History knows this. Cold calling worked. Now, Cold Email Outreach works as well. But there’s a way to go about it. There are enough examples around to prove that sheer dedication, commitment, and a dogged pursuit almost never fails.
You know how the life of an inspired, enthusiastic, and well-meaning marketer or business owner can be, don’t you?
As if it’s not enough that digital marketers have a hundred different things to do each day — connecting all those moving parts — the new age digital marketing and sales did not take away the big, fat, old pimple called “rejection” away.
As Egor Driagin of Conversion.com writes, online reciprocity is oversimplified.
- Giving stuff away is expected. You aren’t doing any favours.
- Free users of your SaaS product won’t even share or talk about the tool unless it helps them, affects them, or delights them in a way that compels them to share, discuss, or even write entire blog posts about your product.
- People are less likely to reciprocate when they can be anonymous (which is totally possible online).
- Your users, audiences, readers, customers, and potential customers — no one has any sort of social pressure.
Because of this, your outreach emails will not be opened or responded to.
Your campaigns won’t work as well as they should
Your free trials won’t convert to paid subscriptions
Your ecommerce store won’t see the kind of sales you expect.
It’s one thing that the Internet has blessed us with opportunity; but completely something else that it’s just getting harder to have someone else do something for you online, let alone sell.
I don’t really know the answer to that. Egor does have a few insights in his post, and you’d have to agree with those:
- Build relationships
- Invoke Trust with content marketing done right.
- Onboard your customers properly
- Put value upfront, ask for “whatever” later.
- Offer Incentives, every time. Don’t take anything for granted.
Egor made his points. But I believe there’s more to it as applied to marketers and business owners who are looking for results today (building relationships and doing content marketing takes time).
So, what do you do today in terms of cold email outreach hustle that can make things work for you? Is cold email outreach even worth it?
Gerard Compte, founder of Findthatlead swears by the fact that email outreach changed his life forever. So much that we went on to create products with the sole intent of helping companies and sales teams connect with their future prospects with products like FindThatLead.
If prospects won’t signup, potential customers don’t click on “buy”, and no one even bothers to share your post, what do you do?
When it comes to cold email outreach, you hustle. That’s what. Here’s how you do it:
Take emotion out of the equation
Let’s say you write a huge blog post mentioning about 26 different bloggers, influencers, marketers, or business owners. You then decide to send out an outreach email to each of them letting them know that they’ve been mentioned in the blog post.
You write out asking them if they could share the post or comment on it.
Some will. Most won’t.
Regardless of what you do next, there’s an emotional toll behind that email and the results that come out of that effort you took.
As a first rule, you’d have to take those emotions out of the equation.
Don’t take it personally. Instead, continue to mention these bloggers, influencers, or business owners (if it makes sense in your future blog posts) and continue to send out outreach emails.
You do that regardless of whether or not you receive a reply and even if they never bothered to read, click, and share.
Similarly, take emotions out completely for every goal you have on your mind — applies to signups, campaign results, web traffic numbers, and sales.
Always Follow up
It’s easy to send out an email. It’s easy to tweet. It’s easy to ask your customers for signing up or for a sale or for anything else for that matter.
It’s easy but that doesn’t mean it’ll work.
It’s hard to follow up. It’s hard to stay in touch, to nurture, and to build relationships.
As Steli Efti of Close.io writes, “life is all about the follow up”
Steli puts it this way:
“I follow up as many times as necessary until I get a response. I don’t care what the response is as long as I get one. If someone tells me they need another 14 days to get back to me, I will put that in my calendar and ping them again in 14 days.”
Unless the person you trying to get in touch with absolutely hates you, give the world a little benefit of doubt: they could be busy, worried, out of town, not at work, launching something new, fretting with some decision, or maybe they did want to take action but just forgot.
Don’t take No For an Answer
I see this all the time. You make a request and you hear the other person say “no”.
You take several steps back. In fact, for all practical purposes, that interaction ends there. In some cases, even relationships end there.
Consider this:
Vendor: I do websites for $1800, including hosting and perpetual support.
Client: That’s too expensive. I am sorry but I’d have to decline.
Vendor: No Issues, I understand.
See how that went? It was wasted time and opportunity for the vendor. The client probably lost a good resources and she’d now waste some more time shopping around.
Instead, the service provider could gone another way altogether.
Let’s look at it again:
Vendor: I do websites for $1800, including hosting and perpetual support.
Client: That’s too expensive. I am sorry but I’d have to decline.
Vendor: I understand where you come from but before you decide, I want you to think about this:
A profitable, money-making website takes about $3600 for upkeep and maintenance. When websites break down or when they don’t work the way you want them to, it’s an added cost.
Support, customisation, and fixing things are hidden problems you won’t even worry about until you have to worry about them.
I don’t just design a website. I help you run a sales machine that keeps your business profitable.
I’d like you to take your time and consider this.
I’ll get back to you to find out how you are doing 3 months from now.
By doing this, you get another change to show the client why you are awesome. Plus, you just turned a cold prospective into a big hot lead into your pipeline. Now, apply this to whatever it is that you use cold email outreach for.
Stay firm and Polite
I recently sent out an email campaign (cold email outreach) to a bunch of people who worked with me earlier, or at least we’ve had a conversation or two about possible work.
Most people replied back positively (so that pipeline is building up). One certain individual, however, wrote back saying that he’d accept guest posts if we are prepared to pay $150 per post.
I pitched. He pitched me back.
Funny how that worked.
This happens sometimes and regardless of what you are trying to do with your cold email outreach, you’ll face dead ends.
None of the above advice would ever mean that you sell yourself short, give discounts, or cut yourself into pieces just trying to deliver a mean cuss who also happens to be your client.
More often than not, you’d have to put your foot down.
But that’s for dealing with clients, prospects, or even your prospect lists when you cold email outreach.
You can also stay “firm” and “polite” with your potential customers. Design your lead nurturing email campaigns that way.
Automate “Emotion heavy” tasks
We are humans after all. Despite the fact that getting emotional isn’t good for you, chances are that you will.
- You’ll still end up with uncle clients who won’t respect you.
- Your cold outreach emails won’t be opened or not replied to.
- Your blogging efforts don’t get you traffic.
- Your sales pitches sink into the bottom of the ice piles of East Antarctica.
That’s understandable. But then, when that’s inevitable, try to automate these processes.
Using some tools, you can automate follow-ups for your outreach. It also helps if you have quick and handy ways to verify your emails in bulk. While there are several bulk email verification services you can use, here are some top bulk email verification services compared
Using Mailchimp or campaign monitor helps you automate most of the lead nurturing you’d need to do with your leads.
Connect Zapier with 500+ apps of every imaginable kind and automate what you can.
Whatever you do, just don’t stop hustling.
How are you going about your business madness?