Over the past couple of years, I’ve been generating millions and millions of dollars with cold emailing. After experimenting with thousands of different email scripts and processes, I’d like to break down a few ways that you guys are making mistakes with your cold emailing, and how to fix them.
How to improve you cold emailing strategy :
Let’s jump into it
1. You send hundreds of messages a day
I was having coffee a few months ago with the director of business development for this huge software-as-a-service startup in San Francisco, and he was breaking down how their sales teams worked.
Basically, each salesperson has to send about 150 emails a day, something I strongly recommend to do.
Sending a bunch of emails a day does work, but it’s a quantity play.
This strategy can lead you to burn out your list and make it difficult to find high-value clients.
People that respond to an email that could be sent hundreds of times a day, are usually ones that are either in dire need of a product and will respond to anyone, or people that you necessarily don’t want to work with.
What I recommend doing instead is sending maybe 20 emails a day, but make each one super customized for the target.
A few days ago I just sent 2 cold emails in a day and I booked a meeting thanks to one of them, 50% response rate.
You’ll be able to get these rates by customizing the message.
2. You don’t define the target or goal correctly
I’ve been talking with so many lead generation shops, tools that supposedly are like AI lead generation and I haven’t been able to recommend or implement one for our team yet.
This is because a lot of their targeting is still very generic.
For example:
When I’m looking for a client for X27, I look for the following info:
- A digital agency owner that has between 50 and 150 employees.
- Has no director of marketing.
- Uses their website as a lead generation channel.
- The former it’s not the main channel.
- And a dozen other factors.
I’ve been able to train our internal people to find this info using LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Also, I’ve trained Filipino and Vietnamese outsource labor on Upwork to get the work done, but there’s no software out there that it’s detailed enough to get the right quality of leads.
So if you’re out there and you’re using one of these tools to find your leads, and not verifying again before any emails, you’re sending your messages to the wrong type of people.
Your conversion rates will be a lot higher if you just spend a few minutes looking at each lead before you send an email out.
3. You use email templates
An email template is something everybody recommends when talking about cold emailing.
I’ve shown some of the emails that have worked for me in the past on this blog and my YouTube channel, but those are not scripts.
What actually works better is sitting down and writing an email out by hand, like you would if you were sitting in front of them at a networking event.
The only scripts that I use on my emails are the ones that are in my head. If I think about X27 Marketing, we built lead generation channels for digital agencies; I can say that in an email, and our results too because they’re memorized, but if I’m going to write it on an email, I’m going to do it by hand.
Be careful, email templates will hurt you in the long run.
So get early in the habit of writing all your emails by hand. Yes, this takes more time, and yes, the response rate is going to be much higher.
4. You do (almost) no research
Just in the last week, I got like six emails from other web design services trying to pitch X27 on reselling their mobile apps. If those people had just taken a second to look at what my LinkedIn profile said, none of that would’ve been applicable and they wouldn’t have pitched.
When you’re doing your pitches, take a second to actually read the profile of the person you’re sending out.
There are premium insights on LinkedIn which let you see everything from company growth rates to numbers of jobs posted in the last couple months and even company categorization by departments in percentages.
So there’s no excuse for you not to be doing this research, and certainly not for you to be pitching people that don’t need your service when all this information is available to you.
5. You don’t read your email like a third party would
The go-to strategy for writing a cold email is to make it look like and read like an ad. At least that’s the strategy I’m getting because these are all the cold emails that I get; bullet points that outline a process, paragraphs after paragraphs talking about benefits or the exact opposite, etc.
One of my friends at Fortune 500 loves to pass me the terrible cold emails he gets and one of them was less than five sentences trying to get him to call them.
If these so-called emailers take a second to read a 5-sentence email to themselves like they were that client they’re trying to pitch, all of the issues on the email would be obvious, and they would change it.
6. You don’t send consistently
A month ago, I was reading a blog post recommending doing cold emails once every two months and just packing like 60 or 70 in a day; well that’s the wrong way to approach it.
What is better is sending a batch of emails consistently to build up a pipeline, that way you don’t run into an issue where you have a really good month, by making deals and selling and then the next month – since you haven’t been sending cold emails – you have nothing and you’re basically flat-lining.
So in order to have consistent growth, you need a consistent outreach strategy, which means even if you’re sending two emails a day, you’re doing it consistently.
There you are, some good reasons why you might suck at cold emailing and not know it and I hope you found this article useful.
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