What's your opinion on cold emailing for lead gen in 2022?

Roy Cohen

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Could it work? Or are you going to get lost in the sea of people spamming everyone?
 
It works. It's never going to NOT WORK.

Thing with cold emails is that, it's easy to do and there are tons of people doing it. It's also relatively cheap, but is time consuming.

My inbox is full of pitches from all kinds of businesses. The ones that stand out are FEW.

The ones that make it work will never tell you about it and how they do it. Just like everything else. Fortunately, we got BUSO and people like @Ryuzaki sharing their knowledge. If this forum didn't exist, I would be throwing shit at a fan and seeing what sticks for SEO.

Thinking about it now. I might just open a cold email journey thread and see where that goes on this forum.

I have been doing cold emails for the past 3 months ONLY and so far I have gotten responses back but haven't closed any deals yet. This doesn't mean it doesn't work. It just means I have to fine tune things.

Clearly, I am not a cold email guru but here are my 2 cents on it:

- Do you know who your target audience is? How well do you know your target audience? If you say, well.. I am looking for business owners. Thats not enough. You need to be SUPER SPECIFIC. You need to drill down further. Company size, revenue, niche, country, etc.. The more specific you get the better results you will get. From there you need to test, test and test.

- Why should the person you are emailing respond to you? Are you providing value? Usually, cold emailers will send out a general message and assume that the person will be impressed by it and respond. Put yourself in your target audience shoes! They probably get 1000's of emails. Why should they respond to YOU?

Are you an expert on the subject matter? - so what. Are you providing a cheap service? - so what.

Your email should be addressing a problem they have and offering a solution. You being an expert will just add to that, but you need to present the problem and provide a solution.

This bring me to my next point. Presentation.

You need to present the problem clearly and provide the solution in a subtle way. For example. If you are running an SEO agency. You can't just be like. "Hey, your rankings are dropping! I can get them back up for you".

A better approach would be. "Hey! A recent Google update has clearly put a dent in your bottom line." (maybe include a screenshot from a serp tracker showing the drop). "Based on our calculation - it looks like the drop in rankings is costing you $$$$$" - "Thankfully, we were able to recover with some simple updates, etc...."

Anyway, I think you get the point.

All the above being said and as I said before. I have YET to close a deal and I AM NOT RUNNING AN SEO AGENCY lol. My business is competitive but def not as competitive as an SEO agency would be, so.. take what I say with a grain of salt.

I am sure there are BUSO members that have more extensive experience than me with cold emails and hopefully they will share some insights :-)
 
I used to do a bit lot of cold emailing when I was doing outbound sales and running a job board website in the same industry. As @wikibum said, it works when you provide some value (even if you are emailing 200 contacts at a time).

Because job postings are incredibly inexpensive in the grand scheme of business expenses, I was sending email mostly to build awareness of the job board. The list was all HR-type roles, office managers, admin, etc.

"Hey contact,
Just wanted to throw on your radar a job board in [industry]. The site can help you reach a wider audience of candidates for your open roles. Blah blah blah."

Then they'd go to the website. And some would post jobs. Then email automation kicked in to remind them to continue posting jobs every month.

Made a fantastic ROI that way and had some of the largest companies in the industry posting multiple jobs a month, quickly. The only downside at the time was I didn't have the resources (read: money. Too much debt SMH) to go hard with building contact lists.

The people that are against cold email are people that don't like receiving cold email. I don't mind cold email and rarely respond to cold email. But that's because it's all business loans and cleaning companies.

Thankfully, as we should all know, what we personally don't like shouldn't dictate how we operate our business.
 
Boy said:
The people that are against cold email are people that don't like receiving cold email. I don't mind cold email and rarely respond to cold email. But that's because it's all business loans and cleaning companies.
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I struggled with this concept for a looooong time. I personally HATE cold emails and ignore 99.9% of them, but I saw first hand that some of my competitors were doing it and they were onboarding some big clients, so I decided to put my own emotions aside and go for it.
 
It took me a long time to realize, too, that what I like or dislike has nothing to do with what the vast majority of people want.

I don't mean this for any of us to be arrogant or superior or whatever, but since we're all entrepreneurs and willing to go out on our own and make it work, it's very likely that we're well above average in intellect. And it's a big trap to project our preferences, desires, and disgusts on everyone else, and especially what we're willing to tolerate.

A big one I see all the time is "yeah, I only have 2 or 3 ads per page because I don't want to annoy people." Or "I don't use ads because I use an ad blocker so I assume everyone else does". Or "Am I being too aggressive in my affiliate link placements?" Or, as you're saying "who the hell would give money to some random cold emailer?" and so forth. We do the same thing with Google too, projecting all over them.

All we should ever do is test and then follow the data.
 
Ryuzaki said:
It took me a long time to realize, too, that what I like or dislike has nothing to do with what the vast majority of people want.

I don't mean this for any of us to be arrogant or superior or whatever, but since we're all entrepreneurs and willing to go out on our own and make it work, it's very likely that we're well above average in intellect. And it's a big trap to project our preferences, desires, and disgusts on everyone else, and especially what we're willing to tolerate.

A big one I see all the time is "yeah, I only have 2 or 3 ads per page because I don't want to annoy people." Or "I don't use ads because I use an ad blocker so I assume everyone else does". Or "Am I being too aggressive in my affiliate link placements?" Or, as you're saying "who the hell would give money to some random cold emailer?" and so forth. We do the same thing with Google too, projecting all over them.

All we should ever do is test and then follow the data.
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This.

I have bought two sites now from owners who had 1 or two ads on the page with ad categories like gambling and pharma turned off.

Such easy wins. I now have 8+ ads and all categories enabled on all pages instantly tripled display ad revenue.

They didn’t do it because they thought it rude to readers lol.
 
I feel like I'm working for pennies right now honestly and meanwhile all my clients are crushing it. Thanks guys, going to give this a go. I'm going to have to learn along the way.

The reality is that 1-2 good clients for me could be lifechanging. And I'm tired of feeling like I'm only scraping by. I want to thrive, not get by. You know?

My biggest problem is not knowing HOW to get better clients. All of my peers create content on Fb/Twitter/LinkedIn and crush it, so I'm going to at least tweet once a day for value and see where that can get me.

I'm going to keep trying and keep my head up. It's been really hard especially after one of my content sites got obliterated and kind of forced me to continue to do client work. I suppose all is for the best.

I'm super stubborn, and I realized HOW stubborn yesterday when I was asking for help and they reminded me I had the SAME problem a year ago and I did nothing to fix it. Instead I just put my head down and accepted my fate.

No more!! I'm going to crush it this year. I'm aiming for at LEAST 10k/mo and I know that I can do much more, as all my clients are doing super well and I just have to believe in myself.
 
Personalization seems to be the key. I'd also imagine that doing some multi-channel marketing prior to sending an email would be a way to increase open rates, response rates, etc. For example, engage with the individuals you've prospected on Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. for a while, then send them an email OR a DM. Heck, you could even ask for their email address in your DM message. This way, they'd be expecting a message from you in their inbox.

Shooting out 1,000 emails that are non-personalized and trying to make a sale immediately won't be effective. The whole point is to get prospects on a call- the emails are a way to get on their radar (you probably know this).
 
It works extremely well when done right.

I am in a European country where not a lot of people are using this and it literally works wonders for us over here.
 
Ryuzaki said:
It took me a long time to realize, too, that what I like or dislike has nothing to do with what the vast majority of people want.

I don't mean this for any of us to be arrogant or superior or whatever, but since we're all entrepreneurs and willing to go out on our own and make it work, it's very likely that we're well above average in intellect. And it's a big trap to project our preferences, desires, and disgusts on everyone else, and especially what we're willing to tolerate.

A big one I see all the time is "yeah, I only have 2 or 3 ads per page because I don't want to annoy people." Or "I don't use ads because I use an ad blocker so I assume everyone else does". Or "Am I being too aggressive in my affiliate link placements?" Or, as you're saying "who the hell would give money to some random cold emailer?" and so forth. We do the same thing with Google too, projecting all over them.

All we should ever do is test and then follow the data.
Click to expand...
Great reply. I've often been stuck in the mindset of 'that would never work" before testing something out when in fact it actually does work and it's been proven.
 
Cold email works. But it's success rate is less than 1%. There are better ways to attract clients.
 
It works, no doubt. As mentioned on here, some sound advice, eg client profiling, content supplied are all factors in determining the effectiveness of the campaign. The potential ROI is good because the cost to implement can be low and it is relatively simple to set up and manage, eg Mailchimp etc. One of the key factors when i have run campaigns was to ensure that the list is highly targeted and been checked/run through verification to ensure maximum delivery. Also as with any form of marketing, analyse your results, open rates, CTR, split test different content, strap lines etc to see what works best.
 
It works, it's direct and conversational marketing so if you know how to write and generate connection you will get leads.

It is important to have automation tools to be able to perform the mail sequences because I have done it manually and you lose control.

I was recommended Mautic to create my own mail server to manage my campaigns, however I have not been able to install it and set it up but it is the best way to go in the long run.

Process: mautic.org
Mautic on AWS EC2 + AWS SES + AWS SNS?

This tool is easy to set up but they are expensive.
replyify dot com

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