking rates using personalised AI cold emailing"
"Marketing agencies swear by our AI conversion emails for a ~32% increase in their booking rates"
"We helped 17 SDRs close an extra 50k in deals using personalised AI cold emails, with no extra effort"
"We helped SDRs like you close 40% more leads using our Personalised Email Tactics "
"Rumour says our crappy AI tool helped a bunch of salespeople break their personal best records, thought you might be keen?"
If you've got any customer testimonials or case studies, you NEED to use them because the effectiveness of your outreach campaign will significantly improved. When we incorporated metrics and customer results we'd see 65%-80% open rates on a bad day.
Notice the key difference being the mention of stats and numbers, humans are automatically attracted to metrics vs grandiose verbs like "skyrocket, double, triple, half the time", they've just been so overused people are numb to it.
Second is the inclusion of the relevance, if i'm selling to sales development representatives, I'm sure to mention that this is important to them! Not to marketers, not to designers, but specifically SDRs. Also, no one wants to be the last and people inherently will do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. So by mentioning that others are already using your service or tool (provided this is true) will bump up the adoption.
Last is the knowledge, you've given them numbers and mentioned that this is solution is for them, but how are you achieving this? This same principle applies to landing page copy as well (similar to cold emails in one way). Try use the words "our, we, me" as little as possible and focus on "you, their, them", this will automatically force you to talk about what you can do for them and less about what you do.
You promise the dream but you need to explain to them how exactly, everyones bulls**t meter is up on alert in 2021 so giving them a condensed outline on how you do what you do will help ease their reservation and in fact peak their intrigue.
The goal is to not build desire, the goal is to channel an existing desire within your prospect using emotional hooks that get them to look at what you have to offer.
Advice play
Another approach you can take that works really well is asking for advice. This puts people in a position of authority and makes them want to offer back advice, remember at our core we all like to talk about ourselves, our opinions and our views. Sometimes all you have to do is listen in sales and you've won the deal. Lets use Brex (They're a startup offering Credit Cards to startups when no banks do).
The angle they can take can be
"Hey <startup founder>
<icebreaker>
Pitch: I built brex to help startup founders get access to credit cards because banks just don't. It's been a fun journey but I'm looking for advice on how I can "grow" this.
Just after some advice on how I can get in touch with other startups who faced a similar problem.
The recipient may as well be the customer you're targeting, but their guards will be down because you're asking for advice. You'll get 2 things out to this, if they are your target customer, the pitch would have worked and they would actually also think "Hey even i'm facing this problem, let me try it out", and secondly since you put them in a position of authority/importance they'll get back offering you genuine advice i.e you've got a new potential customer and some more leads
Call To Values Instead. Offer people value, not another link
The CTAs job is to be simple and not too brash. Don't be too salesy especially when the whole email is focused on them and their outcome.
Be empathetic and ensure you're not here to waste their time. A line like "I know how busy sales can get, and I want to be very respectful of your time. I practiced for hours to bring down the demo to just 5 minutes to respect your time
You're showing the effort you put into your pitch to protect their time. By doing that in advance, you're acting on one of Robert Cialdini's 7 principles of influence, "reciprocity". Since you've done that, they innately feel like they owe you by simply listening to their pitch.
Remember to not go for vanilla CTAs like "Click here, book a meeting, find out more, try now", these are not enticing and come off very demanding.
Instead try focus on a CTV, call to value. Let them feel safe when replying back to you, booking a sales demo or even a link to try out your product.
Don't be insensitive and offer a calendly link, instead set up an automated process where you ask them to reply if they're keen and respond to "keen" with a calendly link.
If your pitch isn't about booking a meeting but more so a product demo for them to try, minimise their resistance by offering an incentive.
"If you're keen to try, I can load up your account with 20,000 credits"
This is only a small part of the full guide to cold emailing campaigns that get you new prospects, leads and higher that normal conversions.
You can find the 10,000 word end to end cold emailing guide here
legit
Nice post, so how did you make 110K in the end? That's what everyone came here for 😄
PS: let's add Mailmeteor to your recommended mailmerge tools! (https://mailmeteor.com)
My bad haha!
I used this process across 2 campaigns to do LinkedIn outreach where I got to learn about a PwC Partner who recently got promoted
Used that angle to reach out and simultaneously noted that he had a child so the "pitch" I went with was
"Hey Theo
Congrats on your baby girl, exciting days ahead for you!
We recently finished a project with KPMG for the digital team, guaranteed them if they worked with us we'd handle the load and the partners could go home to their family early
I'd love to repeat that recent success for any new tech projects you have going on"
This lead to a couple of meetings and then closed the deal :)
Very nice guide. What did you sell to make the $110k?
My bad haha!
I used this process across 2 campaigns to do LinkedIn outreach where I got to learn about a PwC Partner who recently got promoted
Used that angle to reach out and simultaneously noted that he had a child so the "pitch" I went with was
"Hey Theo
Congrats on your baby girl, exciting days ahead for you!
We recently finished a project with KPMG for the digital team, guaranteed them if they worked with us we'd handle the load and the partners could go home to their family early
I'd love to repeat that recent success for any new tech projects you have going on"
This lead to a couple of meetings and then closed the deal :)
Super helpful. Going to save this for future reference.
Absolutely! No worries
Great read, I’m looking to start doing cold emails next month so this has been super helpful
Amazing! All the best!