Presented live on Tuesday, Sept 26, 2017
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You’ve got a list of dream clients – but have you reached out to them? A cold email could do just the trick. The question is this: do you know how to write cold emails that get your prospects to open and reply? In this Tutorial Tuesday, special guest Laura Lopuch walks you through how to write cold emails that get results for your service business.
Laura is writing in Airstory, the writing software for research-based projects.
I used cold emails to 14x my freelance copywriting business. Here’s how. (Includes templates.)
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction [00:00]
Joanna Wiebe: Hello everybody. Joanna here from Copy Hackers. I am joined by Laura. Laura, hello. Hey, Laura.
Laura Lupoch: Hi everyone.
Joanna Wiebe: [crosstalk 00:00:10] my side here. She might be on the other side [inaudible 00:00:13]. We’ve got Sarah here as well. Thanks for joining us for this tutorial Tuesday. We have people filing in. That is fantastic. We’re recording this session as usual, so you should find it online shortly afterward. We’ll send out an update as well, an email to say, hey, here’s how to find it. Cool. Today we are talking about cold emails, and cold emails really for copywriters in particular, honestly. Although anybody in a service business can use what Laura’s going to teach us today. If you haven’t already, you should check out the blog post that we published, that Laura wrote on Copy Hackers this morning. It’s brand new out there. I haven’t even sent out the email about it yet. What? It’s so new. Check that out.
Sarah has just chatted it over to everybody, so that’s cool. Okay. Little bit of housekeeping before we get into that. If you have a question for Laura that you want her to answer, please put it in Q&A. If you have something you just want to chat over or a reaction, or you’re like Ed who’s saying hi, and Bruno, and [Torel 00:01:27] and more people that I haven’t opened up yet, if you just want to say hi, you can do that in chat, or if you have a quick reaction, like, “Oh, man. Something’s wrong with the audio,” then you can put that in chat. If there are any issues with audio or connectivity or anything, please just wait a moment. It’s usually just Wi-Fi, and it should catch up shortly. We have no reason to believe anything will not work out well here today.
Laura was in my mastermind at the beginning of this year. That’s where we first connected. In that mastermind we talked briefly, not Laura, Laura didn’t get involved in the conversation that I remember, but there was some talk about cold emails, and cold emails to grow your business. I confess I am a skeptic in the world of cold emails to grow your business. Laura came along and said, well, hold up. Here’s what I’ve done, I’ve used cold emails. These are the things that came of me using cold emails. What if I just told people about that and helped people understand how you can actually really grow your business with cold emails? I was like, “Cool. Write that post.” She wrote the post and we were like, “Oh my gosh. We have to also do tutorial Tuesday, because this is wicked.” She has templates and everything. Laura, without further ado, I’ll let you take over from there. Cool.
How to Write Cold Emails to Grow Your Service Based Business [2:53]
Laura Lupoch: Sounds good. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining. As Jo said, my name is Laura and I am super excited to be here today, especially talking about cold emails because I hear a lot that cold emails are super intimidating, and I want to talk to you today about how they don’t have to be intimidating and to show you the cold email template that grew my business 1,400%, that’s 14 times in roughly four months. It’s also brought me a nearly $20,000 client, yeah, from a cold email. As you can see, cold emails aren’t a numbers game like you’ve been led to believe. You don’t have to send thousands and thousands of cold emails to score a super defeating open rate of 2%, which is the often touted open rate of cold emails, and that sucks.
That’s a lie just spread by marketers who are horrible at cold emailing, and they want you to feel horrible at cold emailing also. You want the truth? Cold emails actually work really, really well in growing your service-based business. How do I know? My cold emails had a 56% open rate. Little better than 2%, huh? I had a positive reply rate of 9%. If you want more details, check out the post that went live today on Copy Hackers. We’ll chat out the link again, and the post goes into way more detail than I’ll have time to cover in today’s tutorial, like why you should send follow-up emails, what to say in your follow-up email, and lots of examples. Today, I’m sharing the good stuff with you. I’m sharing a cold email template that is perfect for service-based businesses.
We’ll walk through it together, don’t worry, and I’ll show you how to write an effective cold email that doesn’t make you feel like a sleazeball, or make you want to go take a shower right away. In fact, it actually gets you results. Then I’ll share the template with you and answer any questions, so, let’s get started. There are three steps to an effective cold email. Number one, research is vital. Number two, be relevant to your reader, and number three, test your cold emails. Let’s look at a real life cold email that I sent out, and it actually got me a reply back the very same day. I’m going to share my screen. One sec. All right. I’m going to assume that everybody can see it unless I hear otherwise.
Joanna Wiebe: Looks good.
Laura Lupoch: Cool. You can see here’s the subject line: TechCrunch story/experienced customer story writer available. This part right here is the relevance. Write to the reader. They had gotten recently featured in a TechCrunch news story about their recent launch. Starting off right off the bat talking about being relevant and doing your research to your reader. Let’s see. Hi, Roger. Hope your week is going well. I read about … Let’s fill in the second line. What I’m doing here is I’m telling him how I heard about him, because otherwise it’s a little creepy to get an email from a total stranger that you’ve never heard about referencing your company. Give him a little bit of an introduction. Let him get warmed up to you just a little bit.
A great way to do that is with a compliment. Flattery definitely works, so include this specific compliment in your opening line for max effect, and then go a little further if it feels okay with you. For example … Everybody likes to hear that they’re doing cool work.
Joanna Wiebe: [inaudible 00:06:59].
Laura Lupoch: You want to warm up this cold email to make your reader feel like you’re a colleague of a colleague instead of the honest truth, which is you’re a stranger emailing out of the total blue.
How to Research Your Potential Client [7:10]
Moving on to the second line: “I was checking out Gigster’s website and noticed you don’t have any customer success stories.” Right here you can provide a lot of value for your cold email recipient, which in turn builds trust and shows you to be an expert and a professional. This right here, we’re talking this line comes right from your research. Want to do a lot of research on this company that you’re emailing so that it’s super relevant to your reader’s job descriptions and responsibilities.
Joanna Wiebe: Laura.
Laura Lupoch: Yes.
Joanna Wiebe: [inaudible 00:07:47] ask a question?
Laura Lupoch: Yeah.
Joanna Wiebe: How long do you usually take with the research that you do? Because I know that that’s a big point of resistance for a lot of people in cold emailing.
Laura Lupoch: That’s a great question. In the beginning with the first couple of emails when you’re still finding out a good cold email that works for your target reader, which can take a little bit of time, the research can take up to 15, 20 minutes, and, honestly, it’s not any more in-depth than what you would do on maybe … A little bit weird example, but say a former ex that you’re Facebook stalking a little bit. Just a little bit of Googling here and there, what are they up to, that kind of thing.
Joanna Wiebe: Nobody does that, Laura.
Laura Lupoch: No. Only me. I’m the only weirdo.
Joanna Wiebe: [inaudible 00:08:40]. I didn’t know you could use Facebook for that. What?
Laura Lupoch: Yeah.
Joanna Wiebe: That’s awesome.
Laura Lupoch: LinkedIn is another. LinkedIn and Google searches. Yeah. You’d be amazed.
Joanna Wiebe: Love it.
Laura Lupoch: You want to just find out what kind of new projects the company is working on or just released, if the person you’re emailing is new in their job, any hobbies or interests that you have in common with this person that you can reference. For example, one time I referenced in a cold email the fact that a SaaS company was located in Washington, DC. That’s where my little brother lives, and I love visiting DC. It’s such a fun, historic city. I referenced that in my cold email and got a very, very friendly reply email back just a couple of days later.
Researching “What’s in it For Me?” [09:30]
You also want to research what information is directly related to your offer. In other words, research how your offer can help them accomplish their goals.
For example, if they’re a SaaS company, and again, did they just launch, like in this cold email, and now maybe they need customer success stories or an onboarding email series to get a user from free trial to paying customer. That helps them accomplish their business goal and ties into the “what’s in it for me question” that your reader is going to be asking. I guarantee that they’re asking it. You want to answer that question for them as soon as you can in your cold email, and that’s where this line comes into play. I’m asking do you need help with this, and here’s how I can help you. What’s in it for me?
Share Testimonials/Success Stories [10:25]
Now, moving on. I imagine you have lots of great stories to tell that showcase the impressive results you’ve helped your clients achieve. For example, the testimonials by, and I’ll just make up some people’s names here so I’m not encroaching on customer information that I researched.
Joanna Wiebe: Nice reference. Even better. Mister Darcy.
Laura Lupoch: I’m being very specific here, if you notice. I’m telling him these are the two testimonials that I found in my research, from an outsider looking in, that would be great ones that are juicy enough that you can flesh out into actual customer success stories. A lot of times maybe the company has no idea where to start with actually walking down the path that your service can help them walk. In other words, you want to give them a starting point. You want to say, “I see that you have some great testimonials, and I’m sure that you want to get these customer success stories because they’re vital social proof, but maybe you don’t know where to start. Here’s your starting point, and here is exactly, two page customer success story, what the end result could look like.” Moving on.
Joanna Wiebe: Can I just say, Laura, what I love about that point in particular is as somebody who receives a lot of cold emails, I often feel like they’re there to obviously pull you in and the person will execute but I don’t see a lot of great ideas, like here’s what you could do. As soon as, like when I was reading your example, as soon as I saw that, it feels like a really good, persuasive trick to get them … It’s almost future pacing. It’s almost like here’s what your future could look … Here’s how easy I can make this for you. For me to step back and say, “No, I’m not going to use those testimonials for case studies now,” I’m actually giving up an opportunity. You’ve just given me this. I love that moment of it’s part future pacing, part commitment and consistency. It’s just a really good little trick. I love it.
Make Sure Your Email is Relevant to Your Reader [12:55]
Laura Lupoch: Thanks. That actually ties right into number two point about cold emails which is be relevant to your reader. Don’t make them to the heavy lifting in connecting the dots between what your offer can do in their business and how you can help them accomplish it. Let’s be honest, if you email isn’t relevant to your reader, they’re not going to read it. They’re going to delete it. 100 times that for a cold email. They’re going to say, “I don’t know this person.” Delete. Be relevant, and a side note, personalization isn’t being relevant. Sticking a first name into your body copy, that’s really not going to cut it. Let’s see. Like right here, the testimonials by Jane Eyre and Mister Darcy. This is being specifically relevant to my reader in telling them exactly how you can help them accomplish their desires and goals.
Here’s another spot. Where was it? I just had it. Sorry. Totally lost it. Moving on. Don’t make your reader guess at the connection that you’re making. Do that heavy lifting and put it into context for them. You want to help them see that future that you can help them accomplish. In other words, ask yourself to figure this out, “What’s really going on here?” Then link your offer to your best guess on their business goals. Your best guess is going to stem directly out of your research that you’ve done, or that little internet stalking maybe that you did on your cold email recipient. To do that, you:
- Show them how your offer makes their business better by making more money
- Getting more clients
- Reducing expenses
- Growing their business
- Looking awesome to their boss
Like here. We’re going to skip this part. This part right here, this is providing justification for why customer success stories matter to them. This is just an answer to the like, “Prove it. Why do I care? Why do I need case studies in my business?” Then this is the part that I’m talking about right here. Because of my background as a legal software specialist and writer, I can clearly explain complex software issues and tell a compelling story to get new clients and build trust for Gigster. This ties directly into what I’m assuming their business goals are. As a new company launching, they want to get new clients and build trust. They want to grow their business.
Call to Action in a Cold Email to Drive Appointments [15:50]
Then the last section, this is my call to action. You can see it’s actually a question, and that’s totally intentional. People have this innate drive to answer questions. Use that to your advantage, and end your cold email with a simple question. Make it clear on what the next step is, and make sure you eliminate any anxiety they have about it. For example, a 15 minute call. I’m not asking for 30 minutes or 60 minutes, or even for, heaven forbid, like 90 minutes. I’m asking for 15 minutes next week just to chat, just to chat about how we could work together. There’s nothing formal. There’s no pressure, and then end with a simple, “Looking forward to hearing for you.” Assume that they’re going to email you back.
Don’t shoot yourself in the foot and say, “Oh, I’m hoping to hear from you.” Just assume. Be confident. You got this. Then a sign off.
Joanna Wiebe: Dig it. That’s cool. I love the, for the call to action that you have there, you mentioned it’s just a small thing, but that’s like … You talk about this in the post, which, again, everybody should go check out. You’re not asking like let’s talk about signing a contract. You’re doing the next simplest yes, like it’s easy to say yes to that. Don’t do a hard yes. Don’t do anything that makes them think too much about it. Yeah. Very smart.
The Template for Cold Emails [17:23]
Laura Lupoc: Exactly. I’ve also got a real-life example for this template for you at the top, so you can see in the brackets you’re going to be filling in. I did a lot of the heavy lifting for you guys on this one. You’re welcome. These are the parts, the companies. This is the personalization, but here is the part where your research comes into play. You want to describe your job as something that they already have, like a positive customer experience with this company, into something they don’t have, which is what you’re offering, and create a little bit of that tension where they want what you are offering. They want this because they’ve already got a sliver and they want the full piece.
Let’s see. Here is insert a little bit of statistics to show why they should care about what you’re offering. Go back to your research and be relevant. Any questions I should answer at this point before launching onto the last part?
Joanna Wiebe: No. I don’t think so, but I do want to mention that Sarah’s going to chat out the link to this template, so if you’re using Airstory, you can go ahead and grab that template and pop it into your template library. If you’re not using Airstory, why not, but if you’re not using Airstory, just kidding. If you’re not using Airstory, you can just go over to the blog post and copy and paste this directly from the blog post into whatever you’re using. If you use Mixmax, which we mention, Laura mentions it in the blog post. We use it at Copy Hackers and Airstory for templated emails that go straight from Gmail. You can just pop it in there as well, and it’s really clever and quick to do. Two ways to get that template. Please continue on, Laura.
Testing Cold Emails for Effectiveness [19:25]
Laura Lupoch: Awesome. Now for the last step of effective cold emailing, which is a step that not a lot of people talk about, and that is testing. My first cold emails were, honest to God, awful. I don’t even think the recipients opened those emails, and I really hope that they didn’t, because they were horrible. I used that response which was a response to my first test, which was no response, and I started testing different elements of my email. I tested the subject lines. I tested my from name. I tested the timing of my emails, what day of the week I was sending out, what time of day. I tested the timing of my follow-up emails even. I tested my call to action. I tested the research that I was using in my cold email, and I tested how I described my offering, like with that job description that I was just talking about, right here, highlighted on my screen.
Once I found a good email that worked, I templated it. No use in trying to reinvent the wheel every single darn time. I just had to fill in the relevant research that I uncovered, and about five to ten minutes later I had a finished, stellar cold email shooting off into the cyber webs. To answer the earlier question about how long research took in the beginning, it took about 15 to 20 minutes per email, but as I got better at uncovering those little gold nuggets to insert, and as I tweaked my template more and more, the research was taking half that time: five to ten minutes. That’s it actually. If you want more of my secrets on writing cold emails that work, check out the posts that went live today on Copy Hackers, or you can connect with me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is waitingtoberead, and we’ll chat out those links. That’s it. Any questions that I can answer for you guys?
Q&A [22:00]
Joanna Wiebe: There are 20 questions waiting for you.
Laura Lupoch: 20.
Should Emojis be Used in Cold Emails? [22:22]
Joanna Wiebe: Just a few. One, thank you very much, Laura, for that awesome tutorial on writing cold emails for your service business. Again, go to the post. Check it out. We’ve got the template link that we just sent out and Laura is @waitingtoberead, like read, like R-E-A-D, on Twitter, so do go follow her over there. 22 questions. In the time it took … 23. Dammit. Have to start reading them out. Thanks for all the questions guys. Karen asks what are some do’s and don’ts for using emojis in cold emails. Have you done anything there, Laura?
Laura Lupoch: Emojis. That’s a really good question. I haven’t. Try it. Test it. See if it works. Maybe for certain industries it would work really well. For some others that are maybe a little bit more buttoned up, like perhaps finance, they might not work so well. I would try it.
Are There Rules Regarding Cold Emailing? [22:30]
Joanna Wiebe: Perfect. Yeah. Mark says what is the law about cold emails? It’s my understanding that you have to be careful about that. I think what he means is when you reach out to somebody cold, there are rules like CAN-SPAM. There are rules around reaching out to people, except that we’re not talking about blasting people here. We’re talking about targeted, specific cold emails where you go and find the email address of the person, and you reach out to them cold. Like opening a phone book and pointing to a number and saying, “I’m going to call this person.” Same thing applies here, so I haven’t encountered any rules or regulations that prevent you from doing one-on-one emailing to a specific email address at all.
Laura Lupoch: Yeah. Same here. My approach is much different than blast cold emailing, which doesn’t actually work. That’s that numbers game that I was talking about in the beginning.
How Do You Know Who to Send the Cold Email to? [23:30]
Joanna Wiebe: Perfect. Anonymous asks how do you know who to spend the message to.
Laura Lupoch: Good question. I do go into this a little bit more in-depth on the Copy Hackers post, but I’ll answer your question really quick. Basically if you are doing copywriting like I am, you’re looking for someone with the name marketing manager in their title, marketing director, maybe marketing manager. If it’s a really small company, like under 10 employees, email the CEO. Just do it. I would only do this, however, after you’ve found a good cold email template that works. Don’t go cold emailing CEOs right off the bat.
What Length Should Cold Emails Be? [24:18]
Joanna Wiebe: Agreed. That’s awesome. Ray or Rai, hopefully I’m saying that right. This email feels a bit long to me. I was always told keep cold emails super short, four to five paragraphs, one to two sentences per paragraph, because people tend to delete and not read longer emails. What’s been your experience with this?
Laura Lupoch: 56% open rate. I would say as long as you’re being relevant and doing really good research on your reader, they’re going to read whatever you’re sending their way.
Joanna Wiebe: Exactly. That’s always the rule with long copy. If it’s boring and irrelevant, they won’t read it. If it’s not, they will. I agree. The email that you showed us today and the techniques that you told us about today aren’t just, oh, you sent one email and here’s what you learned. This was nearly 400 emails. You’ve been doing this and refining everything over a long … You’ve put in the work and seen what works, and the one that’s the winner, that rose to the top does have more copy in it. Like you said, it’s all very relevant copy, so brilliant. Laurie says I have a service for children. How do I cold email parents? I wonder where I even begin researching. Tough.
How do I Cold Email Parents With a Service for Children? [25:35]
Laura Lupoch: That is a tough one. What I would do is I would start researching … See, the thing is about parents, and I’m a mom, so parents are so tied into their emotions and their dreams and their goals for their children. They want them to be the best version of themselves. What I would do is I would start researching those dreams and desires. You can find them on forums where people are talking about how to improve their kid’s lives or Facebook would be a great one too in the comments. I would try to tap into those dreams, those desires, and use a little bit of the future pacing, where imagine if your kid did X, Y, and Z. Wouldn’t you like to see that come true? Approach it that way, instead of business goals, which is a little bit drier. I hope that helps.
Joanna Wiebe: Yeah. When it comes to finding the parents to reach out to, I don’t know if cold email is a natural fit there. I don’t know what you think but it feels like Facebook advertising is a ridiculously natural fit there, and you could scale it better as well. It’s a service for children, but I would still … I mean to me it doesn’t sound like a cold email thing, but I don’t do a lot of cold emailing. I don’t do any cold emailing to be frank. What do you think? Parenting. Reaching out by cold email to parents.
Laura Lupoch: I think it really depends on the service that you’re offering the parents. If it’s something that’s really, really close to the parents’ emotions, for example, like disabilities. I don’t know what your service is, but if it’s maybe helping your kid with their disability, their reading disability, perhaps, that does feel like more like a Facebook ad type of thing, where there’s a layer of protection for the parents, so they can back out if they say, “This is a little bit too scary. I’m not ready for this.”
Joanna Wiebe: I think if I were a parent, I’d be like, “How do you know I’m a parent? Do you know my kids? What?” I’d back out of there rather swiftly, like, “What else do you know about me?” Todd says how do you decide who to email. This is getting back to that other one, like when it comes down to it, and you mentioned in the post go to LinkedIn. You already said do the marketing manager, look for marketing in their title. I think that answers that question, basically. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:28:11] questions. That’s cool. [Norrie 00:28:12] says is this relevant for service businesses. Yes.
Laura Lupoch: Which businesses?
Joanna Wiebe: Service businesses. It’s totally for service businesses. It’s exactly what we’re talking about today, so yes.
Once You Know Who The Marketing Manager Is, How Do You Get Their Email Address? [28:30]
Leslie says where do you get your ideas of who to target with your cold emails. I guess it could depend on your market. I found sometimes it’s hard to get someone’s personal email address. I think this is getting, okay, once you know who the marketing manager is, how do you get their email address?
Laura Lupoch: Again, going back to the Copy Hackers post, read that. I go into a lot more detail. Couple of quick things. You can Google. There’s a couple of softwares out there that you can use. Again, Copy Hackers post. I think it’s towards the end.
Joanna Wiebe: There’s a table of contents in the post as well, so you can just skip around through it because it’s a 23 minute read, because [inaudible 00:29:10].
Once You Get That Lead, How Swiftly Do You Move in to Close it? [29:12]
Wes says, how much time do you spend on building a lead relationship before you need money or you move on. All this looks awesome, but it appears like something you could spend a ton of time on. Once you get that lead, once you get the connection, it sounds like how swiftly do you move into the point of trying to close them.
Laura Lupoch: To be honest, when I did these I sent follow-up emails trying to close and if I wasn’t getting a response after about four follow-up emails not including my initial cold email, so five emails total, I said, “Forget it. They’re not interested. This isn’t working.” To nurture the relationship I did none of that. None. If you get a positive reply from your cold email, I would recommend designing a nurture sequence to dump them into that if that is a good idea for your business.
What Copywriting Principles are Useful in Cold Emailing? [30:15]
Joanna Wiebe: Joshua says, what other copywriting principles outside of research, relevance, and CTA, what other copywriting principles do you find useful in cold emails? A lot of us as copywriters, you don’t know you’re doing it at the time that you’re doing it. It’s just it’s so in there. Anything else stand out where you had like, oh, using the seven deadly sins worked. I don’t know. Is there anything else that stands out for you?
Laura Lupoch: Sorry. Nothing comes to mind other than find a genuine thing to compliment about their company.
Joanna Wiebe: I think that’s awesome. That goes so far in selling. I can’t tell you how many pairs of shoes my sister and I have bought because the salesperson was like, “Those look sexy.” We’re like, “Box that up. We will take it.” It doesn’t take much more than a little genuine flattery, hopefully genuine.
Bethany says do you use this template to generate your emails rather than writing a new email every time.
Laura Lupoch: That is a great idea. Sorry. I was thinking about newsletter emails. I don’t know why I went there. Maybe because that’s what I’m working on currently. Yes, I did. I use this template every time once I figured out that it was getting consistently opened for my cold email readers, and then just literally plugged and played. I use canned responses in Google, in Gmail, and then it looked identical to the template I gave you today.
Can Including Links in First Pitch Get Your Cold Email Sent To Spam? [31:50]
Joanna Wiebe: Cool. Ray asks, I’ve heard that including links in a first cold pitch can get your email sense to spam. What’s been your experience there?
Laura Lupoch: My experience is I don’t know if it went to spam. There might have been people that it went to spam in their email box and they never opened the email, and so I don’t know if it got sent there. My experience is that perhaps people clicked it or perhaps it was just validation that I have been published elsewhere. You could test it and try it.
Joanna Wiebe: It’s one of those things, like we haven’t really done a tutorial or a talk about it at all, but fear of spam filters keeps a lot of people from writing really great emails. There are words that I’ve seen over the past 15-plus years, where I’ve had to work really hard to talk people into using the word free inside their email: spam filter, to put a dollar sign inside their email. Spam filters filter that out. There’s all of these things, but if you don’t put them in there, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to actually convert people. We have to talk about that down the road, but it’s always very curious, I find, fears of spam filters, and they’re legit. You got to find that balance.
Does Giving Potential Clients Killer Ideas Lead Them to In-House Your Idea Rather Than Work With You? [13:05]
Devon says, do you find that once you give them, I assume the reader, an idea, that they’ll take the idea and run with it in-house. A case study, for example, seems like something that could be in-sourced, so giving them those examples. What do you think, good or bad?
Laura Lupoch: I think it’s a good thing, because I think it proves your value right off the bat. I’ve found that my best relationships with clients have started when I give them a killer, killer idea. It just proves that you’re not like everybody else. You’re a professional and you have a really interesting outlook on life, like you can provide so much value to this relationship and if I’m willing to give you these two ideas for free in a cold email, what else could I give you?
Joanna Wiebe: Exactly. There’s more where that came from.
Laura Lupoch: Exactly.
Joanna Wiebe: If they use it and it works, you’re the one that gave them that idea. They just validated you. Who else are they going to reach out to for the next great idea?
Laura Lupoch: Exactly.
Joanna Wiebe: Wes says, does the question … Wait. It’s just a technical question. Hopefully, yes it does work.
Are There Other Targets for Cold Emails Other Than Marketing Managers? [34:10]
Frederico says, who is your target? Do you target CEOs, marketing managers, or sales reps? Now you already said marketing managers and you said when to do CEOs or C levels. What about sales reps? Do you ever reach out to sales reps?
Laura Lupoch: I don’t because I don’t think that the sales rep has any sort of pull in their job. They have a boss that they’re answering to, and I’m looking for the person who is going to make a decision on whether or not to hire me. I’m looking for the person that I’m going to end up working directly with. The sales rep, to me, I probably won’t be working with him as he’s my boss, so to speak, as he’s my client. It’ll be more of a colleague relationship.
What Tool is Recommended to See if People Open Cold Emails? [35:10]
Joanna Wiebe: Mary says, what tool do you recommend using to see if people open those emails.
Laura Lupoch: Good question. I use Streak. I think I put a link in the Copy Hackers post, so check that out. Sorry to keep referencing it, but it’s there.
Joanna Wiebe: [inaudible 00:35:25] post. It’s amazing. It’s got lots of stuff. Cool. Check out that post. It’s in there, the link to Streak. There’s also screenshots that you show of how you manage it, like CRM style, so it’s really cool.
How Do You Find Prospects in Publications Like TechCrunch? Are There Other Sources? [35:40]
Katie says how do you find prospects that you want to approach. She says, from TechCrunch, I assume. Any other sources?
Laura Lupoch: I liked TechCrunch because I am in the tech industry, and they feature news about the tech industry, which is a great spot for finding that research, and the new company news to tie in my reader. It might vary for your industry, but I would look for what’s that hot publication that everybody wants to be featured in and go read that.
Joanna Wiebe: Perfect. We’ve got 22 more questions, so we can’t answer all of them. I would love to. If you have more that didn’t get answered, please comment on the post and Laura can answer those questions there, and that’s a really good way to reward Laura for her amazingly awesome talk today.
Does Linking to Your Calendar to Schedule an Appointment in Your Cold Email Work? [36:35]
I will ask here, Ally says, hey, Laura, love that you end your emails with assuming that the answer to do you want to talk will be yes. What are your thoughts on putting a link to your calendar for them to schedule time with you, or including it a few times in the email? Did you test that part?
Laura Lupoch: I didn’t test that, but good to see you Ally, on here. I didn’t test that, and the reason is I wanted to make that first step to saying “yes” super easy, like instead of, “Hey, let’s go to a dinner and movie date. I’m available Friday,” which is in three days. “We got to do this.” Make it super easy, like, “Hey, I am going to go grab a cup of coffee at Starbucks. You want to join? I’ll buy it for you.” Make it very easy to say yes, and then when they do say yes, that’s when you can say, “Hey, let’s book a time to talk. Here’s a link to my calendar.”
Joanna Wiebe: Cool. Awesome. Matthew says, was wondering if the rules are the same for LinkedIn InMail, or how do you adjust your cold approach on LinkedIn versus with email? Do you do LinkedIn cold reach outs?
Are LinkedIn Cold InMails Effective? [37:30]
Laura Lupoch: I did try it. I did try it. Got zero responses, so I abandoned that idea and continued with the emails. I did read something somewhere saying that you can pull the emails off of LinkedIn out of your contacts. Don’t know if that’s possible. You might want to look into that, if that’s something that you want to try.
How Long to Wait for Follow Ups When Cold Emailing? [38:08]
Joanna Wiebe: Interesting. Louise asked about follow-ups. How long do you wait before you follow up?
Laura Lupoch: Good question. You guys, you’re killing it today. How long did I wait? I usually gave them between two to three business days. I did not like to email on Fridays, because having worked in the corporate world, I wanted to be as far away from possible from my email box on Friday. I just didn’t email on Friday, and I didn’t email on Mondays. With those two ideas in mind, I would try to email Tuesday through Thursday and I would try to make it so that my follow-up email would fall in one of those days.
Joanna Wiebe: If you emailed on a Thursday, you would wait until the next Tuesday to do the follow-up.
Laura Lupoch: Yeah.
Joanna Wiebe: Cool. This is a name I could never pronounce in my life. How many emails do you send per day? How many cold emails do you fire out?
How Many Cold Emails Do You Send Per Day? [39:05]
Laura Lupoch: That’s a good question too. Again, I went into this on my Copy Hackers post. I had a goal for myself of sending out I think it was 25 emails per week, which translated into roughly five to seven cold emails per day and that was not including follow-up emails, since those are a little bit easier.
Joanna Wiebe: That was amazing. We have to cut off. There are 16 unanswered questions. I’m very sorry to those I couldn’t get to. Some are around subject lines, all sorts of stuff that Laura does go through in that pretty epic post. Bookmark it, tweet it, comment on it if you didn’t get answers to your questions here today, please. Thank you everybody for all of your killer engagement today. It’s been awesome seeing the questions and chats come in. Again, Laura’s on Twitter, and you can find all that information over on the blog post, which Sarah just chatted out the link again to everybody. No. She did it for the tutorial Tuesdays where the replay is. Yes, there will be a replay. Sarah, if you could chat out the link to the post one more time, that would be amazing, please.
Laura, thank you so much for this great tutorial today, and the recording will be up for everybody to see afterward. Thanks again.
Laura Lopuch: Thanks Jo for having me. Appreciate it guys.
Joanna Wiebe: Have a great day everybody.
