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Marco Massaro
Marco Massaro runs a web consultancy that works with tech companies and high-growth startups. The consultancy works on UX design and web development.Marco closed a $15,000 consulting project with a cold e-mail campaign.Before diving in and blasting out e-mails to hundreds of people, he started off by outlining who exactly he was targeting. He needed to identify his ideal clients.The more specific you can get at this step, the more targeted your cold e-mails will be when you send them out. Marco got extremely specific about who he wanted to work with.
Here are the main categories he filtered companies by:
IndustryMarco wanted to work with tech companies: SaaS, B2B, B2C, and social.Company locationHe wanted to work with English-speaking companies only that were based in USA, UK, and Europe.FundingTo make sure they could afford his rates, he focused on companies that were at the seed stage and Series A with at least $200,000 in funding.RevenueIf the companies had no funding, they would have to at least have $500,000 to $1,000,000 in yearly revenue.Company sizeMarco targeted smaller companies because larger companies were able to afford employees to handle their web development and design in-house.Person to e-mailLastly, he made a note of the people within the company who he would have to e-mail — the decision-makers.
Next, he had to find companies that matched this profile.
He used Crunchbase because his target was mostly early-stage tech companies, but other lead gen sources might include AngelList or even software products like LeadFuze. Outreach also has a Chrome plugin that allows you to quickly extract contact information from professional profiles on LinkedIn which makes lead gen more efficient.
The next step was actually writing up the cold e-mail pitches and sending them out.
Marco crafted a quick e-mail with the goal of grabbing the recipient’s attention right off the bat, and getting them interested in his services:
Subject: Work togetherHi [first name],I wanted to find out if you have any design needs at [company] (redesign, landing pages, UX, etc).We can increase sales, engagement, conversions, and more through our design and UX strategies.Interested? Email me back, I’d love to chat.
Notice how this e-mail doesn’t jump right into an introduction in the first sentence?People don’t care about you until they are interested in what you have to offer first.You shouldn’t waste your valuable first few sentences talking about something that your prospect isn’t going to read anyway.The e-mail also addresses the recipient by name. However, it could be a bit more personalized as it doesn’t include how web development or design consulting could help the prospect with their specific situation.
Marco sent this e-mail to 500 prospects, received 67 replies, and got a response rate of around 13.4%.
Apart from personalizing it more, other ways that the process could be improved include:1) A/B testing subject lines or CTAs,and2) integrating with an outbound sales automation tool to keep the campaign more efficient.According to Marco, the lack of structure here made it confusing at times to remember where they were in the sales process for each prospect.
Conclusion
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: cold e-mails are tough. There are many steps involved, and for most people, it can be pretty time-consuming.You have to identify who exactly you’re targeting, scrape the Internet to figure out where those people are hanging out, and then figure out what their e-mail addresses are.Finally, it comes down to how well you conduct your research of the people and the companies you’re targeting, how personalized your message is, how much of an attention grabber your subject line is, and how specific your call to action is.To make things more efficient, remember that you can always use software tools to automate your processes. Tools like Outreach, Sendbloom, and Reply can help you craft the perfect follow-up sequence for your prospects (so you never have to remember who’s in what part of the sales sequence) and also track all your data.Now that you’ve had an “insider’s look” into some highly successful cold e-mail campaigns, you know exactly what sort of templates to use, what numbers to expect, and how to improve the templates going forward.If you get all these points right and send out a massive volume of e-mails, you could see a number of responses that are large enough to change the course of your business.