Master Cold Emails - The ebook Written with at.com
Index Introduction: What Do I Do Now? The Best Tools To Improve Your Cold Email Game How to Craft the Perfect Cold Email Follow-Ups A Few Examples Your Turn!
Master Cold Emails Introduction: What Do I Do Now? Few things beat the excitement of having a fresh list of emails sourced and ready for you to use. Such potential But if you are new to Cold Email or haven t had much success with it in the past, then the next thing that pops into your mind probably sounds like: Okay, great! What do I do now? In this ebook we want to show you how we use cold email at to grow our business. Follow these tips and templates and you won t have to worry. You ll discover how to use cold email and answer the What do I do now? question with leads flowing to your inbox. Read on for a step-by-step guide on how to use cold leads to your advantage and create new business opportunities from the lists you are generating using the Prospector. Before we begin, here are some broad recommendations: Cold email should be used to create conversations and qualify leads. Don t try to sell straight from a cold email. This will annoy prospects and they won t convert. Respect people. If someones asks you to remove them from your list, don t contact them again. Are you convinced that your product or service can help people? Don t be shy! It s your duty to contact them. 3
Master Cold Emails The Best Tools To Your Cold Email Game The team at FTL uses different tools to handle outreach campaigns, depending on complexity. We are about to give you a breakdown of our complete cold email software stack. Basically, we are using Gmail* extensions, SMTP tools and other apps that work great when integrated with our Gmail accounts. *You can also try Outlook but who doesn t like using G Suite :D Gmail Extensions Extensions are like bots that write multiple emails based on a single template. You just click send and emails go out to all your contacts. It sounds really simple. It is. Pretty useful, too! There are several tools but at we use YAMM (Yet Another Mail Merge) and Mixmax. YAMM works wonders for sending (and tracking) emails to a list of contacts you have on a Google Spreadsheet. You can follow up using YAMM, but automation is not that easy. The price to start using YAMM? Ridiculous... just $25 a year! Mixmax allows you to do the same as YAMM but it works fully integrated into your Gmail dashboard. Sending customizable attachments is easier than with YAMM and you have a bunch of cool other features. Mixmax s prices vary depending on your team. We pay around $30 a month for a single account. 4
Master Cold Emails External Software They work exactly the same as Gmail extensions, with the main difference being that they have their own dashboard and interface. These tools are a better fit for bigger campaigns. Essentially, because they make lead management easier. You can add people to your blacklist, manage duplicates and have an overview of all your campaigns on a single screen. We recommend Reply.io, Mailshake and Woodpecker. Pricing depends on the number of emails and users that you need, but they sit around $30 to $50 a month. Whether you are using Gmail Extensions or External Software, be aware that: 1. 2. The emails are sent from your own Gmail account. If one of your campaigns is flagged as spam all your emails will be flagged, too. And if your IP or domain are blacklisted, you will ruin all your team s reputation. Buying a new domain similar to your primary domain is best practice. You can get yourdomain.co or yourdomain.io. Create a new email account with that domain and use that exclusively for cold email campaigns. If your email has been created recently, you will need to warm up the account. This is as easy as using it for a week or two as your primary email. Once you have several emails going out and coming in, your account will be ready for mass emailing. 5
Master Cold Emails SMTP Solutions SMTP doesn t mean you ll be using MailChimp or Sendgrid to send your emails. Tools like those are great but NOT FOR COLD EMAIL! You ll get your account shut down really fast if they realize that no one has opted in to be on your list. But don t worry If you need to run a large campaign, you can build your own server and send the emails via SMTP from your own software. Setting this up is quite complicated and you ll need to know about servers. If you want to give it a try, here are the basic steps: Create a VPS and install MailWizz Buy a domain Create an account on SparkPost or Mailgun Sync the domain into SparkPost or Mailgun (SMTP server) Add the SMTP server into MailWizz Use Mailwizz to send out thousands of emails The downside to SMTP 1 You are not sending from a Gmail account, so expect a shitty deliverability. 2 If your unsubscribes count or spam reports are high, SparkPost and Mailgun will shut down your account (you can remove the domain, create another account and add it again, if this happens). 3 Your Domain and IP will burn quite fast. Consider buying several domains so you can switch them. 4 Email formatting is difficult and your emails will look pretty ugly, especially your signatures. 6 5 You can seriously damage your brand image if you use this for spam. No one likes spam
Master Cold Emails How to Craft the Perfect Cold Email This section covers the required elements that you need to include in your email to increase your chances of getting a positive reply. Subject Line We receive dozens of emails everyday in our inbox. The first thing we do is go over the subject lines and mark emails as read even before having read them. It's either that or sending emails to the bin. In other words, we select the emails that we want to ignore. This is way writing a good subject line is really important. It has to be soooo god that will make your email earn a place in your contact s inbox and a chance to be read. So, forget about all the spammy lines like: sell more, your solution is here, need to read this or similar. Personalization If you want people to believe you are writing to them exclusively, this is much more than merely starting with hello <<name>>. You should add some extra personalization touches like their location, position, company or industry. Anything that makes them feel the email s been written only for them. Fortunately, you ll have all this information available in your export after using the Prospector. Body The body should be short and clean. It s amazing if you can say something about them (obviously something nice) in the intro. Then go straight to the topic and keep it short. You have to respect people s time. Call to Action You are writing this email with a purpose. You can t just write an email without asking them to have a meeting, asking for their feedback, or offering yourself as a help. Each email you write should have a single, easy to follow Call to Action. Signature Pitching on your first email doesn t get great results. So you need to have an attractive signature with a catchy sentence and a link to your website. This will help your contact understand who you are and what you do. At FTL we used to have get your next best customers email as a tagline in our signature. 7
Master Cold Emails Follow-Ups Follow-ups are a major part of any cold email campaign. You can t send one email and expect people to reach out to you and buy your product or have that call. Chances are your first email will get ignored. But this doesn t mean that you shouldn t insist a little bit. We usually do 3 to 4 emails per campaign. The first email is short and clean. It can t come across as a sales email. The second one can be done in two different ways: Create a VPS and install MailWizzReminding them that you sent them an email some days ago and hitting them with your call to action again. Being a little bit more sales oriented and briefly introducing your solution for your lead. After a short introduction you go back to the call to action. The third and fourth emails should be a bit more relaxed. You can ask people to forward you to the correct person at their company, if they are too busy. 8
Master Cold Emails A Few Examples Here are some top-secret screenshots taken from real templates we ve used recently at. Remember, templates are meant to be a guide. Don t just copy and paste use what works best for you and, most importantly, YOUR PROSPECT! London CEOs Campaign Open rate: 77% Reply ratio: 15% Source: Prospector Email #1 Email #2 Email #3 9
Master Cold Emails Event Speakers Campaign Open rate: 87% Source: Scraping names and finding Reply ratio: 36% emails with Email #1 Subject: I loved it Hey <<first name>>, I ve also attended the E-show 2017. I saw your pitch on <<company>> and it was amazing. I d like to know more about it. When are you available? Email #2 Subject: I also went Yes <<name>>, The pitch you gave about <<company>> regarding e-commerce was outstanding. I would like to know more about your experience in the industry. Do you have five minutes? Email #3 Subject: shining like a star <<name>>, Someday I d like to be able to do a pitch like the one you made at the e-commerce show 2017. I was there and it was spectacular! I think it would be great to have a conversation about <<company>> and, it is clear that we are a perfect match! Shall we talk? 10
Master Cold Emails Your Turn! That s it! You ve peeked behind the curtain and discovered the ancient secrets of cold emailing. Is not that complicated! You just have to set up a few tools and then start sending out emails. The more emails you send, the better you ll get at it. You ll get a good grasp on what makes your ideal target open, reply and buy from you. Sending daily emails to potential prospects is one of the simplest, cheapest and most effective ways to grow your sales. Make sure you don t spend a day without putting the tips and tricks you learned today in practice. 11
Your Leads Gerard Compte and the team at.com