COLD OUTREACH

Cold email outreach has been one of my key discoveries as an entrepreneur. There is no denying the fact that cold calls or cold emails can be annoying to a recipient, but that’s mainly because the message or offer has little to no relevance to the recipient.

If you take the effort to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and make a legitimate list of offers they will find value in, Cold Email Outreach can turn into one of the most inexpensive ways to initiate a conversation with your prospects.

But for those of you who are wondering what Cold Emails are, here are some basics …

If you’re reading this piece, there is a reasonably good chance that you have a primary email address. On your primary email address, you might be receiving a few emails every week from people you have never interacted with earlier.

Such emails are called Cold Emails. These are sent to you since you must have qualified as a prospect for someone & hence they’re making an attempt to start a conversation with you.

Cold Email Outreach is the technique for sending cold emails to your prospects to start a conversion, which might lead to a positive outcome such as a sale, a hire, an invitation acceptance, etc.

It does, but it’s not for everyone.

You can do the math for yourself using the statistics from my experience …

The steps I’ve followed to run cold email outreach campaigns brought me just over 60% open rates and just over 5% reply rates.

In terms of the exact numbers,



Reference Campaign Statistics for Cold Email Outreach

So you can assume that for every 1000 prospects you run through a well-constructed cold email outreach process, you can expect around 50 replies.

The entire setup I use to send these 1000 emails every week or approximately 200,000 emails per year requires an annual investment of around …

Add everything up, and you’ll have to invest around $12,000 per year to run outreach for 200,000 prospects which would end up bringing you 10,000 replies.

Hence, a well-orchestrated cold outreach process can help you churn about 800 to 1000 leads every month for about $1 per lead.

If this makes sense to your business, read further to know how we run cold outreach ourselves.

Let me start with a disclaimer …

I am not an expert at this art. This is an attempt to share something that might help you run cold email outreach.

I’ve read a lot of literature after being introduced to this concept by some of my customers and community members. Although, it would be fair to say that I have done a fair number of successful outreach campaigns recently.

There are much better experts out there who have been doing this for decades. But here are the steps I followed …

The first rule we have set internally is -

Never send cold emails from your primary domain.

We’re all human so assume that you will make mistakes unintentionally. The last thing we want is our domain reputation for getting affected by one lousy campaign that I or anyone from my team might do.

As our primary domain was nexweave.com, we use the following outreach domains …

Also, all these domains are re-directed to our primary domain, i.e., nexweave.com, just in case our prospects want to check who we are.

When preparing email accounts for outreach, here are a few things that need to be taken care of …

Since your email accounts are newly made, a lot of sudden activity on an email account can raise alarms, causing your account to get disabled. Hence the process of email warming is essential to ensure that your emails don’t end up in spam.

The way this works is that the platform will send emails from your registered email to other emails registered on their platform. By doing this, the platform ensures that your emails are kept out of spam. Besides this, these platforms will slowly ramp up the number of emails you’re sending in a day so that it does not raise any flags due to sudden activity from your email address.

Several email warming tools are available in the market today that help you with this. Just ensure that your emails are being sent to business email IDs. We use is Instantly.ai since it’s one of the affordable options, especially when you wish to run this process with tens of email addresses, and it works well.

My advice is to warm up your email address for at least ten business days, with your platform configured to ramp up your number of emails by +2 every day. This way, your email address would be ready to send 20 emails daily at the end of 2 weeks. Keep the warm-up active on these email addresses, and you will be able to send 50 emails daily after a month of warming.

It’s common to acquire your prospect list from a platform that provides you with the contact details for a price. There is nothing wrong in doing that, but ensure that you run your own checks and balances before you upload this prospect list to your cold email outreach software.

We run the emails sequentially through two different email verification softwares (you can pick any two) to ensure that we’re preparing the campaigns to achieve a low bounce rate. This is probably one of the key reasons why we have managed to stay above the 50% open rate mark in all the campaigns we’ve done until now.

This method has helped us achieve the metrics mentioned above for three out of every four campaigns we’ve done. However, your product/service might have nuances that demand tweaks due to various factors such as

Here is how we craft our outreach in four simple steps …

EMAIL 1 - ESTABLISH A CONNECTION

The first email of your outreach sequence should have,

For example, if you’re approaching a list of email marketing agencies that are experts on a particular platform, and you know that there are specific key metrics that matter for email marketing processes, the following subject lines could work …

(These are a few of the ones that have worked for us across multiple experiments.)

Don’t forget to A/B test your subject lines. For a prospecting list of about 8,000 to 10,000, we try to use different subject lines with the initial group of 300 to 500 prospects to see which ones are getting better open rates. Testing out 3 to 5 different subject lines over the first 25% of your prospect base would typically give you a winner to use for the remaining 75% of your list.

Another trick that has worked for us is to keep the same subject line for the complete sequence. This technique bumps up your previous email and adds a small counter to your new email. Couple this up with a profile image for your account, and it causes the necessary pattern interrupt to get noticed.

We’ve been noticing our open rates peak around the second email, with a 100% open rate for three out of every five campaigns that we’ve done using this technique!

… and this brings us to the second step of the sequence.

EMAIL 2 - MAKE A STRONG IMPRESSION

Now that you’ve appeared in their inbox, not once but twice, the conversation is warm enough to make a strong impression about yourself. Here are a few things we’ve found success with in this step …

Here is a video message for Brian regarding something we could work out for HubSpot!

We’re not the most creative folks out there, so I’m sure you can come up with a few more techniques that can help.

EMAIL 3 - DROP A VALUE BOMB

If your first two emails have not resulted in a reply, now is probably your last chance to get a reply, or at least leave them with an unforgettable impression of yourself as an expert in the domain.

You can try a bunch of things here …

This is where your responses will need to be the most creative and personalized to make an impact, so put in the effort as they are the warmest set opening our third email!

EMAIL 4 - PARTING EMAIL

Don’t abandon your outreach sequence without a closure email. Your prospects might have genuinely been out of action for a week or so, and this step adds a little stretch to your outreach and ends it professionally.

Persistence is seen as a positive trait in businesses. Sometimes, the fact that you did not abandon the prospect after three emails might create a sense of obligation for them to respond, even if it is negative.

I usually include my LinkedIn Profile and a link to our Free FB community in the last email, and almost 30% of them end up joining the community :)

You’ll find some tools out there that will visit the LinkedIn profiles of your prospects. These tools will also offer the option to drop connection messages, but we’ve not done that well as yet. However, there is a benefit in visiting their profiles since it would likely send them a notification and establish a slightly higher level of trust and familiarity if they had seen your name on LinkedIn.

Be careful with this, though. LinkedIn does not like automation, so check the tools before you put them to use.

As with any campaign, you’ll need to …

I like to call this ‘The Regular Stuff’ since this is hygiene for any business operator.

With that, we come to the end of this small guide. I hope you’ll find these helpful and if it helps, let me know I’d love to get insights from you!