The Best Cold Email I Ever Received (And How to Steal His Approach) - Proposify Biz Chat

in this episode of The Biz chat I'm talking about the best cold email I ever received and how you can steal the [Music] approach so if you're like me you probably hate cold email you hate getting it you don't respond to it you delete it as soon as it comes in and yet people still send it why is that sometimes people think of it as a numbers game like if you just blast a list of 100,000 addresses and even if you get three that respond then that's good um there's a lot of different reasons why

people send cold email sometimes it's really effective and so what I want to kind of go over today is what's really the difference what goes into a great cold email and what goes into the trash that we're used to seeing every day so I want to talk about an actual occasion when I saw a great cold email and I'm going to dis dissect it so you can see how you can use that same approach when trying to generate leads for your own business especially if you run a service business like a consultancy or an agency

so before I really go into the Weeds on this I want to first talk about the one of the worst emails that I've ever received and by the way this isn't really the worst email it's just a great archetypical example of a bad cold email so I looked through Linkedin and I saw this email from Julie and I'm not going to say her last name or company but I'm going to read her email and then kind of show you why it's terrible and hopefully you agree with me so Julie's email says um subject line is

business deal from Julie and it says conversation hello Kyle I heard about your company through a digital agency that I work with we're a technology company in the payment space serving digital agencies as well as large web development companies we're also one of the largest providers of software for payments to attorney firms in the US and K12 schools in the US do you have a moment this week for a conversation I think there's a way for us to do some business together and perhaps create a significant Revenue stream for you when is a good time

for me to call you best regards Julie so I'm sure you agree with me this is a really bad email and one that did not get a reply from me but why exactly is it so bad there's a few things so first of all it's extremely vague and self-indulgent she spends a lot of time time talking about her and her company um while at the same time somehow being extremely vague so for example she says that they're the largest provider of payments for law firms and schools K to 12 which I had no idea what

that meant for starters I run a SAS company I'm not a digital agency I'm not a law firm I'm not a K12 school so all of it just seemed very inappropriate like maybe it was perhaps just I was just one name in a huge pile of names that she had emailed the exact same email to very likely that's what happened Julie also assumes a lot so she assumed that we were at the bus business deal stage that's what her subject line was business deal from Julie which is very odd because if you're emailing somebody cold

you're not at the the deal stage yet you're just sort of having a conversation so it's a little bit like proposing marriage when you meet a stranger for the first time or go out on a first date it was just very awkward and then the third thing was that she was pushing for a meeting before she even understood if I was the right fit so why if if what she's offering is so great why would she want to meet with me if she doesn't even know if if we're a good fit you know why would

she want to take that time out of her schedule to have a call so all in all I mean it's a it's a bad email it's not the worst because it's probably as bad as every other cold email that you get through Linkedin but really what you want to be doing when you're writing a cold email is try to avoid all of those pitfalls that poor Julie fell into now it's time to go through the best cold email I received so this was a quite a while back a couple years ago I still haven't found

an email that's been better that I've seen that's been cold and so this one was from a company called full story and they're a SAS company that basically takes records videos of your users using your website so you can see where they click and where they go now now to start off um the subject line was magic goggles and that's the only thing I will say is actually the the bad part of their cold email because it's not a very good subject line it's not the company name uh it's it's not something that really people

would click on but aside from that it was an excellent cold email so I'm going to read it now so the email says Kyle I wanted to give you a quick shout to introduce you to full story a new tool that helps companies understand customer experiences like never before the easiest way to get a feel for full story is to check out the 30second demo of me interacting with your site there's a link and then it says want the full story you can take it for a two-e trial or shoot me a message if you

have any questions happy watching so Trey's email was very good the the most important part of this email was that it was visual there was a A visual representation of my company's website so before I read any text the first thing my eye goes to is a video of my website right who's not going to click on that and see what happens so that was very smart to get my attention people are very uh narcissistic they're all only consumed with themselves so the more you can put them and their own brand into the email and

talk about them and show them the more effective it will be and then when it came down to the actual content of the email that was very effective as well so he said in the email um you know this full story helps people understand customer experience experiences like never before so that shows that he knew he was emailing this the founder of a SAS company because the message was targeted at me and my needs it wasn't again talking about law firms and k12 and all that stuff that has nothing to do with me so Trey

took the time and researched and had a very targeted list of people that obviously run SAS companies and they care a lot about experiences it's not some vague promise of additional revenue and growth streams second thing that he did really well was it felt very low pressure he did not try to get me on a phone call he didn't uh there was no pressure cell at all it was like here's the link check it out let me know if you have questions happy watching and it was very light-hearted not necessarily humorous but it was just

it was just Breezy you know and that's kind of a good feeling um when you're reading a cold email it's like my only action I had to take was click uh a link and view a video so that wasn't that hard for me to do so the next part came when it was time for follow-up so obviously Trey from full story had some kind of tracking on his email because he knew that I could when I open the email he knew that I clicked the link and that I viewed and all that stuff so the

next day I got another email and here's what it said hey Kyle couldn't help it notice that you had a chance to watch the full story demo I sent you yesterday you guessed it we use full story on full story why wanted to see if I could answer any questions for you I'd be happy to give you a quick 20-minute demo of course if you'd rather jump in you can shoot I can shoot you will log into a no strings attached full story trial account and you can be up and running in less than 10

minutes what do you think best so it was a great followup and again Trey really showed that he knew who I was he knew what I was doing and he was getting me at the right time so remember this the the the goal of a cold email is not to close a deal it's to learn if a prospect is right for you and so if you use cold email this way as just a way to Prospect and to try to create leads not to try to close deals it will hopefully work for you now you

might be thinking what if I don't run a Sask business what if I run a service business a consultancy an agency something that's a little bit higher price tag that's that's there's more involved it's a longer sales cycle will cold email still work for me I say yes it can if it's done right so I had a a chat on the biz chat um a while back you can look it up it's Alex Burman he talked about how he uh Grew 400k From nothing using just cold email in 30 days it's a really good conversation

you should check it out there's some really good pointers here this is just to show that cold email can work for a service business so here is the approach I would take if if I was going to steal Trey's approach and full story's approach for how they do cold email so first of all like Trey you got to really know who you're going after you know marketing agencies are always telling their clients they should have customer personas and avatars and really uh you know shape their ideal client and know who they are often times they

don't know it for themselves they'll take on any client who comes knocking and that's why it's really important to be specialized and to know who your best customer is so you should know the the general size of the company how much they do in Revenue roughly who's the uh position the job title of the person you're going after at the company should kind of know all these things going in second of all you want to use this information to find leads so you can use a tool like LinkedIn sales Navigator which uh is great you

can put in all this criteria into a search and it can show you lists of people you can contact them or you can just save them as leads and have them as a lead lead LT that a lead list that's saved now once you know who you're going after you want to make sure you can find their email addresses and you can use linkedin's in mail to to message them but that's very easy for that to get lost you don't necessarily know if they opened it so I prefer to just get in their inbox directly

and there's different tools out there that you can use to find people's email addresses yes wear reportative um generally speaking depending on the size of the company if somebody's at a small company it'll probably just be their first name at domain name if they're at a a larger company then it might be you know first initial full last name at company domain once you know the email address you want to actually start crafting the message now before you do that I want to talk about lead magnets so uh we had posted on the podcast last

week uh a whole post about lead magnets about different ways of doing them what we're doing at proposify but I would just want to point out something which is that we always think of lead magnets as being things like ebooks cheat sheets guides that you give to a prospect when they're say reading a blog post and you want to get their their information their email address so that you can contact them and that's true lead magnets are great for that but they can also be useful if you already know the Prospect and their email address

this gets into more account-based marketing so for example let's say you run a marketing agency or even more specialized like a social media or an SEO agency you're probably used to doing audits for your your clients maybe even at the proposal stage if you can find a way to automate this and make it faster you could actually do it for cold prospects using tools like uh unimo uh word tracker Google AdWords there's all kinds of tools free and paid that you can use to generate reports from a URL and if you can pull them into

one cohesive report nicely branded PDF or nicely branded document or micro website or something you can use that as a tool to get that prospect's interest just like Trey did with the cold email and the the screenshot of the video of the website that's what got me interested was because I saw myself in the email if you can do a similar thing and put say uh a quick Report with maybe a couple of takeaways or suggestions for that specific client that's going to get their interest much more than just a block of [Music] text so

once you've got your lead magnet you want to craft a message that's very short now just to keep in mind Trey's email was 30 words and it told me pretty much everything I wanted to to know or needed to know to get interested Julie's email was 102 words more than double the length and told me absolutely nothing so don't think you need to write a lot go as short and concise as possible be conversational and light-hearted in tone you know emails with humor get a 46% open rate according to yesware so if you are a

funny person or you know funny people have them craft your cold email because that's going to get somebody uh make somebody treat you more like a human which is what you want if you sound robotic you'll get treated like a robot and then finally have some kind of follow-up method just like Trey got back with the email it might have even been automated that said hey I noticed you opened the video and looked at it um with kind of more of a further you know push them further along the sales line you want to do

a similar thing so if they look at your report or your bought it you want to know that they opened it and then know that they viewed it and then you can reach back and say what did you think um I've got a few more suggestions if you want to jump on a call or even better yet have a paid service that you can save for the for the other 10 suggestions um you know it's it's all compiled in this nice um document it's X number of dollars there could be an actual paid component there

so there's a lot of ways to follow up you can actually use any kind of tool like sidekick for instance to know whether or not a proect opened your email and I'm going to offer a Shameless plug here and mention that using my product proposify you could put a lead magnet as a proposal take off all the signature and um pricing and all that kind of stuff and just make it a a document in the browser that your client can view and you'll actually know when they opened it where they looked how long they spent

on each section and so you could use proposify as a lead generation tool in addition to a proposal tool so you've got your follow-up ready and then hopefully you can start getting that conversation going which is really what the goal of this whole thing is remember you're not trying to close a deal you're trying to figure out if the prospect is right for you if you try these things I'd love to hear if it works if there's any additional suggestions you would like to offer and I really hope you liked watching this video so if

you want more be sure to hit subscribed regardless of where you are make sure you're uh subscribed with us on YouTube and we also have the audio versions on iTunes SoundCloud Google Play and don't forget to hit proposify up Biz if you want to check that out more and learn how the product can work for you thanks so much for watching I'll see you next [Music] week