What Is Cold Email and Why I Created Nureply?

I am a software developer for more than 10 years. Most of my life has gone by developing things for myself or my clients. But I was not doing marketing ever.

This changed dramatically after I started my software agency.

I have struggled a lot to find new clients and started to search for new ways.

This is when I met with the term "Cold Email Outreach". I quickly realized that’s what I was looking for!

What is Cold Email Outreach?

There are a lot of formal definitions for Cold Email Outreach but in simple terms, it means going beyond your first circle to find more people.

Referrals are good if you want to work on the least amount of projects but if you need more, you need to go beyond this.

Why that was the solution for finding more clients?

First of all my agency was so small. I just had 2 developers and 2 projects. This means I had to work on the projects as well. But how can I find more clients if I am working on the development as well?

There were 2 ways;

• Either I will work on development and marketing at the same time and I won’t sleep
• I should find a way to do it asynchronously and in a scalable way

Of course, I chose the second one.

OK but how does Cold Email Outreach work?

There are a few easy steps, or that’s what I thought at the beginning:

1. Find your potential client’s emails (find leads)
2. Send a meaningful email to them (send emails)
3. Make them reply somehow (get replies)
4. Convince them to join a meeting with you (arrange meetings)
5. Show them you are the right person/company for their project (referrals)
6. Profit!

Of course, it is not that easy but let’s go over them. I will not get into details of all steps but the most important: Getting replies!

Why getting a reply is important?

Don’t you hate when you email someone and they don’t reply to you? Because this means your job is on hold.

This is the same for the cold emails. If they don’t reply, they won’t be a client to you.

But how do convince them to reply?

There is a term called "email icebreaker"

You might be thinking of the regular icebreaker but this is a bit different. This is not for the real ice but the ice between you and your potential client.

Whenever you reach someone first thing they will think is: "Who the hell is this?" And they are right to think that way.

For passing this step you need a great email icebreaker. A compliment that shows you know them or you are interested in what they are doing!

Let’s say you wanted to reach out to me and checked my LinkedIn profile . How would you compliment me?

It is not that easy, right? You have to check a lot of details and write some meaningful email first line or icebreaker.

OK, to be fair, after a while you will get used to it and your icebreaker muscles will gain some strength and will work by themselves but there is another problem.

How many icebreakers you can write in a day?

We are back at the beginning but now the bottleneck is writing icebreakers. Let’s do a basic calculation:

• You want to reach out to 1000 potential clients
• For every client, you will write 1 icebreaker
• Each icebreaker takes 5 minutes to write (in reality it takes more than 10 minutes to write, especially if you are a nonnative English speaker like me)
• In total, you need 5000 MINUTES, or 84 HOURS, or 10 WORK DAYS to write 1000 icebreakers.

It started to feel like a problem right?

I have worked with AI before

When I was in college, my graduation project was all about AI and Machine Learning Algorithms. When I realize I am writing similar things but adding small nifty details, I saw the pattern.

The only thing I needed to do is creating an AI which replicates my voice (or my writing style). OK, I can do this!

First Iteration of Nureply’s AI

I wanted to test my theory, I gathered around the icebreakers I have sent before, based on the lead’s website, and proven to be working. I made it AI readable and fed it into the custom AI model.

After polishing it 1000 times, it started to sound like a human.

And I tested it with an A/B test. I was getting 2.4x more replies!

Let’s make it a product

So if you have built any SaaS before, you know it is different than building something for yourself.

You need to care about UI, User Experience, stability, consistency, and many more.

I have told you I have built a lot of products, so I know a little about design and UX. I tried to put everything I know into Nureply.

Eventually, Nureply became something usable. But of course, I didn’t want to stop there. I wanted to have a product that I am proud of!

Let’s make it more personal

After going only with website based personalizations for a month, I decided to train an AI for the LinkedIn profiles of the leads. I started to gather info and write lines based on the info I got.

I wanted to retest it to see if there were any differences.

I saw a %300 increase in email replies! If we do quick maths:

• My reply rates were %1, roughly, when I started to do it without any personalization
• After website based personalization it jumped to ~%2.5
• When I included the LinkedIn based personalization I saw %15 reply rates. It might be an outlier but it jumped to at least 2x more replies than website based personalization and 7x more replies from no personalization

Current State of Nureply

Currently, Nureply is still under heavy development and I am making it more competent every day.

I am also planning to add some email sending capabilities with the same quality as Nureply’s LinkedIn based personalization. There are many plans and many things to add but I would say this is a good start!

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