What's your cold-emailing strategy?
I have just started my first step towards cold-emailing potential customers for Blanq.
So far:
- Read the best practices for body and subject.
- Prepared a list of email addresses.
I found searching for potential clients and looking for their email addresses on their websites to be quite time consuming process.
Is there a better way to deal with this? How do you approach this problem?
I still want the email to be personalised and not be automated generic emails.
An effective cold email is personalized to the individual recipient.
Sometimes when I find cold emails that interests me, I Google the sender. If I don't find their linkedin profiles or other credible source to verify their identity, I mark them spam.
Plus there are usual compliances with CAN-SPAM ACT etc. by allowing easy option to opt-out, full disclosure about the sender.
There is no such thing as a perfect (cold-)email. You just have to go out and do it, reflect on the responses, adjust and repeat.
Don't write like a robot, write like you want to talk about your product with a distant friend or somebody you've had a quick chat with at a networking event. NOBODY wants to read these shitty corporate marketing-lingo emails. That shit will get you nowhere.
One thing I wish someone had told me when i worked in sales, especially when starting out, was: make the customer think they matter, be sincere with them. Don't try to sell to them -> make them want to buy.
Did you use a consent campaign?
Cold email is mastered by only a few. There is many folks who talk, yet few who succeed. Many folks work at it awhile and then give up. We can tell you copywriting is worthless if you can't inbox. And you will find groups who use VA's to send individual emails, but the ROI is missing since it is so manual. We spent 14 months mastering it at scale. We would not use theses products but you can. https://www.lemlist.com/ , https://woodpecker.co/
Hi,
It's one of the channels we're leaning into quite a bit.
Like you mention, customising and positioning the email to the recipient is important, but can usually be done with just a couple of extra custom variables in the template.
For finding leads, I wrote a script which uses one of the SERP scraping APIs. We use a mixture or Hunter.io and Neverbounce to get emails.
I don't feel particularly efficient at getting email addresses, but that's mostly because I try and guess them through NeverBounce first. If the 4 most common email address formats fail, I'll use one of my 'free plan' Hunter credits. If you were willing to pay for Hunter and just do all prospecting through there, that would speed things up quite a bit I think.
I've just started using Lemlist and am quite enjoying it so far. Liking the gamification feel that it provides. (bit of a pain to get everything setup, but do-able).
Cheers,
Oli
How is your progress?
Have only recently started using Lemlist, so only really have analytics from that period. Not before. We've averaged about a 2% reply rate for a while though I think.
Looking at Lemlist for the past month, our results are:
Sent: 265
Opened: 65%
Clicked: 16
Replied: 13 (this includes auto-responders)
Interested: 4
The sales cycles is usually laughably long for $20 a month customer. But, I think it's a fantastic way to have regular interaction with your ideal future customers.
These are good numbers. I have extensive experience. The problem you have "this does not scale". I solved that problem. It took me 14 months.