How To ACTUALLY Succeed With Cold Email In 2023 (Complete Guide)

What's up, guys? Andre here. And in this video, I'm going to be showing you the absolute best way to sign more clients and make more money for your online business in 2023. The new year is right around the corner and I'm sure a lot of you have goals to make more money, grow your business and level up, right? Well, how do you actually do that? If you want to make more money, you need to get clients. Alright, so how do you get clients? You send cold emails. Cold emailing done right is one of the easiest and most effective ways to acquire new clients for almost any business you can think of. I've personally scaled the business to $100,000 a month and another business to $250,000 a month with just cold email. And I'm literally going to show you the system you can start implementing right now to acquire as many clients as you want. And in 2023, hit the like button. Be sure to subscribe. Let's dive in. All right, let's dive in. So in this video again, I'll be walking you through how to get clients from cold email in 2023. And if you're watching this sometime later in the future, I can almost guarantee this information still applies and is relevant. So you first need to understand each step of the cold email sales funnel. And there are five steps which are the following. The open rate, which you want to see, at least a 60% open rate. The reply rate, which you want to see at least a 10% reply rate. The interest rate you want to see 33% interest, one out of every three a call booked rate you want half of those interested prospects actually go forward and book a call on your calendar. And then the close rate, which you want to see, at least 20%. So as an example, here's what we can expect if we were to put 500 highly targeted prospects through this funnel. So with a 60% open rate, we'd have 300 prospects to actually open the email. With a 10% reply rate, we'd have 30 prospects reply. Because these numbers are just based on the previous number in the funnel is how we're calculating these. With an interest rate of 33%, we'd have 10 prospects that are interested. And with a call booked rate of 50%, we'd have five prospects that go through and book a call. And out of the five prospects that book a call, if we're closing 20%, one will actually close. Now, for most of you, signing one client is a big deal. I know for our agency, the average LTV is anywhere from 12 to 15 to $18,000, and it's even higher for most other B2B businesses. So if I can get a client through cold email, where the ROI makes sense for my ltv, I'm really excited. And the nice thing about a cold email sales funnel is it's really easy to scale compared to ads, whereas you start to spend more money on ads. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't get too happy about it and starts to mess it all up. Actionable. And let's start with step one to acquire one client per every 500 prospects through cold email, and that is email deliverability. So in this step, we're going to address the first metric in the cold email sales funnel I talked about earlier, which is the open rate. And so we want to achieve a 60% open rate. What do you have to do? Well, you need to, one, set up domains that are not associated with your main website domain. This is the to protect your main domain. And what I mean by that, and as an example, because examples, especially visually on the screen will be really helpful to get this across, is if your website is clickfunnels.com, you want to set up domains such as try clickfunnels.com or myclickfunnels.com or really any verb before the name of your domain. And so like, my domain is knowledgex us. And so I'll set it up as try knowledgex us or test knowledgex us or knowledgexus.com it really doesn't matter. It just should have some similarity so it's not completely different. And so once you set this up, you'll then set up proper DNS records. So this is more technical stuff and there's articles on how exactly to do this basically all across the Internet. So the records you want to have set up are spf, dkim and dmarc. Those are the three records that'll allow you to actually deliver cold emails and see that 60% open rate. And then you're also gonna want to redirect these domains to your main domain. So if you purchase try clickfunnels.com and your real website is clickfunnels.com just set up a redirect so that if someone were to type in try clickfunnels.com it just takes them right to clickfunnels.com okay? And. And it's really easy to do. And once you have the new domain purchased, you want to create a user account in the new domain. So something like your first name, always use A name, never use like a generic email, like admin or support at like always use a name, a profile when sending cold emails. So again, an example is just andre@tryclickfunnels.com like we talked about in the previous step. And once your email account is set up, you want to warm it up for two weeks using a tool like Malady. And what this does is it kind of trains the Google algorithm to say that hey, this email account is safe and it's proven that it is, it can send emails and they these emails should be delivered. If you just start to send cold emails right away after setting up a new email account, Google will flag your emails and send them to spam because right away they're not familiar with who you are and they're seeing sales related emails. It's just a red flag for Google's spam filters. And then the last thing you want to do to ensure 60% open rates is to test different subject lines. So the two biggest takeaways from my experience here is that shorter works better. So like our best performing subject line ever is Quick question. And you've probably gotten emails from people that use this subject line and you've probably opened them because it's really straightforward and doesn't really tell you much. It's intriguing to say, okay, what is the quick question? And then also something to consider is that personalization helps. So even something as simple as quick question about and then their company name, which you can do when you build your email list, you just get a name or the list also to include the company names for each of these prospects, you can set that up in a tool like Melody. When you set up your campaigns, that little bit of personalization like question about click Funnels or question about Knowledge X or question about YouTube, it goes a long way and shows prospects that you really care about working with them because you took the time to personalize the email. So that's the first step. The second step is targeting and messaging. And so in this step we'll discuss two of the metrics that were talked about in the cold email sales funnel, which is the 10% reply rate and the 33% interest rate. And in order to achieve and hit both these metrics, let's talk about the following. So the first step is that you need to scrape an email list of decision maker contacts in your target market. And to do this effectively, you must be clear on who you want to work with and what makes them qualified. And again, from my experience, a pro tip is the more niche down the better. So if you're targeting e commerce brands, consider getting more specific and targeting women fashion brands. Or if you're wanting to work with podcast hosts, instead of targeting all podcast hosts, target marketing podcast host or Marvel themed podcast host, whatever it is, just get more niche, get more specific. And it doesn't just have to be the types of brands or the types of companies. It could be something as simple as location. Instead of just targeting e commerce brands, why not target e commerce brands located in New York City or Los Angeles or in a certain part of the world? And this will allow you to get a lot more specific with your messaging, which we'll talk about later on. And real quick, you can use tools such as Apollo or Sales Navigator, which is just LinkedIn's paid subscription, to scrape email list of your decision maker contacts or decision maker contacts in your target market. And so there's really two things. Target market are companies that you want to work with. So you first have to identify what types of companies you want to work with and that are qualified to work with you. And then you have to figure out who are the decision maker contacts at those companies. So for example, if you're targeting women fashion brands, do you want to target the janitor at those brands? Probably not. You want to target the CEO? Sure. The founder? Sure. The marketing, the head of marketing or the marketing director depending on your offer. Sure. So you have to figure out who are the decision makers at companies in your target market. So it's really twofold. And again, Apollo and Sales Navigator are great tools. And so I suggest scraping a thousand leads to start. If you remember the metrics from the cold email sales funnel, you'll remember you need to reach out to at least 500 prospects to sign one client. But that's only if your strategy is really dialed in. So you should be able to get one from at least a thousand prospects as you learn the basics through trial and error. But I wouldn't expect to get one client from the first 500 prospects, especially if you're very new to this. So 1000 is going to make a lot more sense to start if you're really ambitious to get that first client through cold email. So now that you have your email list, you need to write a multi step email sequence pitching the prospects in this email list to get on a call with you to learn more about your offer. And it's really important to understand that you're pitching them to get on a call with you to learn more about your offer. You're not pitching them to buy your offer just yet. That's why there is another step in the process, which is the close rate, because you're not closing them in the email, you're closing them on the call that you convinced them to get on through email. Okay? And so with this in mind, be sure not to write your email like an ad. There's a major difference between email marketing, cold email marketing, to be more specific, and paid advertising. And, and so this is not direct response marketing. The same tactics that work in your Facebook ads or your YouTube ads, or your Twitter ads, or just written content does not work in a cold email. What works in a cold email is keeping it conversational. People want to be talked with, not talked to, if that makes sense, especially through email. Do not write them an ad, they will not respond, and they will mark you as spam. It's also important to understand that if your prospect or if the recipient can't read your email in its entirety and understand exactly what you're asking for within the first 10 seconds of opening the email, they will not respond or they will not do so in a way that's positive or with interest. And so what do you do with this information? Well, you keep your email short and you avoid writing in clunky paragraphs. Okay. The best emails that I've seen convert are very, very short. And I'll even say one of our clients sells influencer marketing to e commerce brands. And the email that got the best results for them was as simple as, hey, name, are you looking for influencers to promote your products? Question mark. And that was the entire email. It was one question. And that's actually a strategy that we use for many of our clients still to this day. We call it the one sentence cold email or the one sentence question. So you're just asking a sentence that kind of is, in a way, it's, it's directly asking if there, if your offer makes sense or if it's something that they're looking for or interested in. So keeping it short, that's really important. And then personalizing the beginning of the email by leveraging what you know about your specific target audience also is really important. So what I mean by that is if you're targeting, let's say, e commerce brands in New York City, you can personalize the beginning of the email by saying, hey, I was searching for the best e commerce brands in New York City and came across your website. And even though it's not personalized to each specific prospect, it's relevant to all the prospects in your email list because they're all E commerce brands in New York City that will show up in a Google search. And so you're complimenting them but not complimenting them specifically. And so you can get really creative with personalization, the more targeted and the more specific your email list is. So that's why earlier I said the further you can niche down, the better because then you're going to have more leverage when it comes to personalization. But I will be honest, I do not write the email sequences for the clients at my agency or for our own email campaigns, although I am a big part of the process. My co founder and business partner Christian writes all of our email sequences and you can find him and follow him on Twitter B rights copy and he posts a lot of great content around cold email scripts and copywriting. So the fourth step here again, these are the steps to achieve a 10% reply rate and a 33% interest rate. The fourth step is just understanding that the targeting and the messaging must work together. That's why they're in the same step. Otherwise, you might not hit a 10% reply rate, but you might hit a 10% reply rate. Right? You might have a thousand emails sent and 400 people are saying, screw you, this is not something I'm interested in. Because they're not, they're so far apart, you're targeting and messaging that people are like taking time out of their day to tell you they're not interested. We've had that before. So the reply rate is not the best measurement. What's an even better, more important measurement is that interest rate. But you need the reply rate to have the interest rate be relevant. So again, you, you have to achieve both. And the way you do that is by keeping the targeting and in the messaging relevant to each other. So if you get 10 replies, you know at least three or four of them are going to be interested. Whereas if the targeting and the messaging don't align, even if you get 10 replies, it's probably, it's likely that you will have zero or maybe just one that's interested out of the 10, which is falling way below the KPI. This is probably the toughest metric to hit in the beginning. And so if you understand and accept the fact that it's unlikely you'll hit this target on your first try. It's just like if you're playing baseball or golf, like you're not going to hit a home run on your first swing and you're not going to hit a hole in one on your first swing. In golf. But you, you might, if you continue to test different combinations of target markets, target audience, you in email scripts, just like if you continue to swing the bat and swing the golf club, right? Just don't give up. You'll eventually hit these metrics if you continue to test and try different strategies. Again, the two things to focus on here is who's your target audience? And what are the email scripts you're writing that speak directly to everything you know about your target audience? Not just what do you know about, like where they're located or what type of brand they are, but what are their pain points, what are their desires, what are they struggling with, what are they buying, what are they in the market for, what do they need that they might not know that they need? Or what do they need that they know they need and are actively looking for? How do you speak to each of these things in a short, concise email script? Right? Not easy, but if you can do it, very powerful. And so that's step two. And then the final step is step three, which are conversions. And so now that you're generating interested replies from your cold email campaigns, the final step is to book those prospects for a sales call on your calendar. And so as mentioned in the cold email sales funnel, you should be able to do this at a 50% rate. So all this this means is that if 5, sorry, if 10 people respond and they show interest, you should be able to convert at least five of those to a call on your calendar. And the call is a sales call to pitch them on your offer or your services. Right? And this is actually where I see most people fumble the ball. They fumble it at the one yard line and they struggle to convert people that show interest to a call on their calendar. And so to achieve a 50% call booked rate, you need to do a few things. The first is you need to respond back to email replies within the first few minutes. And not everyone can sit at their desk and wait for email replies to come through all day, right? It's just not feasible. And so there's a solution we could talk about later on, just like hiring an inbox manager. But the reason responding to email replies within the first few minutes is so important is because attention spans, right? And I'm sure you've, you've done this before, but how often do you check your email inbox, reply to something and then completely forget that you replied to it and completely forget what it was about, Right? But when you were replying to that email in the moment you were aware of what you were doing and what you were responding to, which is the highest intent. That was when you're the highest intent, which is the mental state in which you are primed to make a purchasing decision, which in this step of the process is simply to book a sales call, that's where you're at. And so it's important to respond back within the first few minutes because it's likely that they are still in that mental state. Whereas if you wait an hour or if you wait 10 hours or a day or three days, that that moment of opportunity is probably gone. It's not to say that if you respond back that that far after, they're never going to respond back, but the likelihood that they do is, and the likelihood that it's positive decreases dramatically. So you really want to make sure that you have a system in place or a person in place, or that you are available throughout the day to respond to email replies within the first few minutes. And when you do that, and when someone shows interest and they want to hop on a call with you, the job is still not finished. I've literally seen hundreds of examples where people say they're interested to get on a call with you or with someone, and that person does not ever get that prospect on a call. And it's because of a lot of these things that I'm talking about now. But a big reason that they fumble the bag is because they try to send them a scheduling link or they make it really difficult for the prospect to book in on their calendar. Whereas what you should really be doing is manually coordinating a time and date for your sales calls. And once you do that, simply sending them a calendar invite so they don't forget. And it's easy to send a calendar invite. All you need is their name in their email, which you obviously have if you're already in email conversation with them. And then you can include a zoom link or a meeting link, whichever meeting software you prefer. And so manually coordinate a time, don't forget to coordinate a time and date for your sales calls. This is so, so important. The other thing that people really mess up with is they don't follow up enough. And so the money is in the follow up. This is like one of the most cliche sayings in sales, but it really applies to this part of the process because most people just don't follow up. And so what I want you to do is follow up with prospects until you get a clear yes, which means they booked a call on your calendar, not that they just said they're interested in or no, they're not interested. If you don't have either of those clear responses, you should be following up creatively and in a way that's personalized as much as possible. Most people, someone says they're interested, they send them a reply, they might follow up once or twice and then they give up after that. The people that succeed and achieve a 50% call booked rate and even surpass that are the ones that follow up consistently and creatively and in a way that's personalized. Super important. And then what else here? So two more the fourth step to achieve a 50% call booked rate is to just understand that the only CTA in your email sequence should be to schedule a call. That is it. You are not selling your offer via email. You're not trying to get them to make a purchase. You're not trying to get them to buy your services. You are simply trying to get them on a call or on your calendar for a call where they can learn more about your offer or about your services. Do not try to sell your offer through email. It will not work. Okay? It's super important. And then the final thing here is just consider hiring a trained and experienced inbox manager. Because inbox management is a lot. It requires you to be active all throughout the day. It requires multiple follow ups. It's a very strenuous role, especially if you are the owner, the operator of a business. This is not something that you want to have the responsibility of doing. And if you do and you don't have the time and you can't make the mental commitment to it every single day, it's likely you're going to fall behind KPI and you're going to get all the way to this point with your campaigns, which takes a lot of effort as is, and you're gonna fumble the ball at the one yard line. So consider bringing in an expert or someone that is trained to do this part of the job specifically. Okay? So now that you're converting at least 50% of interested replies into booked calls, your focus will be on optimizing your sales process, right? Because the last step in the cold email sales funnel was the close rate. Because now that you have calls on your calendar, you want to be able to close those calls because why else would you fill your calendar if you're not converting those calls or opportunities to close deals? But caveat here. I'm not a sales expert. I don't do sales calls for my own agency. So I'd rather not advise you on this Step My business partner, Dan Crowley, 12:12 on Twitter handles all the sales calls for the businesses I'm involved in and has great content on strategies he's used to close 100 plus high ticket deals in the past year. So I'd strongly recommend that you check out his content. And there's lots of great content on high ticket sales all throughout YouTube and in our space on Twitter as well, and in some of the offers that we'll talk about here at the end. And so those are the three steps. Again, it's a lot, especially if you're new to this, but I promise you, it's all worth it. And so the final question that I promised at the beginning of the video I would answer for you is how much does this all cost, right? So the last thing to consider is how much does something like this cost? And really the only cost you're looking at are the email domains, which are just $12 up front. So you paid Google Domains $12 and then $6 a month to have the email user account and that's through Google Workspace. So it's really cheap, like $18 that first month, if you consider it that way, and then $6 a month after then to get a list of a thousand emails, because that's part of step two, right? Is you want to scrape a thousand leads or a thousand emails to start, you can do that through a tool like Apollo for as low as $99 a month. And, and then the sending tool, which will one allow you to warm up your new email account and then actually send the email sequence that you've written, you can get a sending tool for as low as $97 a month via Malady IO, which I highly recommend you check out. And so for as little as, let's just call it $250 a month, you can get one new high ticket client for your agency, right? So as you can see, the hard cost of running cold emails, Cold email campaigns are dirt cheap, at least on the front end. But now this doesn't tell the full story, right? To run successful cold email campaigns, because anyone can buy an email domain, anyone can buy a list of emails, anyone can buy a sending tool, but these are just tools, right? It's just like anyone can buy the same tools that a surgeon uses to perform brain surgery, but not everyone knows how to successfully perform brain surgery, right? They're just tools. You have to also understand how to use the tools, when to use them and have the experience and track record of using them successfully, right? So to run successful cold Email campaigns. Using tools like these, it's best to set up multiple email domains for more setting volume. And there's just so many skills required. You'll need to hire. You'll likely need to hire copywriters, you'll likely need to hire inbox managers, you'll likely need to hire campaign managers. These are all roles that we've hired for within our own agency that help the clients that we're working with. And they're necessary because there are so many skill sets. You need copywriters to come up with email scripts, you need inbox managers to manage all the replies. You need campaign managers to set up this entire process and monitor things on a daily basis. So don't get me wrong, you can get a positive ROI from cold email campaigns. Otherwise, I want to be as successful as I am. But you have to understand it's not the hard cost to determine whether or not you will get an roi. It's more about knowing how to effectively put campaigns together by building leads, list monitoring email deliverability, writing script sequences, sequences, testing angles, managing inboxes, and so on. And from my experience, 99% of business owners fail at this because they're unable to put the right team together. And so my suggestion to you is, if you're not already a cold email expert, consider these three options. The first option is you can pay an agency to do everything for you. An agency that would make a lot of sense is my agency, KnowledgeX US, which is linked in the description below. The second option is if you're a little more ambitious and you have more time on your hands and you're interested in learning how to do this all on your own, you could pay a coach or an expert to show you exactly how to do it all yourself, which you can do right. In Client Ascension, which is my coaching program, we have hundreds of case studies you've probably seen on my channel already of people we've helped do exactly this. So you can check that out again. It's Client Ascension. It's in the link or in the description below. And then the third thing you can do, the third option is to try to do it all yourself. That's what I did. I'm here today. I survived, I did it, I was successful with it. So I'm not saying it's not possible, but the first two options will really speed up that path to success for you and for your business in 2023. So regardless of what path you choose, I. I hope this video was helpful and I can't wait to hear success stories from people like you who took action after watching this and signed a bunch of clients in 2023. Thanks so much for watching. If you got value, please subscribe to the channel. Give this video a thumbs up comment what your biggest takeaway was and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out guys.