Nowadays, you can’t log in to your email or LinkedIn without being assaulted with spam messages.

But 99% of it sucks.

It’s just not relevant, nor personalized.

It’s clear whoever is sending these spam messages is sending them to thousands of other people, and is on a bit of a fishing expedition.

You either ignore, delete or block them, but not before you’ve rolled your eyes.

It’s not that cold outreach doesn’t work.

It’s that people aren’t doing it right.

In order for a cold email or message to get a response (and not a snarky one), it needs to tick the following boxes.

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1. Personalized

Just because you’ve used merge tags to personalize someone’s first name and company name does not make your message personalized.

True personalization requires research, and this is why most people suck at cold outreach.

a) Start with a Compliment

A truly personalized email starts with a compliment about something the target prospect said or did recently.

For example:

“Saw your webinar on Gen AI and loved your take on moving from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy”.

This shows that you’ve done your research and you’re not just another spam bot taking a machine gun approach to sell SEO or lead gen services.

b) Highlight a Pain or Need

Second, you should follow up the compliment with a hard-earned observation that uncovers a pain they have.

If I’m selling SEO services, then I might say something like:

“I noticed organic traffic to your website is just 200 users per month. Your competitors such as Company X generate over 20,000 users per month”.

This not only suggests that their SEO is poor, but also that they’re losing market share to a competitor who is doing it better.

Sending emails with this level of personalization might take an extra 10 minutes of research per email, but it is far more likely to get a response than a generic message.

2. Targeted

It’s not enough to personalize your emails.

They need to go to the right people. People with decision-making authority and budget (or at least people with enough influence in the organization to get budget).

For example, if I’m selling SEO services, then I’m likely targeting a CMO or a Head of Marketing, or if it’s an early-stage company, a Founder.

In addition, I should be targeting organizations in industries where SEO matters — probably not mining.

There’s no point sending such a message to the Head of HR at BHP selling SEO services, for example.

3. Timely

Finally, while you might hit on a pain, it might not be the right time. Companies have limited resources and budgets that mean timing matters.

For example, if I know a company has raised capital recently, then the’re far more likely to start allocating budget to things like marketing and growth.

If I know that a CMO has been in the press recently talking about refreshing their marketing strategy, it might be a good time to reach out.

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My $300,000 Cold Email

Back in 2017 when I was running Collective Campus, a corporate innovation consultancy and startup accelerator, I was using theses methods to grow our business.

I would have a team member use tools like Google Alerts to track media mentions of keywords like “digital transformation” and “corporate innovation”, among others.

They’d then compile a list of signals such as ‘CEO from Company X mentioned in the Publication Y talking about company’s growing investment in Digital Transformation’.

And finally, we’d reach out to these executives with cold messages, taking into account these timely signals.

Here it is.

In retrospect, the email could have been much better.

It could have been further personalized to mention what was said in the article, and how what we do can help but it worked anyway.

The response came fast — literally 11 minutes later.

The sale did, too — less than 2 months later, which is really short when selling six-figure contracts to large corporations.

This is because we had all of the ingredients necessary.

Our target had budget available, authority to decide, a need we were filling, and the timing was right. Or as sales folks say, there was BANT.

And a short month later, we had announced the program in Australia’s pre-eminent business publication, the Australian Financial Review.

Who said corporate sales cycles were long?!

Cold Message Template

If you’re looking to give this a go yourself, give the following format a go.

Hi X

Compliment.

Highlight pain or need.

How you can help (“we’re a content agency that helps companies like yours do X”)

One relevant case study (“we’ve helped companies in your industry such as X, Y, and Z grow their online footprint”)

Call to action (“book a call or let me know when you’re free”).

Or if you’d rather have someone else do this for you, send me an email.

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