Aditya Sheth

Cold email landed me my first startup gig. And my first full time gig in a new country.

Cold email helped me land my dream clients.

Cold email helped me connect with Jeff Bezos, Biz Stone, Ryan Holiday, Justin Kan, Daniel Gross, etc.

Whether you’re looking to land more clients, find mentors, or scale your lifecycle efforts, this guide is for you:

My Cold Email Playbook 💌

• Send targeted cold emails, book meetings, and win based on personalisation. While the big guy’s spam, win by hitting potential customers with highly targeted, customised cold emails.
• Rule of thumb: Don’t use cold email if product / service <$2000, time spent won’t be worth it. Use for >$2000 or Mil $ items.
• Sell something in extremely high demand. Test cold emails before scaling. And target effectively.
• If you can lock in your offer and get hyper-specific, you’ll find millions of dollars in deals and massively outperform any business that attempts to do everything for everybody. You cannot be all things to all people. Target clients the right way and hone in on your specific niche to magnify success.
• Measure results. If open rate sucks, send 20 more emails with a new subject line. If reply rate sucks, keep subject line, rewrite body, and iterate over and over until you hit benchmark stats. If you do this effectively, expect 4-8 meetings / 100 emails, and at the same time ramp up the number of emails you send.

Making Cold Email Work

• Have a specific offer you can deliver. That’s enticing to a specific market.
• How do you create an offer that stands out? It comes down to the case study. Example: 

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 specialise 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

• The best cold email is fully custom, the worst is a generic. Fully custom cold emails take hours. Write one custom opener and your email is more likely to receive a reply.
• Two ways to end cold emails:
  • Basic: Interested? Let me know and I can send over a few times to chat. 
  • Advanced: Are you interested in {{benefit you provide}} for {{company name}}? Let me know and I can send over a few times to chat. Example: Can you take on more clients at Fuzz? Let me know and I can send over a few times to chat.
• Imagine if your best closer only closed deals. How many more deals would get done? Or the best lead generator only found leads. Once your team is specialised and doubles down on tasks that they’re best at, your company will skyrocket.
• Your lead generator should be able to locate 200 leads/day. A lead: First Name, Last Name, Title, Company, Website and Email.
• For your custom compliment writer: spend 3-5 minutes for each first line.
• The cold email sender should achieve a meeting book rate between 4-8%. 
• Your sales closer should be getting between 10-25% close rate from cold leads and 80% for warm MQLs.
• A strong ICP: title of the person, company size, and revenue. Once this has been broken down, target Golden Geese companies: ones that are worth $5-150m/year. They are big enough to be able to afford your product or service, but small enough that they won’t drag you through an excruciating enterprise process!
• If emails are being made up, your email verification tool should find them. If you send without verifying, you might see a bounce rate of 30-40% which will instantly send your account to spam, killing your campaigns and your domain. Aim for a bounce rate <8%.
• Work within the constraints of the company you’re targeting. If you have to talk to two assistants, do that too. If the deal size is >$500k, it’s worth pursuing.
• Just because a prospect asks a question doesn’t mean you need to answer it in the email. The goal is to book calls, so ask for calls.
• When you’re on a proposal call with a client, I recommend the following structure.
  • First: begin with a bit of banter, a little small talk, chat about sports or where they live, possibly family, for a little while. No politics, no religion!
  • Second: identify a big problem they experience, and frame the product as the solution. It’s valuable to ask them as many questions about the problem:
    • 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’s stopping them from solving something they’ve identified as a big problem?
• You want your operation to be honest and authentic, and your salespeople to be pitching value props you can deliver. To achieve this: compensate salespeople on a monthly basis, as long as the client sticks around. You don’t want to be handing out a year’s worth of commission to a salesperson, because what will happen is that they will begin lying and promising things that they can’t deliver.
• Put in place a clawback: if a client leaves then a salesperson loses the commission. That means that your ops team and salespeople are going to be on the same page, with sales really wanting the client to succeed with the product or service.

The Pre-Work

• Instead of saying you do copywriting, tell them specifically who you work with, tell them you have achieved outstanding results, and then offer to do the same for them.
• Squeeze your case studies into one-sentence pitches to get ready for sending cold emails. Make them hyper-specific. 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 cite this in your email.
• Your case study must appeal to companies similar to the ones that you sold to previously. 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.
• Golden Geese: Any company generating between $5-150 million in revenue. These companies have the ability to pay, and aren’t ground down by layers of management and decision-making associated with massive enterprises.
• A good offer is specific and is tied to a monetary goal. Somebody hearing your offer for the first time will immediately know  it’s going to make them more money, or help them look good in their job.
• Example: I will review all of your Facebook ad campaigns, if we don’t find at >2 optimisations to make you more money then you don’t have to work with us any longer. But if we find them, let’s scale your ads.
  • Newsletter copywriting: Write 3 newsletters for 50% commission, no sales, no payment. 
  • 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. 
  • App Dev: Wireframes only, if you don’t like where this is headed, you get your money back. 
  • Backend: A two-hour tech review, we can end the contract after that if you don’t see the value. 
  • SEO: In-depth review (not the sort that other people give for free) if you don’t like it, we’ll refund.
• Buy domain names similar to your domain. Because if you send out 3,000 cold emails on a whim, and end up being marked spam, your domain is done. Think: internal company emails hitting spam, invoices to not getting through, etc. Protect your main domain name like the golden banner it is.
• Images lead to higher manual spam complaints, so fewer images work best. Adding an avatar or image of yourself can also harm cold email.
• By adding images and links we encourage people to visit our website, when we want them to book a meeting instead.
• DMARC does for email what HTTPS does for browsers. Setup DMARC for your domain.

Lead Generation

• Cold email is not spam, don’t make it into spam. Have watertight lead gen criteria so you’re being helpful, not a nuisance. Lead generation is not about firing out as many emails as possible, it’s about identifying people who need your services and who can afford to pay the price you want.
• 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.
• It’s important to really drill down into the specifics of what you’re trying to achieve. eCommerce is not adequate. Instead, it should be apparel. Don’t just target startups, look for B2B SaaS. 
• The great thing about contacting people in niche industries is that no one else can identify them! So they don’t get bothered much! In many ways, targeting niche and very specific industries is better, as they 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.
• Once you’ve settled on the industry, the second point to address is job title. Always begin with the CEO, best to go straight for the top immediately.
• If there’s no response from CEO, make your way down the ladder of step-by-step, every 2 weeks. Target CMO, Director of Marketing, etc. Don’t email two people from the same company simultaneously. Only deal with one contact at a time, or you run the risk of spamming them. 

The Perfect Cold Email

• A great cold email consists of five parts:
  • Subject line
  • Compliment 
  • Case study
  • Call to action
  • Email Signature
• After you grab your potential client’s attention, next: convey authority. This can be achieved by delivering great value upfront, cutting through all of the noise and doubts that will no doubt be reverberating around their minds. Your job with cold email is to eliminate these doubts and make the client believe that they simply have to get in contact with you.
• Subject line shouldn’t be >5 words, 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.
• Top 10 top subject lines 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
• A case study isn’t 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.
• 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’. “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 customised to your exact offer, rather than copy-pasting the same sentence as everyone else.
• Usually after initial positive feedback, follow up until you get a “yes” or “no”, even if it takes months or years.

Hit Send

• When it comes to scaling up, by the time you’re in a position to send 1,000 emails it might not be something that you even wish to do. If you book 6 demos for every 100 emails, 1,000 emails a day lead to 60 meetings per day, which will require a ton of new hires. Get to a point where your campaigns are so effective and predictable that you can choose the number you send out in order to get the exact result you need. So you know that you can be successful with a relatively small number of emails. 
• Warm up your email inbox for at least two weeks before sending, otherwise you will be marked as spam. Warm up selectfew.io inboxes.
• First week: send 10 emails per day. Increase by 10 emails / day for first month, until you average 100 custom emails / day. Keep track of the total sent emails + follow-ups. This’ll help you avoid hitting any maximum email limits by Gmail or Outlook.
• Gmail has a maximum number of emails that you can send on a daily basis. You can only send out 2,000 emails /  day on a trial account.  If you’re sending 1,000 emails / day, and then follow up on some of them, it’s easy to get close to that 2,000 figure quickly. Before you get anywhere near this number, make sure that your campaigns are functioning correctly.
• Don’t scale your campaign unless you’re hitting benchmarks. If you’re not hitting your targets, get things right on a small scale before you begin to expand your operation. Otherwise you’re wasting leads (and money).
• Different times of day also tend to work better for various job titles and positions. CEOs tend to check their emails first thing in the morning and late at night, especially if in hyper-growth startups. It’s also best to aim for Tuesday / Wednesday as your sending day. Just before the weekend or first thing on Monday morning, doesn’t work. People don’t care about emails ahead of the weekend! And they have too much to do on Monday morning. Another option is Sunday afternoon, a lot of people plan their week ahead of time, so this can be an excellent opportunity to catch busy people.
• Cold email benchmarks:
  • Open rate: 80%
  • Meetings: 4-8%
  • Bounce rate: <8%
• Subject line and lead quality will be the most important factors in hitting these benchmarks, that’s the first place to look if you don’t hit your targets.
• Ensure 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 low that means either your email is failing to get your point across, recipients mark it spam, or your offer is completely irrelevant.
• Focus on making your one-sentence case study as clear as possible. Make emails short and to the point, and ensure that they are 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.
• Keep trying different things to see how they affect your results:
  • For every 100 emails, 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 trying new approaches.
• The stronger that case study and the more relevant that to the specific industry you’re targeting, and the more that they speak to the particular person you’re contacting, the greater the amount of trust you’ll 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, 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. If you want to strike gold with a cold email, make sure your offer appeals to your target market. So that someone reads it and instantly wants to buy from you.

Email Deliverabilty 📨

• Ensure technical setup:
  • Authentication:
    • SPF
    • DKIM
    • DMARC
    • BIMI
  • Subdomains
• Steadily ramp up email volume + activity
• Routinely monitor email engagement rates overall + top 5 domains
• Continue to optimize email processes: collection, targeting, and content

For High-Volume Senders

(If you’re sending >1 million emails / month)

• Use seperate subdomains for transactional/commercial emails
• Add more subdomains for additional business lines
• Outsource monitoring + trend tracking to 3rd party. Like: Everest
• Constantly tweak targeting + suppression strategies.

Cold Email Checklist ✅

• Setup:
  • CTD
  • DMARC
  • SPF
  • DKIM
  • TLS
• No spam-trigger words
• Send delay between email (180s)
• Email #1: Optimize for replies
• Plain text emails only
• No links / shortners
• Disable link tracking 
• Stick to 3 follow ups (max) 
• No attachments (till reply)
• Warm up new email inboxes for ~2 weeks.  
• Don’t buy email lists. 
• Send 50-200 emails / day. Start with 10-20. Add 20 / day.
  • If you do it right, expect a ~20% reply rate.
  • You can’t handle >100 replies / day anyway. Don’t go for quantity. 
  • Nail down low volume first. 
• Send max 500 emails / day per account. 
• Rule of thumb: send first follow-up >3d. Increase wait time / follow up:
  • Day 1: First email 
  • Day 4: Follow-up #1 
  • Day 11: Follow-up #2 
• Don’t send >3 follow ups. Either they’re in / out.
• Always send to business emails, not personal.
• Don’t add an unsubscribe link to OB sequences.
• Update templates 1x / 2 week to avoid spam traps.
• Don’t email info@, admin@, etc. For more opens, email people. 
• Keep bounce rate low. Verify emails with Zerobounce:
  • Access the “Bulk Email Upload” page.
  • Upload list in .CSV, .XLS, XLSX or .TXT format. 
  • Give Zerobounce 45-60min per 100,000 emails. 
  • Download cleaned list by clicking the green file. 
• Check delivery with Mail Tester. Fix any issues.
• Avoid using free email accounts (easy to use, hard to unblock).
• DRY! Add previous email for context, but offer new CTA.

Resources:

• Cold Email Playbook by Alex Berman
• Demand Curve’s Own the Inbox Sprint