The Cold Email Manifesto: How to fill your sales pipeline, convert like crazy and level up your business in 90 days or less

Berman, Alex; Indries, Robert

Chapter 1.

The only thing that you can trust is that it’s going to work out in the end, if you keep persisting, keep learning from your mistakes-checking your open rates, response rates, measuring-like a scientist, and believe in what you’re doing. If you’re ready to develop this unflinching self-belief, and actively receive feedback from the market, you will inevitably succeed. The wrong way to react to someone telling you that you’re spamming, is to send out 10,000 emails, and spam even harder! And yet, a lot of people do that.

First, when you’re selling via e-mail you need to ensure that your product or service is priced correctly. As a general rule, I don’t believe that cold email is the best way to go if your software project, product, or service is under $ 2,000, otherwise the time spent won’t be worth it. But you can use this to sell anything from $ 2,000 up to millions or even billions of dollars.

Second, you need to ensure that you’re selling something that is in extremely high demand. This means that you need to test your cold emails before you scale the process. And target effectively. What a lot of agency clients do is sell web and iOS development, along with other similar services, and they’re willing to sell it to anyone. We’ve all seen these companies-want a website? They’ll build it. How about a complex API? Sure. Designs for your business cards? They’re great at it! A business can succeed like that, but to really thrive, for each cold email, you need a specific offer and a specific customer. The successful version of this is to phrase your offer in a hyper-specific way. Instead of saying “we build websites” say “we do Kubernetes consulting for startups that have over 2 million active users per month.” If you can lock in your offer and get hyper-specific, you can find millions of dollars in deals and you will massively outperform any business that attempts to do everything for everybody. You cannot be all things to all people. You must target clients the right way and hone in on the specific niche for your business and you will hugely magnify your success.

Then measure your results. If your open rate is disappointing, send another 20 with a different subject line. If you’re happy with your open rate, but received no responses, keep your subject line, rewrite the body, and iterate over and over and over again, until you hit your benchmark stats. If you do this effectively, you should be able to achieve 4-8 meetings on your calendar for every hundred emails, and at the same time ramp up the number of emails you send.

Chapter 2. My Dad Was The Cold Call King

Cold emails are significantly less intrusive. They are not a nuisance, which is another reason that they work so much better than cold calling. The person that you are contacting is already at his or her desk, they have the task in hand to check their email, and your email is simply one of many. All you have to focus on is ensuring that you get into their inbox in the first place, and that your message is compelling.

CHAPTER 3. Making Cold Email Work

First things first, I want to tell you the most important aspect of all cold email campaigns. You must have a very specific offer. You must have something nailed down that you know that you can deliver.

Instead of offering Web Design, offer Magento 2 migrations. Or instead of App Development, say you specialize in building connectivity apps for Universities. That’s how specific you want to get.

When it comes to writing your email, one of the first things to address is distinguishing yourself from the hundreds of other cold emails your potential customer gets daily. How do you create an offer that stands out from the crowd? It all comes down to the case study. This is the hardest and most important aspect of cold email, as it conveys exactly what you do. This is how you’re going to sell your business to the client. This case study will be the second line of your cold email template, with a custom compliment as your first line.

Hey John,

Heard about you while looking up Marketing Directors for major hospitals and love your backstory-incredible that you work as a volunteer firefighter as well.

I specialize in iOS development for the healthcare industry. Recently, we built an app for Johns Hopkins that has increased their patient happiness rating by 75% through an automated dashboard.

Interested in improving your patient happiness at Baylor? Let me know and I’ll send over some times to chat.

Thanks, Alex

That’s an example of an email that will generate meetings because you’re effectively separating yourself from your competitors. Are any of your competitors going direct to clients with a pitch like this? No! So you’re right in front of the client immediately. These are busy people. They don’t want to go away and research healthcare app development companies. They don’t want to release an RFP and have other people pitch. They want the solution to arrive in front of them, as if by magic! And this is exactly what you achieve by using this cold email strategy. You’re offering these people a solution on a silver platter. Now they can make themselves look good to their bosses, and make it seem like they are the

How do you get potential customers to open the email? You need a good subject line. Luckily this is the easy part. We have a complete list of subject lines proven to perform later on in this book, but for now just use the subject line Quick Question. This subject line has consistently outperformed other subjects in our testing. Test Quick Question in your campaigns and you’ll be sure to get a high number of opens!

The final part of the picture is the call to action. This is the least personalized and customized part of the email. In fact, it can pretty much be copied and pasted. But it does need to be asked in a specific form to prompt a “yes” or “no” answer. This is much more favorable than an open-ended question like: “what is your biggest problem at the moment?”.

First, your lead generator should be able to locate 200 leads every day. A lead includes: First Name, Last Name, Title, Company Name, Website and Email Address. Typically, this lead generator is located in a developing economy or Third World country, where there are fewer demands in terms of salary. And the great thing is that there are thousands of people that have been working on this over the last couple of decades, so you won’t have to train them. If you find one that requires training, hire somebody else.

For your custom compliment writer, this is a little bit trickier, so I would suggest 3-5 minutes for each first line is a reasonable benchmark. And the cold email sender should achieve a meeting book rate between 4-8%. Next, your meeting booker should be able to basically fill your calendar with meetings. If you get this going effectively, you will be so busy that you won’t have time to breathe! And, finally, your sales closer should be getting between 10-25% close rate from cold leads, depending on the size of your deal and 80% for warm marketing qualified leads.

Now that your tools are set up, you need to be hyper-specific with your customer. You need to understand the person that is buying intimately. Are you selling to HR, or the CTO of a company? Are you delivering a hiring tool, or a tech solution? What is the size of the business that you’re dealing with? Once you begin to answer these questions, you can create an impression of your client. A strong customer profile will include the title of the person, the company size, and its revenue. Once this has been broken down, I typically target Golden Geese companies-those that are worth between $ 5-150 million annually. The reason for this is that they are big enough to be able to afford your product or service, but small enough that they won’t drag you through an entire excruciating enterprise process!

You should be aiming for a bounce rate of no higher than 8%.

I don’t recommend following up more than four times.

The reason that the breakup email works so well, is that most people in business are accustomed to having salespeople hound them mercilessly. This gives them a bit of breathing room and provides them with the opportunity to respond. It also gives the psychological impression that this opportunity is slipping away and that can be really compelling. So don’t neglect this part of the process, even if you believe the client will never respond, as this last email works way more often than you think it should. Of course, you can’t hook every fish, but always go through the process. Getting a solid “yes” or “no” is the goal-we don’t want clients hanging out in limbo.

Then you move into the call. It’s critically important at this stage, as I just mentioned, to ask some questions, and get some feedback from the client. Here are the actual discovery questions we wrote for an SEO agency. Notice how highly specific they are to the service they offer. Yours should be just as specific to your offer.

Questions:

Can you tell me more about your company and your role within the organization? What’s your main value proposition? Who are your ideal customers? What work do you personally oversee?
What areas of growth are you focusing on for (current year)? What actions on the site are most important to you (white paper download, demo, free trial, etc) KPIs? Any dollar amounts you assign to these conversions?
What issues are you having with your organic search marketing strategy?
When you responded to the email I sent, could you tell me about what came to mind when you thought about us working together?
What would be a slam dunk?
How much are you currently spending on SEO?

These are just some examples, and you should customize them to sell whatever service you’re working with. The important thing is that the questions guide the customer through the sales process. You are gently persuading them into buying, rather than pushing them forcefully.

One of the critical aspects is to identify a big problem that they experience, and then frame the product or service that you’re selling as the solution. This means that it’s valuable to ask them as many questions about the problem as possible: Have they tried to solve it in the past? If they did try to solve it, why did this fail? If they haven’t tried to solve it, why not? What is going on in the organization to stop them from attempting to solve something that they’ve identified as a big problem? And then once you’ve gathered all of this information, you should talk about your case studies and past work in your answers.

Another important thing to note is that you’re being affirmative with the client. You’re telling them that they are correct, and that you’ve experienced this previously in the past. And you’re then offering them the solution to the problem that they have expressed.

CHAPTER 4. The Pre-Work

The reason for this is that cold email is different from inbound; you’re essentially driving the process. So you need to do 90% of the work and pitch an offer, not a service. I’ll give you an example.

An agency will compose a cold email, and it will say something like the following:

Subject: Quick Question

Hey Mark,

Are you looking to do any web development projects? We specialize in all languages and can design sites or apps as well.

Let me know what you think.

Regards, Carl

This email is trash. Why? That’s pitching a service, not pitching an offer. Pitching an offer is about producing something that a customer can buy. For example:

Subject: Quick Question

Hey Karen,

Huge fan of the work you’re doing with Acme tours-loved the last video!

I specialize in writing emails for tour companies. Recently, one client increased their sales by 141% with just one newsletter. I’d love to do the same for you. Is that something you’d be interested in?

Thanks, Mark

That’s the way any company doing cold emails should pitch. Instead of telling the client that they do copywriting, tell them specifically who you work with as a copywriting firm, tell them that you have achieved outstanding results, and then offer to do the same for them.

It’s not enough to just target a specific industry, they also need to solve a specific problem. Ideally, your pitch is also something that has increased revenue for businesses previously, so that you can cite this in your email. Remember, sugar, salt and fat. We’re like McDonald’s. Deliver that value by promising to make them money, the same way McDonald’s promises to make you feel good by giving you sugar, salt and fat!

One important point to understand is that your case study must appeal to companies that are similar to the ones that you sold to previously. So the previous sale that you cited in your case study can’t be too specific. I know that I’ve just stated that it must be specific-but it must also be generalizable to the rest of the market. You have to be specific enough that somebody in that market will immediately resonate with the benefits, but general enough that it can be applied to a decent number of companies.

A good offer is specific and is tied to a monetary goal. This means that somebody hearing your offer for the first time will immediately know that it’s going to make them more money, or help them look good in their job. Ideally, money is better, because if you think about what McDonald’s does-it’s by no means the best fast food in the world, but they give you sugar, salt and fat! And making someone more money is the sugar, salt and fat of the enterprise world. If you can provide that to someone, it’s incredibly easy to sell.

More Examples of No-Brainer Offers:

Facebook ads–Manage ads for 30 days, if no return on investment, we refund our fee .
Newsletter copywriting–Write 3 newsletters for 50% commission, no sales, no payment .
Lead generation (Outbound)-Book 10 meetings in 4 weeks or your money back.
Website design–Wireframes only, if you don’t like where this is headed, we give you your money back .
Mobile app development-Wireframes only, if you don’t like where this is headed, you get your money back .
Backend development–A two-hour tech review, we can end the contract after that if you don’t see the value .
Branding-Let’s just do the mood board, if you don’t like where this is headed, we can refund.
Search Engine Optimization–In-depth review (not the sort that other people give for free) if you don’t like it, we’ll refund.

CHAPTER 5. Lead Generation

Who you send an email campaign to is more important than the content of the email. Let me repeat that. Who you send an email campaign to is more important than the content of the email.

Cold email is not spam, so don’t make it into spam. So it is vital that you have watertight lead generation criteria. This will ensure that your whole operation remains above board, and that you’re being helpful rather than a nuisance. Lead generation is not about firing out as many emails as possible, it’s about identifying people who need your services, and, critically, who can afford to pay the price that you want. In order to achieve this, we need to put lead generation criteria in place. The first part of this process is to address a few points that are required in order to send effective cold emails. These are first and last name, email, website, company name, and the custom first line. Those five data points are all that you really need for each lead.

A lot of people make a rookie error early on, believing that they’re selling to startups across the board, when B2B and B2C startups are completely different. Even within the specific niches, a B2C startup, in a pre-traction state, with $ 500 million raised in capital is nothing like a bootstrapped B2C that’s in post-traction with thousands of established customers. They are completely different businesses, and yet both will often be described as startups. So it’s extremely important that you distinguish between companies that you are targeting, and work out precisely which ones will suit your particular business.

The great thing about contacting people in niche industries is that no one else can identify them either! So they don’t get bothered very much! In many ways, targeting niche and very specific industries is better, as they simply receive considerably less contact. You can even think outside the box and attend conferences and events; anything that enables you to come into contact with people that you’re targeting.

CHAPTER 6. The Perfect Cold Email

To reiterate, a great cold email consists of five parts:

Subject line
Compliment
Case study
Call to action
Email signature

We’re going to take a look at each of these in more detail, and I’m going to walk you through everything that you need to know.

But before we do that, I want you to ask yourself an important question. What would it take for you to buy something from a complete stranger? That’s a very important question, as that’s essentially what you’re doing here. Contacting someone out of the blue with a proposition, and they know absolutely nothing about you whatsoever. So you have to be convincing. You have to grab their attention rapidly. Whenever you’re writing a cold email you should keep this concept in mind, as it will ultimately define whether or not you’re successful.

The C’s: compliment, case study, and call to action. The compliment gets their attention, the case study sets authority, and the call to action induces them to book a meeting. And this is all achieved in three sentences. That doesn’t sound too labor-intensive, does it?

Okay, let’s go through some examples. Here’s a script for mobile development.

Subject line: Quick question, Jack

Hi Jack,

Huge fan of Acme Inc and your forward thinking approach to marketing!

Recently I’ve helped several companies build VR applications in order to drive more awareness to their brands and I’d love to do the same for you.

Mind if I send over a few times for a quick call?

Thanks, Alex

It’s important to emphasize that this company is being extremely specific. Drill down into something that you know is relevant to the client. Don’t just tell them that you do app development-everyone does app development, so what?!

Here’s another example for a pay per click advertising campaign:

Subject line: Quick question

Hi Greg, Hope your day is going well so far-just came across Acme so thought I’d reach out.

Recently helped Globonet, a technology company, use email, LinkedIn advertising, and content marketing to advertise their product, which resulted in 500 + leads and $ 2M in revenue within a year. Would love to help you do something similar for Acme-mind if I send over a few times to chat?

Thanks, Alex

Another example for brand strategy:

Subject line: Call next week?

Hi Jackson,

Came across Acme recently and fell in love with < specific product >! Recently finished the website and marketing materials for Globonet, where they saw a 97% annual increase in mobile traffic. Would love to do the same and help take the Acme brand to the next level.

Mind if I send over some available times for a call next week?

Best Regards, Alex

It’s a really simple process, but it’s important to get each part of that process in place. So let’s move on to writing the perfect cold email.

The logical place to start is with the subject line. But why is this even important? Quite simply, your subject line is your first point of contact with a potential prospect. It’s the first thing that they see in the inbox, and they’re going to judge you based on this. They’re only going to see this and your name, so you need to make it good. This is the deciding factor as to whether your email will be opened or deleted.

Your subject line shouldn’t be more than five words, and ideally two words. It needs to prick the curiosity of the recipient so that they absolutely have to click it. This is one area in which it’s fine to be clickbait! You want them to think about what it could be, but not be able to know without opening the email.

But to make this as easy as possible for you, I’m going to give you our 10 top subject lines right now that have proven to be successful:

Quick Question
[Name], Quick Question
Quick Question, [Company Name]
< Relevant emoji >
Question?
Something for you, [Name]
Interview Invite
I’ve got a Story for You
[Name] Recommended I Get in Touch
Intro

“Quick Question” is without a doubt the most effective subject line. But it’s certainly worthwhile to test some of the other examples out, as you may experience different results in your particular field. I should mention that the emoji-based example was because we were pitching to game developers-you should use something relevant to another industry.

I’m sure that the prospect of writing personalized cold emails is not necessarily an attractive one. You probably want to skip this section. We all do. No one wants to put in the actual work of writing personalized cold emails; I barely want to do it! The only reason we use this approach is that it’s 10 times more effective than not personalizing. If we could get away without personalizing, we would definitely skip the whole process. And there are times where if you niche down enough you can write a first line that appeals to everyone in your niche, or create a first line that has one personalized data point that you can outsource: for instance for cosmetics you could write:

Hi Jack,

My girlfriend was just telling me about how much she loves {! Company name} especially the {! Product Name} and I figured it was worth reaching out directly.

If you can’t find a system like that, then a custom compliment is something that will separate you from the potentially thousands of other messages that important people receive. It’s going to identify you as the wheat that will be separated from the chaff. So it’s definitely worth investing a few minutes in order to set the wheels in motion for deals that could be worth tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. It just makes sense!

An example of a custom compliment would be similar to the million dollar email script that we talked about previously: “I’ve been following Fuzz for a while, love your work. Awesome job with Rockefeller Center.” That’s something very specific that shows you understand what the client has been doing. That’s one example.

Here are several more:

Hey Dennis, huge fan of what you’re doing at x.ai-we use it all the time internally.
Hey Dennis, came across your thoughts on Google Duplex, it’s interesting-I love your approach to company disclosure.
Hey Dennis, been following your career since Visual Revenue, and I’m hugely impressed with what you’ve built at x.ai
Hey Dennis, been following your story for a while and finally checked your LinkedIn, impressed that you have a patent.
Hey Dennis, love that quote on your LinkedIn about Bjorn-it’s amazing how you’ve incorporated that irreverence into your entire brand.
Hey Marcy, greetings from a fellow UC grad!
Hey Marcy, been following WPromote for a while now and impressed with your background.. amazing that you went from sales associate to director of marketing!
Hey Marcy, love what you’re doing at WPromote, especially the work you did with Pied Piper :-P
Hey Marcy, huge fan of Zenni, so when I saw that you ran their campaigns I had to reach out!
Hey Marcy, love the work you did with Weinerschnitzel.
Hey Hayley, love everything about Golden Hippo, and am impressed with your background in IT.
Hey Hayley, found you on LinkedIn and love what you’re doing-amazing that you point out how critical listening is, I believe the same thing.
Hey Hayley, came across Golden Hippo and love that quote from Alyssa on your website, it’s impressive that you treat the QA team so well.
Hey Hayley, saw you were hiring a business analyst, and wanted to reach out and say congrats on the growth!
Hey Hayley, been following the Golden Hippo Instagram for a while, and love how you treat the IT team.

A well-written first line will have just enough information to indicate that you’ve personalized it, but not so much that you appear to be a stalker! Keep that in mind-the shorter, the better. One sentence is enough.

The next part of the process is the case study. And a perfect example would be going back to the million-dollar email that we used at X27, which helped to generate $ 600,000 in annual recurring revenue in just 60 days and millions after that. Here is the case study included in that email: I specialize in finding new clients for web and app developers. Recently, we helped Dom & Tom-an NYC-based developer, bring on McDonald’s and close an extra $ 1 million in six months.

Here are some hypothetical examples:

Recently, we helped Marvel Studios get 250,000 Twitter followers in two weeks using targeted Twitter ads.

And another: Recently, we helped Palantir close $ 500,000 in new contracts in six months by using our brand guidelines and logo to increase their value.

And yet another: Recently, we helped LinkedIn save $ 7 million on DevOps hires in 60 days by using our AI-powered recommendations. So we need to write something like that for your company.

Here’s what to keep in mind: A case study is not just about flaunting numbers. Every word of the case study is engineered. And every word of the case study is important. It’s about demonstrating experience, instantly building authority, and curating the appropriate reaction from the recipient.

Interestingly, the common assertion that people need to know you and like you in order to purchase from you is actually bullshit! It’s completely false. People don’t need to like you; they simply need to trust you and know that you’re going to deliver. An example of this would be Microsoft, a largely reviled company, yet they sell Windows all over the world, a largely reviled product! In obscene quantities! No one likes Bill Gates, and that doesn’t make any difference whatsoever (sorry Bill!).

Before we go any further, remember that the goal of your cold email is to arrange a meeting. That’s why every email ends with a “yes” or “no” question. “Mind if I send over a few times for a quick call?”, for example. It must be easy to accept or decline, as the people that you’re prospecting are busy. They haven’t got time to muck around! The goal of what you’re doing is not to get them to click on your portfolio, or watch some sort of quirky, personalized video, or even to sign up to your email list. It’s just to get them on a meeting so that you can close on a five to six-figure deal. Every other use of cold email is a waste of this powerful tool.

Don’t ask for newsletter signups or some other such trivial nonsense! Ask for meetings that will lead directly to sales. Because your time is valuable, the recipient’s time is valuable, and you don’t want to waste it on things of no consequence. Equally, as we mentioned previously, you need to go in there with big box items. It’s pointless selling a product worth $ 200 via cold email. If you have any doubts about what you’re offering, add a zero to the price, and you can thank me later! The first example of a call to action that works is the ‘simple ask’. “Interested? Let me know and I can send over a few times to chat.” And the other we refer to as the ‘specific benefit’. This one is a little more advanced. “Can you take on more clients? Let me know. And I can send over a few times to chat.” The reason that the second one is more advanced is because of the first few words, which are customized to your exact offer, rather than copy pasting the same sentence as everyone else.

One thing I should also reiterate is that if you are attempting to sell a big product to a client via cold email, and they indicate some interest, it’s absolutely fine to continue emailing them. You should chase them down if they have expressed any intention of purchasing a $ 50,000 product, and if you fail to do so then you’re a terrible salesperson!

Please invest the effort required to master cold email. Because it is the most effective way to book meetings, particularly in the five to six-figure range for your business. And wouldn’t it be great to have a calendar full of those meetings arranged for next week?

CHAPTER 7. Hit Send

It’s natural to want to jump in at the deep end. But if you begin too forcefully with cold email campaigns, you could hit a couple of issues immediately. First, your campaign isn’t appropriately optimized. You might send 1,000 emails and find that your open rate is only 17%. This would naturally indicate that something is broken in the system. You might think: “fine, we’ll fix it”, but it’s not as simple as that. You’ve now burned leads, put yourself at risk of getting marked as spam, and (worst of all) sent a campaign that could have performed 8x better with a few tweaks. However, if you’re more patient then you can eventually reach the point where you’re sending 1,000 emails a day or more, obtaining a much higher open rate, booking way more meetings and closing a lot more deals as a result. If you start small, there’s no reason that you can’t improve your open rate to 80%, and get your meeting book rate to 6% or higher.

But if you want to get to that point, you have to optimize things correctly. The first thing I would recommend is to relisten the section on email warmup. This is not an optional extra, it’s essential. You must warm up your email inbox for at least two weeks before sending, otherwise you will be marked as spam, and you’ll have to start all over again.

Now, let’s move onto scaling emails. During the first week, you should send 10 cold emails per day. You can then increase that by 10 emails every day for the first month, until you’re averaging 100 customized emails per day. All the time that you’re doing this, you should be keeping track of the total number of emails that you’ve sent, including follow-ups. This will enable you to avoid hitting any maximum email limits imposed by Gmail or Outlook.

Another important principle is to ensure that every single email that you send is being directed towards an email address that could eventually result in a purchase. This isn’t a spray and pray approach! We’re following a targeted and customized cold email strategy. Research each prospect on your lead list before you send your email. Look at their website and check whether they’re a good fit for your service, and if it’s the right size of company to target. This is also a great time to write your custom first line. Do your research, stick to your sending limits, and you can begin to build momentum.

Don’t scale your campaign unless you’re hitting the benchmarks. If you’re not hitting your targets, your approach can improve, so get things right on a small scale before you begin to expand your operation. Otherwise you’re wasting leads (and money).

It’s also important to take time zones into consideration. Make sure that you know where the person that you’re sending an email is located, and also that you optimize your approach based on that location. And don’t just take countries into consideration; the United States is split up into numerous time zones, so bear this in mind as well. 10am in Philadelphia is not 10am in San Francisco! Different times of day also tend to work better for various job titles and positions. For example, CEOs tend to check their emails first thing in the morning and late at night, especially if they’re in hyper-growth startups. It’s also best to aim for Tuesday or Wednesday as your sending day, as just before the weekend, or first thing on Monday morning, doesn’t really work. People don’t care about emails ahead of the weekend! And they have too much to do on Monday morning. Another possibility is to send on Sunday afternoon, as we’ve found that a lot of people will be planning their week ahead of time, so this can be an excellent opportunity to catch busy people in particular.

Now it’s not just enough to send an excellent cold email. You also need to go back and forth with the clients in order to book a meeting, in a process referred to as ‘appointment setting’. So how do you do this? First, the most important principle to remember is that we’re doing this to arrange a meeting. We’re not selling via email, we want to get a phone call so that we can speak to the client

It’s important to always give specific times for meetings, because it’s easier for the client to book, and avoids a needless back and forth conversation. One thing I have found is that busy people appreciate it if you take the initiative, so don’t feel that you need to pussyfoot around. Another tip here is that although there are calendar booking tools available, you might find that many high-level executives are over 50, and have a hard time with modern technology. My experience is that offering time slots is better than providing calendar invites.

You can’t make everyone turn up, but you can definitely minimize the number of no shows. First, you need to send a clear invite, and ensure that all of the details involved are correct. Make sure that it’s crystal clear where the meeting is taking place and also that the person you’re meeting with knows exactly what they need to do in order to join. And you should follow up on this by sending an email before the meeting that reminds them of the time and place, and provide a video chat link. Then the next part of the process is to send an email five minutes before the meeting, reminding the recipient that they’re speaking with you. My email for this simply says the following: Mark, Talk to you in five minutes! Here’s the link: < > Thanks, Alex By doing this, you are ensuring that everyone you contact sees your invitation three separate times.

But that still might not be enough! They still might not show up! So if you’re sitting around for five minutes, you can send them another email informing them politely that you’re “on the line when [they’re] ready”. If that doesn’t work, you can call them directly. If the call isn’t answered, leave a voicemail: “Hey, it’s Alex Berman calling at the scheduled time. Will give you a call back in 5 minutes or give me a call at 972-212-3818. Thanks!” And then if nothing happens after a further five minutes, call back again and leave another voicemail: “Hey, It’s Alex calling. We were supposed to talk five minutes ago. I’ll send you an email to reschedule. Thanks.” If a client fails to meet on three separate occasions, then send a breakup email, similar to some of the emails that we’ve discussed earlier in the book. One final opportunity to make contact. Hey Mike, I guess now is not a good time to discuss building a new website for you. If you’re still interested, you can get in touch with me here, or via the number in my signature. Thanks,

Okay, I don’t want to go over benchmarks too much, as we’ve discussed them elsewhere in the book, but it’s important to reiterate what you should be aiming for. Your open rate should be 80%, your response rate should be at least 15%, and your meeting booking rate should be between 4% and 8%. The subject line and the quality of your leads will be the most important factors in achieving these benchmarks, so that’s the first place to look if you don’t hit your targets.

But how else can you improve your campaign in order to boost your figures? The first thing to note is that you can’t expect major success immediately. Anything worth doing takes time, and this principle definitely applies to cold email. As I just explained, you need to build slowly and scale over time. You’re definitely not going to get everything perfect immediately. If you think this is going to be an instant silver bullet, where you send 50 emails and your calendar is booked solid, you’re going to be tremendously disappointed. That’s just not realistic. You will only get out of this what you invest in it, and the process of cold email requires three Ts in addition to the the 3 C’s-time, training and tenacity.

That being said, one of the most important ways to improve cold email results is via lead quality. Ensuring that you only send emails to people who are likely to purchase from you. Prospects will only respond when they understand what you’re selling, so if your response rate is disappointing that means either that your email is failing to get your point across succinctly, recipients judge it to be spam, or, worse still, that your offer is completely irrelevant to your target market. So focus on making your one-sentence case study as clear as possible. Make your emails short and to the point, and ensure that they are absolutely crystal clear.

Response rate is the key benchmark. If you’re getting responses then you’re well on the way to success. However, if you have a strong response rate, but you’re not managing to book meetings, you need to review your follow-up strategy and appointment setting approach. Remember that you should be aiming for 6 + meetings per 100 emails sent. The easiest way to book more meetings is to reduce the amount of time between their response and your follow-up. So if someone indicates interest, get back to them within 5 minutes and watch your meeting book rate soar!

Another key issue is bounce rate. You must ensure that this is kept under 8% at all times. Make sure that you verify your emails before sending, and constantly review the quality of your email leads. If you have inconsistent issues with your bounce rate, it’s time to find a new lead database. There’s nothing worse than putting effort in and knowing that it’s been completely wasted, so you really need to keep on top of this issue.

For every 100 emails that you send, try 50% with one subject line and 50% with another. - Try different case studies and experiment with the wording. - Change the sending times for different days and hours. - Swap follow-up emails, try different wording and approaches.

For each of these strategies, remove anything that turns out to be ineffective, and even do more testing with different proportions and combinations. The choice is yours, but what you shouldn’t do is proceed to cold email without measuring the process and regularly attempting different approaches.

The biggest thing that you can do to compel prospects to respond is to build trust. You want your clients to feel that you’re an expert, trust that you are a responsible person to work with, and believe that their investment of time and money is secure and wise. So if you want to increase your cold email results astronomically, you need to increase the amount of trust that the client has in you proportionately. But how do you build trust?! The first way is to deliver a strong and extremely relevant case study that speaks directly to the recipients. The stronger that case study is, and the more relevant that they are to the specific industry that you’re targeting, and the more that they speak to the particular person that you’re contacting, the greater the amount of trust that you are going to build. The ideal scenario would be a case study involving work with a competitor, because then you have social proof of something in common with the target. That equals instant trust building, and that’s money in the bank. The second way is the no-brainer offer. If you really want a client to trust you, your no-brainer offer needs to be something that requires no thought whatsoever. So if you want to strike gold with a cold email, you need to make sure that your offer appeals to your target market. So that someone reads it and instantly wants to buy from you. And the third and final way that you can increase your cold email success is to establish a personal brand that illustrates that you’re an expert in your field. This can be done via social media accounts, or YouTube, podcasts, blogs, or an active website presence. It’s just anything that will demonstrate to people that you have authority in your field. Having links online that back up the assertions that you make in your cold email will exponentially increase your results. For a good example, check out what we’ve built with the Alex Berman and Robert Indries personal brands.

CHAPTER 9. Leading Your Team to Victory

The final thing that I want to discuss in this chapter is engaging your whole team in deciding their compensation. Most people know what they want. They just need the permission to ask for it. But what most bosses do is the following: Hey, guys, we have this new initiative, we’re going to be sending 1,000 cold emails each week. Let me know when that’s done. I want 1,000 emails out by the end of the week ASAP. That’s one way to approach it. Here’s another approach: Hey, guys, we’ve got this new initiative to send cold emails, because it’s going to really improve the organization, and we’re going to book a bunch of meetings. How many emails do you think is realistic to send in one week?