Benoit Dervieux

A person I know from university told me she thought about reaching more people to increase the number of customers she currently has. 

As I struggled with this problem when I was myself a freelancer, and I know this can boost (or not) your business, I asked her if she was doing any cold emailing or if she thought about doing so? When I speak about cold emailing, I also speak about cold outreach which can somehow be the same on other platforms such as Instagram, Linkedin etc.

Her answer was that she eventually thought about it but never took the time to do it. And honestly, I understand her. This kind of seems a bit complicated, harsh even. And to be fair it is, if you do not have the right mindset and the right way to do it, you could easily feel that you suck at it, you don’t know how to do it or be ashamed because no one is answering you.

In this small article, I just want to tell her, and people reading it, how you could and should start a habit of cold outreach for your activity.

Let’s do it, without AI, just my raw untouched thoughts

Mindset

The first thing you need to understand is the mindset in which you need to be. Cold outreach means messaging maybe 1000 persons, have 20 answering you and 1 that buys. I know, it’s a lot, a lot of unread, unresponded emails where people do not really care about how you can help them. 

So the faster you accept no one is going to respond to you (or buy), the faster you can start acting and make it a habit. Like sport, results might come in 3, 6, 12 months, but you need to go to the gym regularly, even if this hurts, it’s annoying or you don’t see much results.

You need to be ready to reach people as if they don’t care. Until they do. 

You need to be ready to speak to them no matter what the result is at the beginning.

You need to put your feelings on the side because they are not important here. What is important is how you’ll execute, how many people you’ll reach and how much you’ll learn from what you’re doing.

Asset

You should take cold outreach like an asset. This helps you build knowledge on how to get leads and clients. Once you have this knowledge, this is a strategy you can use. You can know if you should spend more time doing it or not. But without knowing if this is beneficial for you, you might “sleep on a goldmine”.

Once you consider cold outreach as an asset, you’d have to develop a machine, a mental system that takes people’s information, processes them, sends them messages and hopefully converts them into customers. Everyone does that and I bet you can’t remember this email sent in 2018 by a cold emailer? So it won’t be much of a big deal.

If you treat that that way, your mission becomes a formality. That’s the mistake I made previously as a freelancer. I treat cold outreach like people would judge me and my video editing skills. It’s not the case. Only trash people might judge you. People will either care because they find a business interest or not care. And if they care, that’s where the conversation can start.

Habit

Cold email should be a habit. Something you do, I would say on a daily basis, but let’s say once a week at least. For several reason: 

• The technique behind it is pretty time constrained. The number of emails you can send is constrained.
• It’s like a sport, the more you practice, the more you’ll see and understand results

This is why it’s better to accept that cold email should be a necessary weekly habit and book some time on it every week. I would say that 2 sessions of 4 hours can be enough, but this depends where you find the leads and how powerful is your offer

As always, the more one does painful/annoying BUT NECESSARY tasks, the more we adapt and are tolerant to the pain. Cold Email is, to me, a painful activity that can still bring reward.

Technique

I would say that’s the part I am least comfortable with and yet the part where you can find advice online and . 

The only thing I would say when it comes to email is:

• You need an email address with the name of your company so that it’s more credible, not a gmail address.
• You need to “warm” your email address, which means the systems can recognize it’s someone’s email address, so you need to send and receive mail before reaching out (if you want to avoid being in the spam). You can usually do that with software and it takes around 3 or 4 weeks to do so.
• There are limits you shouldn’t cross per day and week so that systems don’t think you’re a robot. Mine is 30 emails per day max, 5 days a week but it’s a lower limit.
• Be careful that some email address can be kind of banned and always come in the spam folder (or other quite irrelevant folders), so think twice before using your email address.
• At the beginning, you need to start low and increase with time.

For this part I would recommend following a tutorial if you plan to send more than 10/20 emails a day with a brand new email address.

Understanding your ICP

The most important thing to do is to understand who is buying from you and why. Then you can act: Find the right person(s), have the right message(s) that can trigger a response and use the right platform.

Let’s say you’re selling a baby product, then you’ll target young parents. Dumb example but this can get more complicated depending on the customer you reach.

In general cold outreach is better in b2b with high ticket. Reaching parents using Linkedin makes less sense than through ads on facebook for instance. 

But once you have framed your ICP, then you can gather the right information on them and see what patterns make them respond.

Copywriting

You’ll need to write impactful messages to reach your prospects and make them react. Depending on your ICP and how they buy, you’ll have to adapt the copy to either go straight to the point so that the sale can happen fast and they don’t get distracted by what you write.

It’s pretty hard to really determine what you need to write but as a matter of example, I recommend: 

“Hi,

[explaining the signals ] +/or [Paint point]

[We do that]

[Let’s book a meeting if interested]

Best regards

“

Sequence

People don’t necessarily respond directly. They might be interested, or mildly interested, they might have an urgent problem, yet it doesn’t mean they’re going to act. So you need to send a sequence of messages. This sequence is arbitrary and depends on the prospect too.

The rule I have is to send 3 emails as it’s a good number, but less can be inefficient and more can, depending on your ICP, be too many. 

One advice I have is to always provide value for each step. Value can be “look at our website”, “look at this video”, “if you respond now you can get X% off”. It’s up to you to decide but you understand the intent, each step can push the client to act.

Respond as fast as possible

If you can, respond the soonest, it will help you keep the customer’s focus and keep the potential of the sale alive.

Signals

A signal is a clear action that shows that the prospect is actively looking for changes. This can be a Linkedin Comment like “Oh I have been looking for doing this for a long time”, or a change of job, registration to a newsletter etc.

The more you’re capable of recognizing signals, the better you can find the momentum and reach your prospects at the right time. 

For this one, you’ll have to reflect on what you’re doing and how you should approach the signals. But if you find effective signals, you can reduce your efforts.

Early system

There are plenty of software available to do cold emailing and if you have the budget I would recommend them. That said, the easiest way to start is a simple Gmail + Google Doc + Google Sheet + Mailsuite free (add on on chrome or other browser)

List all your prospects on Google Sheet: Name, email, what they do, signal or differentiation, where they’re from (so that you send at the right time), and when you reached them and what sequence + what step.

Write each of your personalized emails on Google doc. Try to personalize emails as much as you can.

Use Mailsuite to know if people have read your emails or not, you’ll be able to determine your deliverability.

Use Gmail to plan when to send your emails.

My workflow is the following: Find emails online, List them in Google Sheet, Write a personalized message for each of them, Use Gmail to schedule when to send (max 100 to schedule) 

That way, I do everything in a batch. You don’t need to personalize your emails all the time but it’s better if you want to avoid being in the spam folder.

I used to send 150 mails a week, 50 new prospects, 50 nudges and 50 emails saying I won’t be bothering you again but I’m here if you need. Your sequence can change of course but that was my early system.

Road to better software 

There are plenty of softwares you could use to automate that: I can recommend Lemlist, Instantly, Clay

But tbh I haven’t used them so maybe it’s for later. I would love to follow this course but didn’t have the time yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDGcd1JoJV0

Offer too good you can’t say no

Last advice I found online is to provide an offer too good so that people wouldn’t say no. This is up to you and your business but if you manage to find something your ICP would be dumb to say no to that, and you’re still making money off of that, then you’re 

Finish

Right now I don’t have anything more in mind, I hope I can add some stuff one day. Contact me if you have questions so that I can add them here. This might not be a 100% clear article but I would love to improve it.