When client acquisition is mentioned, cold emailing always comes up as one of the most obvious methods. It works, but it can be very frustrating, too. You never know how it will work with your target audience, but there are things you can do to increase your chances.
How should your email look like
The most basic condition for cold emailing to work is that your target audience is companies, not individuals. Companies are easy to reach and used to other companies and freelancers offering them their services. On the other hand, individuals are very suspicious of cold emails, and there's no easy (or ethical) way of obtaining their contact information either.
Companies and their executives get tens, sometimes even hundreds, of cold emails daily. Cold email isn't very difficult to spot, so you have literally anywhere from 0.5 to 3 seconds to make an impression that would encourage them to read it.
You can kill any chances just with the subject line - make it short but interesting enough to make the recipient want to read the email content. The email should also be as short as possible and cut directly to the core. This is hard because freelancers often want to communicate everything they can do, and it ends up having the form and length of an essay. Your choice isn't between the recipient reading your long email or reading the short email - the choice is between him immediately deleting your long email or reading the short one.
Keep it professional but conversational - a little joke can help if your profession permits it. You're trying to establish a relationship, and sending something a bit unusual can help you stand out.
Propose something specific and address all basic questions the recipient will probably have after reading your email. Your email will likely go to the bin if it lacks these answers. Propose an easy next step if you can - "If you're interested, just let me know, and I'll put together a short list of things I'd like to help you improve. If you like it, we can move forward." This tells a recipient that all he has to do is email you back, and you'll get him something for free, which he can use to evaluate whether he wants to work with you.
To make your email not look like you sent it to 300 recipients, we suggest including a custom paragraph in your email template. Most of the email content will be the same for everyone, but there will be 2-3 sentences about the company - the more interesting you can make it, the better. The ideal scenario would be that most of your email would be about what specifically you can do for a given company - this will take a lot of time, though, so you have to find a sweet spot that works for you. An approach like this will show the recipient that he didn't get the same email hundreds of others got, that you actually checked out the company, and maybe even that it was written just for him.
💡 Keep in mind
Paragraph spacing is your friend - use it.
Many email clients have problems displaying pictures from your email signatures. They will likely end up as attachments.
Where to send it?
The next question is what kind of email addresses to use when emailing companies. In small businesses, owners usually have access to the email address you'll find at the find - typically, it's contact@company.com or info@company.com. Personal email addresses may be difficult to find, so general addresses are a safe bet in this case. If you know the owner's or CEO's name, definitely include it in the greeting.
With bigger companies, emailing contact@ or info@ addresses will probably get it to a secretary or someone who is instructed to delete all emails like yours. A much better option would be to email specific people from the company - naturally, you want the decision-makers. To do that, you need two things - their names and their emails.
The names can be easily obtained through LinkedIn. Find the company you want and browse the employee list until you find the ones with the positions you are looking for. If you do this on a higher scale, LinkedIn will restrict your browsing capabilities for the rest of the month if you don't upgrade to their paid plan. But there's a trick to go around this - if you're looking for a marketing director of Apple, just Google "marketing director apple linkedin". Googling isn't limited, and it gets you what you need - the names of people holding specific positions at specific companies.
What about the email addresses? Google can help you with this one, too: search for "Apple email format". It will show you results from pages that specialize in collecting people's professional contact information, and even without opening any of them, you will see which email format(s) a given company uses. Sometimes, it's the same for all employees (for example, first name and initial of the second name - johnd@company.com). Some big companies have multiple email formats - fortunately, one is usually dominant and used by most employees, so it's going to be a bit of a betting game but with solid odds. When your first email bounces, you can try the other email format.
Email formats of mid-size companies or companies outside the biggest countries aren't usually published anywhere, but you can use another trick to find them. If the company's website address is company.com, use Google to search for "@company.com". Then hit Ctrl/Cmd + F and write @company in the window that pops up in your browser. Then just keep hitting Ctrl/Cmd + G. This will help you find any email addresses of a given company published anywhere online. If you, for example, find the email address doe_j@company.com, you'll know that most employees probably have this email format.
This targeted approach will get your emails in front of the people you want but expect 20-40% of your emails to bounce. When you factor these in, the process can become pretty time-consuming.
It’s a numbers game
At the end of the day, it's a numbers game. Give it 10-20 hours and see where it goes.
We also suggest a more systematic approach, like A/B testing, to see which emails work best. Create 2-3 versions and send each to the same number of recipients - make sure the sample size is big enough to give you a true idea about the effectiveness of separate emails. You can also pick multiple target audiences and see whether some are more receptive than others.
Even if the cold emailing won't be successful, it may show you which target audience to focus on. You will likely start noticing patterns - the companies and people that will at least reply or show a bit of interest will probably have something in common - try to figure out what it is.
Following up
If you don't receive a reply in a few days, definitely try to follow up. This is a great place to think of a joke or super creative excuse to get in touch. Not many people follow up, and if you can make the recipient smile, maybe he'll give you a shot.
If you don't get a reply after the follow-up, you can still wait 6 to 12 months and try again. This will show the person you're persistent, and by that time, you won't be a complete stranger either.
Remember
👉 Your recipients get tons of cold emails every day.
👉 Keep your subject lines and email content as information-dense as possible.
👉 Break down email content into paragraphs.
👉 Use Google, not LinkedIn directly, to find employee names.
👉 Witty follow-ups are your second chance to impress.
👉 Doing A/B tests will help you to identify the best email subjects, content, and target audiences.
Homework
1️⃣ Create an Excel/Google Sheet and write down all target audiences (niches and industries) you want to target.
2️⃣ Google all relevant companies from identified groups.
3️⃣ Find an email for every company. For bigger companies, use the approach described in the lesson to find decision-makers' names.
4️⃣ Use the approach described in the lesson to identify an email format for every company where you will target specific people.
5️⃣ Sort all these contacts into multiple groups and send the first 20 contacts from each group an email with different subject lines and/or content. It's your choice how much you want to experiment. Just make sure you still have some contacts left to send your best subject line-content combo when you're done experimenting.
👏 Inspiring progress!
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