Are you sending cold emails but getting frustrated with the lack of leads? Even with personalization?
Are your MQLs down due to COVID-19?
Let me take you through a step-by-step journey through creating a winning cold email sequence.
I’ve followed this formula for years and generated thousands of leads for my business.
Phase 1: Preparation
Step 1: Specify Your Target Audience
Write down your target audience very clearly. You should be able to describe the audience in one sentence and anybody in your team who reads it should immediately get it.
Some good examples:
VPs/Directors of Marketing at bootstrapped tech companies
CEOs of SaaS companies in the USA with over $1M ARR
Developers at consumer tech startups in India with over 25 employees
Step 2: Fix Your Goal
Write down the goal or objective that you want this cold email sequence to achieve. Don’t forget to establish at least one key metric that will be measured as an outcome of this sequence.
Good examples:
Book meetings (most typical)
Free trials
Referrals
Step 3: Ask Why now?
Write down the background of why you want to target these people NOW and why you think they should care. What’s in it for them right NOW? The NOW part is critical here.
Example:
Let’s say you have a marketing product that helps generate more leads without significantly increasing costs. You want to target the VPs of marketing at bootstrapped tech companies. Here’s what the background could look like:
“During COVID, bootstrapped tech companies are struggling to keep up with their business goals. A key problem is the lack of leads at the top of the funnel. Because they’re bootstrapped they can’t buy more leads unsustainably. Also, most such companies are conserving cash during these times. Our solution helps VPs of marketing make their marketing campaigns more efficient without spending more, so this is the right time for them to consider using our product.”
Step 4: Objections
Put yourselves in the shoes of your audience, and list all the reasons you think they may have to avoid responding to your emails. This is a very important step and this is what separates the good sequences from the great ones. The more you understand your prospects, the better you can write emails that get results. You should iterate this over time based on the kind of responses you get.
Example: Let’s take the same context from the previous example where you were targeting VPs of marketing at bootstrapped tech companies. Here’s what their objections to responding to your emails could be:
I don’t have the budget for any new experiments in marketing right now
What you’re saying may work normally, but does it really work in this environment?
I’m not the decision-maker for any new software in our company
I’m busy keeping the ship afloat, I don’t have time to talk to anyone new right now.
Notice that I’m using the first-person language, speaking as your recipient to write down the objections. That’s a simple but powerful way to really put yourselves in the shoes of your audience.
Once you’ve done all of this, it’s time to write the actual sequence.
Phase 2: Creating The Sequence
My friend and mentor Raj Sheth always says that you should think of individual touch points like peeling the layers of an onion. Like chapters of a story being uncovered. It requires discipline to prevent ourselves from writing bad sequences.
So, before we jump into writing the emails themselves, there is one more important step.
Step 1: Outline
Write down an outline of each of the emails. Mention just one key takeaway that your prospects should get from each email or one key aspect you want to make sure is covered in that email.
This technique forces your emails to be short and crisp. You hash out the journey of the story first, before writing all the emails. The iteration will be faster. This is like writing the script of the movie before actually shooting it.
(Pro tip: I recommend teams discuss and agree on the outline first. This saves a lot of time later)
Example: Using the situation mentioned earlier for reference again
Notice that all of the preparation that you’ve done in clearly articulating the target audience, goal, context, and objections makes it easier to create very relevant touch points.
Also notice that I did not talk about personalization here. But that doesn’t mean personalization is not important. Whether you want to make biryani that millions of people will like or you want to be a gourmet chef serving a few people is your choice. It doesn’t change the basics of how you cook.
Note: We use hubspot to run our sequences
Step 2: Writing the actual sequence
I won’t go into a lot of detail here because there are a lot of resources that help you write a great email copy. Hope it’s clear now that as important as a good copy is, the structure of the sequence as well as your empathy towards the target audience are also key to writing a winning cold email sequence. That’s why the focus of this post only covered those elements.
Refer to these resources for more tips to write great cold email copy
Cold Email 101 webinar by Prakhar Jain and me.
My case study on Drift’s winning cold email sequence.
Conclusion
While all of this may seem like a lot of work, as you keep doing this a few times, it will become more and more intuitive for you, and pretty quickly, you will start powering through it. Also, wouldn’t you trade in a little bit of extra time for much better outcomes from your campaigns?
Lastly, remember that cold email sequences are all about iteration. The more iterations you do, and the more disciplined you are in learning from those iterations, the better the results that you will get. You may not get great results on your first attempt but if you stop there, how are you ever going to learn? Keep at it and let me know how it works for you.
Go crush Q3!
P.S: The co-author of this week’s edition is my colleague Kalyan Varma - Co-founder & CEO.