I’ve used cold emails to grow a few different businesses, but you don’t always have to try and go for the sale. Have you tried using cold email to invite people to webinars? Or do surveys for market research (that you publish later)?
This post goes into a few different ways that you can use cold emails to grow a business.
Have you used cold emails? How did it work?
What, exactly, is a Cold email?
I think we all know what it is.
In a nutshell - contacting someone via email that you haven’t talked with previously.
That doesn’t really explain it.
Back in the day when I did freelance I’d reply to craigslist gigs by email. Setup a whole kind of semi automated system for it. It worked pretty well.
I’ve recently begun to do a tiny bit of cold outreach to websites that are in my target market, and it’s worked fairly well. Only sent out like 200 or so emails and got some decent responses and leads. Planning to do a bit more.
When I cold email I always try to keep the email super short and simple. I don’t try to sell the whole thing in a full page email with 12 bullet points. Just a short “hey I thought you might be interested in X” - I try to keep it to like one or two sentences.
Thank you for a better explanation. That type of cold email is perfectly fine with most people.
The general term “cold email” sounds like spam. And probably usually is.
I think the difference here is the individual you are contacting has posted something publicly (On Craigslist) that you are responding to in context, it’s more of a warm email than what the OP is alluding to, no? But which services these days publicly expose their users email addresses?
The idea of sending “Cold Emails” sounds dubious to me. I know it’s becoming more popular but personally I would just delete anything that tried to bait me into sampling a product/service, however roundabout way they choose to do this.
Everyone gets them. When they are done right and it is something you have an interest in, you respond and don’t even think of it as spam. When you get cold emails for things you don’t want, people then consider it spam. So it’s just a matter of appealing to the right audience at the right time. I’ve used it to grow 3 different businesses. Yes, it gets a bad rap, but it works.
It depends on whether you send a handful of emails to specific people or you are sending in bulk.
If you are sending in bulk to people that didn’t sign up for it, you are spamming.
Spam works. If it didn’t nobody would do it. But that isn’t the point.
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I have a lot of experience sending email. I have a double-opt-in list with 100,000 active subscribers that get an email 5 days a week. We have a 45% open rate because our subscribers actually want to get that email, because we provide something valuable for them.
Technically, it isn’t spam: www.leadfuze.com/cold-email-outreach-isnt-spam-heres-why/
Your model is much different so yea…it wouldn’t make sense for you. For most B2B companies though, cold email is a legitimate lead generating channel (along with many other inbound list building strategies) that can be incorporated. Ultimately, it isn’t for everyone though - that’s for sure.
100k list is super impressive @howtogeek. Nicely done!
I have solved numerous IT quandaries using How to Geek so that’s completely plausible. In fact I just signed up.
Would be interested to hear where you people get your email data from if you’re not getting it from opt in lists via promo material on your website.