Advice on cold emailing?

Discussions
#1

I would like to know what tactics or email examples do you use for cold emailing, as well as what do you think about this method in terms of effectiveness.

Thanks all

#2

Not an expert in the subject, but here’s a nice (and recent) blog post about the subject: The cold emails that got me meetings at Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub by Iris Shoor, which is pretty good at this kind of things from what I gather :slight_smile:

#3

Keep it short (max 5 lines, excluding signature).

Be personal and genuine, no corporate talking - people had enough.

Buy a good database with highly targeted people - forget about generic email addresses, they never work.

Set up Mailchimp so you monitor your opening rates and get other interesting metrics on your campaign.

#4

There’s nothing I don’t hate about this, but that’s just my 2 cents as someone who receives these all the time .

I also doubt it’s going to be the thing that makes your business. Using these techniques to approach reporters is a bit different and there I’m more OK with it as they’re generally actively looking for interesting stories.

1 Like
#5

Hey @ian I’m curious - do you hate cold emails less when they’re highly relevant to you?

For example- assuming your saas apps are on rails and deal with email, how would you feel about a cold email about a rails email plugin or feature of some sort?

Reason I ask is I’m considering doing a bit of cold email to magento merchants for a magento plugin.

I actually received a cold email for some magento plugin to my work email and I actually found myself not that annoyed by it because it was actually fairly relevant to us.

That said I know cold commercial email is pretty well despised across the boards. So I’d understand if people were just completely against it on principle.

#6

Erica Douglass’ talk from Microconf 2013 contains an explanation of Buffer’s manual strategy for reaching out cold to prospective customers (1000+ emails sent over a few months) and shows the content of the email.

Erica Douglass - Finding Customers Who Are 100x More Valuable Without 100x the Effort:
http://vimeo.com/72456666

#7

@kalen If you’re actually reaching out to people based on research and not just blasting lists or churning through people you found via automated searches and stuff then I hate it slightly less.

Still in most context you see it used it’s used poorly. Also, I just got into a twitter battle on this with a company that was “cold emailing”. They basically refused to stop until I publicly called them out.

So I guess a lot is in the details. If you email someone and they don’t reply I don’t think you should keep emailing them/calling them until they do. That’s sleazy. Obviously if they tell you to get lost you should also stop.

If you’re going to do 1 personal, well researched email I suppose that’s something different. Though the temptation is so great to automate it and to harass people once you go down this road it seems risky to me.

#8

I think the problem is that most cold calling books/blogs teach exactly that: If the person doesn’t reply, keep emailing them. This is supposed to show the person that you are a hard working and dedicated salesman, and s/he will be so impressed, they will give you their time (don’t look at me: These aren’t my thoughts).

#9

I think the blogs do say it for a reason – because for the most part it works. I think after X emails sent you’re bound to get a response or a ‘unsubscribe’ action, just because people don’t like getting spam.

Being on the sending side, I have found that targeted emailing tends to work a lot better than just mass emailing. E.g. sending online video whitepapers to people who manage digital media has definitely started some conversations.

#10

Thanks Ian. Sorry for the late reply - I didn’t get an email notification! (handle is @kalenjordan)

Ya I hear what you’re saying. Actually what I’ve been doing recently is finding people on linkedin. I like it better for a number of reasons - in most cases because I’m the same industry as these people they’re already a 2nd or 3rd degree contact. So it’s a much warmer cold contact - and they can see my profile to see whether they’re interested in adding me.

But even there there’s still etiquette - a buddy of mine has been showing me the ropes as he lives and breathes this kind of thing for biz dev.

Thanks!