Cold email. People either live by it or are convinced it'll never work for them.
For those that are not familiar with the term, all it means is simply sending emails to people you don’t know/have never heard of you or spoken to you before in their life.
You can tap into a database like Hunter or LeadRocks or ZoomInfo or Apollo to get anyone’s work email. From there, just send them an email…
I’ve probably sent over 50,000 cold emails in my career. I've gotten a few thousand responses, and closed a few dozen customers/clients out of it.
But I always see people doing cold emails wrong.
Most people pay to access a database and will load those emails up into a cold email tool like Super Send (my favorite simple and affordable cold email tool). From there, just write a few paragraphs and start sending a few hundred out a day.
I’ve done that before.
A lot of “gurus” on Twitter will tell you that you need to hire a virtual assistant to write custom “first lines.” Meaning, speaking to where the person receiving the email went to school or where Linkedin says they live…
I’ve done that before too.
The secret to my 7-figure cold email strategy, is that a one-sentence cold email is always a question. I increased my response rate from below 1% to upwards of 10% when I did this for my ad agency.
You see, most cold emails feature a short intro and maybe a few sentences. In introduces the person and why they are emailing. That intro will then be followed by some main talking points of why the person receiving the email should be interested in whatever you are trying to sell them. This type of cold email typically concludes with a call to action to book a demo on a calendar link or click to a website to take advantage of a free trial of some sort…
THIS WILL GET YOU NOWHERE, FAST.
When you send someone a cold email, the chances of them reading it are slim. The chances of them reading more than a sentence are fewer than slim. The changes of them reading a few sentences and following through with your Call To Action to book a call or take advantage of some free trial? Virtually zero!
To find success with cold emailing, from my experience, you need to reframe your goal from getting someone to book a call or take advantage of a free trial, to just starting a conversation.
I do it with a single question.
Here Are Some Practical Examples:
Agency - When I was running my ad agency, instead of emailing a bunch of businesses pitching ourselves as the best creative testing agency and saying we have a ton of amazing case studies, I sent the following simple email to 10,000 people:
“Hey Jackie,
Is there a reason why (insert brand name) is not testing more Facebook ads right now?
Looking forward to your answer,Max(Insert link to my agency)”
The results were off the charts! People responded and said, " Hey, we can’t afford a full-time graphic designer." Or , "We are in-between agencies right now or I feel like we are testing a lot already…" They gave me the reason why they aren’t testing. So now I can go to bat and say, "Oh sure, lots of our clients struggle with that, here’s how we fix it…"
SaaS - Say you run a project management tool SaaS, you might email project managers something like:
“Hey Suzie,
How long does it take you to create a new Gant chart?”
I bet you’ll get more responses to a one-sentence question cold email like this than paragraphs or bullet points about why hundreds of companies are switching over to you…
Direct To Consumer - Say you sell weighted eye masks that help people sleep better. Perhaps you first get a list of all the Founders who just raised VC capital to grow their business. Now, your cold email using my strategy might look something like this:
“Hey, Liz,
“Are you looking for an easy way to improve your sleep given the natural stress of being a venture-backed founder?”
Most people will go on and on about how their sleep masks will help them… but if you put a link to your brand below your name in the footer, I guarantee you’ll get some clicks to your website and certainly get a handful of responses to your cold email!
Lazy Cold Emailers:
The few people I have shared this strategy with get lazy. They come up with boring questions like, “Are you looking for ways to increase your team’s productivity?”
Don’t be that cold emailer, I beg you!
Get specific and create a question that’s intriguing.
I think the reason why the question I asked in the past was so successful in getting responses was that it was borderline offensive.
That's right. I’m kind of making the recipient feel like they aren’t doing everything they can be to grow their business.
So, here’s what you should do. Figure out what question you want to ask, get an email list from LeadRocks, upload it into Super Send (my favorite quick-start, simple, and affordable cold email tool), and watch the answers to your question start rolling in :)
Great growth marketers find their specific, borderline offensive, single question to use in their cold emails.
Pro Tips
Some pro tips to help you execute this Growth Hack are available to all Growth Hacks University Students inside the “Growth Hacks Library” which you can sign-up to get access to here.