Starting to cold email for my freelancing business.
I'm starting to gather contact's and I have an email template where I am offering free reports to some businesses of their website and ways they can improve search rankings, and exposure to their customers, i.e. web presence. This is a huge problem in my area, and I see a high percentage of SMB's lacking SSL, and really bad SEO, to where you can hardly find them by googling the business.
Currently, my report has a recommendation of SSL encryption and reasons why they need to do that with links to articles to back it up, images of how the site looks on mobile and desktop, insights from google page speed, and recommendations.
What do you guys think, any other key components I can add to really offer some value?
Thanks friends.
So much on cold email. Here’s an article you may find useful:
https://copyhackers.com/2017/09/cold-emails/
That is a seriously good resource, thanks!
Helpful for me, thanks for sharing!
Hey John,
Huge congrats for starting this, just revisiting my strategy for cold emails today too ;)
Here are some suggestions:
Those were just learnings from my own experience, hope it helps!!!
Good luck ;)
Great, detailed advice. I have a lot of refinement to do. I hope I am framing it correctly, for the type of clients I am reaching out to. Thanks again.
Hey John,
Feel free to reach out via with your learning or results. Always trying to bounce ideas of other people and we could always both learn from each other ;)
Cheers!
Hey John,
I'm not a bad cold emailer. There are others on IH who are pretty good as well.
Why don't you give us a quick example email to look over (maybe not the report itself, just the email) and maybe a link to your site/landing page as well?
Then you'd get more actionable feedback :)
Thank you very much for the feedback, here is where I am at with my email template, I know I can improve it. And I probably need to improve my site as well since it was geared toward getting a fulltime dev job and now I want to pivot a bit more to freelance.
http://jbull.co lol and I need ssl on my own site... lol I have a lot to do.
Hello {name of business owner},
Are you looking to grow your business? My name is John an I am a Website Developer and Tech Expert located in the Central Valley. I'm interested in helping local businesses serve their customers better. I am providing free web presence reports as a promotion to show some local businesses how they can improve their online presence and gain more customer interaction.
I highly recommend you take this opportunity to get this free information on your web presence and learn how you can keep your business growing in a digital age.
Thanks for your time,
John Bull
Web Developer
http://jbull.co
jackbull328@gmail.com
You need to let them know why you should be listened to.
Nothing in the email, or on your portfolio site does a particularly good job of selling you as a tech expert.
Free reports like this are only interesting if you can demonstrate some authority. Otherwise you look no different from the Indian spammers who scraped my email addresses from a whois entry and bug me ten times a day (last time I tie a real email address to a domain registration).
Thanks, I can think of a few ways where I can address that, and these are good points that you raise.
A few thoughts on your template in parenthesis.
Hello {name of business owner},
Are you looking to grow your business (of course they are, you sound like a spammer)? My name is John an I am a Website Developer and Tech Expert located in the Central Valley. I'm interested in helping local businesses serve their customers better (local businesses is generic, this screams template). I am providing free web presence reports as a promotion to show some local businesses how they can improve their online presence and gain more customer interaction.
I highly recommend (why should your recommendation matter?) you take this opportunity to get this free information on your web presence and learn how you can keep your business growing in a digital age.
Thanks for your time,
John Bull
Web Developer
A few thoughts on things you could do.
Hey name,
I was browsing your website and noticed a few things you could do to get more people to call/email/signup (whatever matters to them as the most important action)
Here’s a quick video outlining what I just mentioned (optional but recommended - works wonderfully)
I specialize in helping x (their specific industry. People will pay a premium for the SEO specialist for that industry as opposed to a generalist) improve their web presence.
(Compelling statement about how users interact with search engines to find businesses in their industry. stats and examples work best).
If this is something you’d like to take advantage of going forward, just reply to this email and I’ll send over a tailored web presence report with x (web presence report is vague, donthey even know what’s inside one? I sure as hell don’t. Let them know what they should expect inside it and hit on the benefits contained therein) it’ll help you tackle immediate problems and unlock growth in your business.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
(Your name)
(Contact info)
This is excelent, and reminds me why this community is so fantastic. I would have come around to some of the things you suggest, and they make a lot of sense. But because of your advice and the advice of others I am able to skip some of the trial and error and learn from you and others. Thanks so much.
Glad you took something away from it. Of course you would've. I have no doubt about that. It's just the learning curve can be so steep at times. Why not skip past it when you can?
Good luck.
No problem.
If it were me, I'd make the following changes to the cold email:
Focus more (and earlier) on the value you are providing to the customer and the problem you're solving for them
Include a concrete next step for the collaboration
Personalise a bit more to build trust. As the recipient of the email I should feel like you really know my business and understand the challenge I'm facing
Include a testimonial or results you've achieved for companies similar to mine
Good luck!
oh and lose the gmail address ASAP!
ahh, double good idea.
Regarding SSL in particular, Google has stopped just short of actively delisting sites without ssl enabled. I don't like focusing on the negative, but if somebody has ssl problems, they need to get them fixed ASAP or lots of bad things are gonna happen. They can handle that however they feel is appropriate, but you're really doing them a service by giving them the heads up.
Chrome will soon start actively marking sites without SSL as Insecure (as opposed to marking SSL enabled sites as Secure).