The 3 stages of the founding journey that I've experienced so far are:
I don't think I would have succeeded at any of these without cold outreach. Actually, I've had several projects in the past that failed at any one of these stages because I didn't know how to get in touch with people, or how to get them to reply.
So I wanted to share what I've learned. This is not a step-by-step guide, but rather the key principles, considerations, and tools we use at Lyne.ai to start new relationships with large clients and with early users for new products.
-- The 3 pillars of cold email (failing to do any 1 can kill your campaign) --
-- Important considerations for each pillar --
Copywriting:
a. is my message personalized to the recipient?
b. does my offer solve a burning need? (if already selling)
c. is there something they could gain from replying (if not already selling)
d. is my email short and easily digestible?
List building:
a. am I emailing companies who actually have the need I solve?
b. am I emailing the right job title at the company?
Deliverability:
a. am I sending to valid email addresses?
b. is my own email domain properly warmed up?
-- Tools for each pillar --
Copywriting:
a. to automate the "personalization" portion of your emails, we use our own tool, Lyne.ai, which researches each of your prospects and writes a personalized compliment for each of them that you can plug into your cold emails at scale
List building :
a. you can use tools like Texau or Phantombuster to scrape leads from Linkedin searches, or…
b. tools like Apollo.io that allow you to search for your leads from a database instead
Deliverability:
a. to reduce bounces, you should verify your lists through a tool like Usebouncer.com or Clearout.io
b. to warm up your domains before your campaigns (at least 2 weeks of warmup time is best), you can use a paid tool like WarmupInbox.com or Lemwarm, or a free tool like Gmass'
c. to send your campaign, you should use a tool specifically designed for cold email, like SmartReach.io
Hope this helps! Let me know if you'd like to see something more step-by-step. And free to shoot me a message on linkedin (linkedin.com/in/coldemail) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/ElsakrAndrew) if you ever want to chat about cold email.
how many cold emails do you send at once? and typically how many emails before you get a reply?
I view campaigns more like a series of tests. So for For my market size, if I want to test something (new messaging or a new tactic), I might test on ~300-500, but those go out over multiple days. This would vary based on the size of your market. If you have a smaller market to go after, you will need to test in smaller batches. And you can have multiple tests running at once, but in my experience, many smaller/fine-tuned campaigns are better than one massive campaign. Keep in mind, this methodology doesn't apply so much to enterprise sales.
As far as reply rate - this is one of the metrics tracked, secondary to meetings booked rate. On successful tests, the reply rate can get up to 18%, on unsuccessful tests it can be as low as 0%. What matters is you learn from the results and continue testing. On average, I see 8%+ reply rate.
How accurate are the list building tools that you have mentioned?
Gonna be some duds in there for sure but using the verification tool after building the lists should weed out most of those. You're sending to 99% valid emails, so even if the data is a bit stale and someone's switched jobs, all you get is an auto-response saying they work somewhere else now.
I will say, the accuracy of the data depends also on industry. I've seen much more issues with old data when reaching out to dentists than people in B2B SaaS
Sounds good, thanks!
Hey! Yeah, it would be nice to see something in much detail. Indeed I have tested cold-email but without any success. However, I might say that I haven't approached a big list of users (only 20-30 tbh).
On a separate note - I'm new to IH community. How can I save your article cause it seems very useful.
Cheers!
Hi, glad you enjoyed! Not sure if there's an easy way on IndieHacker without bookmarking or saving the link somewhere using another method :)
Will post something more detailed in the near future!