Why Your Cold Emails Don't Get Replies (THE FIX)

Hey. So if you are sending cold emails and you're just not getting any results, whether that means you're just not getting any replies or you're getting replies, but you're just not booking any meetings. In today's video, I break down an exhaustive list of every single reason why your cold emails aren't working. And this is all information that I've learned myself after sending well over a million plus cold emails and booking thousands of sales calls for my own business. So if you are sending cold emails and it's not working, or you're not getting the results that you are expecting, this video I have included nine things as to why that is. So jumping right into it, the first reason why you might not be seeing results with cold emails is you're just not sending enough volume, right? Because there's a saying, and that is volume negates luck. And there's actually a study that I found as I was putting this video together, and it was put together by the Harvard Business School and it actually says that at any given time when you reach out to a prospect, so when you're selling anything, there's a breakdown of where they are on the buyer's journey. So 5% of people that you ever talk to will be open to engaging in conversation. 50% of those people. So half of those people are just not interested in what you're selling. And 45% of people might be interested, but the timing isn't right. So how that relates to volume is, especially if you're sending cold emails, it's is the more emails you send, the more likely you are to find that 5% of people who are open to conversation, right? Because it doesn't really matter if you're seeing the best things, you're reaching out to the right people, but if you're reaching out to people who just aren't that interested in what you have or for them, the timing is not right. Because let's say you are helping people assign clients and they are just full in terms of client capacity. Sending emails is not going to be the reason why they suddenly change the mind, right? So the best thing you could do is send more volume. Gone are the days when you where you're able to get by with sending 50 emails a day or 100 emails a day, you need to be sending a lot more volume. And in 90% of the cases, if you're getting replies, but you're just not getting that many replies, or you're getting some replies, but you're just not getting really any Sales calls, volume is probably the reason why. Now, moving on to the next reason. The next reason is people just don't want what you're selling. So basically, for lack of better words, is you just have a bad offer. And this is one of the largest reasons why cold emails might not be working for you right now. Because at the end of the day, cold emails isn't a miracle if you are selling something that people just don't want. People just don't want to buy what it is that you're selling, whether that's a product or a service. Sending a thousand cold emails, 2000 cold emails, even a million cold emails is not going to solve that problem. Because at the end of the day, cold emails is just a channel to get more eyeballs onto your business, to, to generate more traffic onto your business and help you generate attention. So what that means is if people don't want what you're selling, even if you multiply the attention a million times, you're still not going to get any results. However, if you are selling something that people want, you sending more emails, so sending more volume is going to really multiply the success that you will have in terms of interest and the chance of you signing clients, right? So this is probably one of the largest reasons is people just don't want what you have, right? If you're selling an umbrella to someone who lives in the desert, even if you find a million people who live in the desert and offer them that umbrella, they're still not going to buy from you, right? And that's the exact same thing with cold emails. So make sure that people want what you have. Make sure your product market fit or service market fit, meaning that people just want what you have, right? It's really that simple. Because cold emails is not a miracle for selling something that people just don't really want. Now the next reason is maybe you're reaching out to the wrong people, meaning you have a bad leads list. So a very large portion of cold email success is actually who you're reaching out to. Because you could have the best copy, you could have the best offers. So people want what you have. But if you are trying to sell a service to marketing agencies, but for whatever reasons you kind of mess up and the people on that list, you end up reaching out to realtors, it's obviously not going to work. Because part of what makes cold email successful is you need to be relevant towards who it is that you're reaching out to, right? If you're reaching out to a CEO, you want to use language that is relevant to a CEO. You don't want to use language that's relevant to a CMO when you're reaching out to the CEO, because it's just not going to work. So make sure you're reaching out to the right people in terms of the industry and then in terms of the titles and in terms of your research too, because the size of the companies you reach out to makes a massive difference, right? The type of messaging you might use reaching out to a solopreneur who runs entire company by himself will be completely different than the type of message that you'll be using when you reach out to a Fortune 500 company. So make sure you have the right leads list, making sure you're reaching out to the right industry, to the right titles, using relevant language. Now, the next reason is you're saying the wrong thing, meaning you have poor copy. And when people struggle with cold emails, they're not getting replies, they're not getting results, they're not booking meetings. This is kind of by default, the they just automatically think that maybe the words that they're using, maybe the things that they're actually saying in the cold emails is poor. And I completely agree to an extent because obviously if you're sending a lot of emails, you're sending it to the right people, but you're saying kind of rubbish, it's obviously not going to work. But this is actually much less likely of a reason than what most people think. Now, obviously, if you stick to the guidelines, you make sure that what you're saying is directly, whoever skims your emails understand exactly what you're saying, it's relevant, and you don't trigger any spam words and things like that. It will obviously help. But at the end of the day, right, it really comes down to, again, right, the offer making sure you're following structured frameworks that are proven to work with cold emails. And I think the overall idea is just making sure that whoever reads their cold emails, they're able to do it without spending three minutes reading a whole paragraph. They're able to do it via while feeling like what you're saying is relevant to them and they're able to read it and understand exactly how you can help them within 10 to 20 seconds. That's the overall idea of writing a strong code emails, right? But as you can see, I even found this picture right, where this guy, he sent a cold emails. And the biggest issue he had, which is circled in the red, was he had a really, really long sales script, right? He started his entire cold email with I am this. And I wanted to get in touch because of blah blah, blah, blah. And he kind of just rambles on about, you know, a million different things. And that's exactly what you do not want to do, right? Because not only is this cold email long, not only is this hard to understand, so if you skim this email, you're still not really going to know what it is that he's trying to say or what is that he's trying to sell. But the worst part about this is the entire focus of this code emails is on him, not the reader. I am this, I am that, I do this rather. And it's not just, it's just not that relevant for the reader. Then the next point is you're just not rigorously testing your copy or testing your emails or testing your subject lines. And for myself, I work with a lot of different people, a lot of different clients. And the number one reason that I personally found why people send cold emails and they're not getting long term success is because what they do is they might spend an hour writing cold email copy, they might spend 30 minutes coming up with the subject line, the reply templates, all of these different things, and then they call it a day. They start sending, let's say 1000 cold emails a day and it doesn't work for the first two weeks and they just continue sending the same script over and over and over again. The best cold emailers that I know, they all rigorously test, right? They're testing different subject lines, two to three subject lines, the testing two to three offers, two to three call to actions. And they're always split testing every single campaign that they launch, they're starting it and launching it with multiple variations. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see when people split test is they're still kind of saying the exact same thing, just worded slightly different. But the best way to split test your copy is to test your offer. Because at the end of the day, personally, what I think is the number one driver of Cody most success is the offer. Do people want what you're saying? Do people want what you're selling? Are people actually interested in the service or the product that you're trying to provide for them? And the best way to test that is with the offer. Because the way you want to think about it is anytime you're selling something, there's obviously the obvious outcome that you're selling. If you're selling lead generation, the obvious outcome is we will help you get More leads generate more sales costs. But there's a bunch of secondary reasons why a company will want to work with a lead generation agency. Aside from the obvious stuff, which is generating leads, that's kind of a given. Is it because they're saving time? Is it because they're saving money? Is it because the process sucks and they just don't want to do it themselves? What are those reasons? And you want to think about that as you're creating different variations of an offer and talk about those things in your email copy. So the best cold emails that I know, they're rigorously testing at all times. Now, next is you look like an Internet scammer, meaning people just don't trust what you're saying. You look very suspicious. You might not have an online presence, all of that stuff. Because understand people that when you're sending cold emails to people, they don't know who you are. If your name is Mike, you're going to send a cold email to another guy, he's going to search you up on Google, he's going to search up your company name. And what will happen is if you just don't exist on Google, people just by default automatically think that you're an Internet scammer. And in a way, it's kind of on you to convince them that you're not, that you know what you're talking about, that you're legitimate, that you're a subject matter expert, all of these different things. So one of the largest reasons as well is, is you're just not building up enough trust. Because at the end of the day, what cold emails is, is you're really just reaching out to a thousand random people and seeing if, number one, they have a problem and number two, if they're interested in what you have to sell. But we live in an age where people can say anything online, there's all these different people saying all these different things and people just don't really trust each other anymore. I actually read a study the other day which said person to person trust and is at the lowest point in the last 40 years, meaning people just don't trust other people. So think about that when you're putting together your cold email campaigns or your outbound campaigns. Think about it from the perspective of what can I do to increase trust and to showcase my expertise and to showcase my authority. Because people will search you up. That's a fact, right? People will search up your name, people will search up your company, see what you have to say, see if you exist on YouTube, on Google, on LinkedIn and, and see if you are in fact a subject matter expert. Now, the next point is you're just not following up enough. You reach out once and you call it a day, right? And I found this statistic which said that 80% of prospects actually buy only after at least five follow ups and 92% of salespeople stop trying after they hear no four times. Now, I don't want you to interpret this the wrong way and you know, just spam a prospect 100 times even if they're not exactly interested. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm talking about is when you reach out to people, you want to make sure that you're following up multiple times, right? So personally, for me in my own cold email campaigns, I reach out anywhere from three to five times over a one to two week period. And for me, I've tested really long sequences, really short sequences, and I found that to be a good mix. Because you never know, right? You're reaching out to random people to reach out to business owners. They might just be busy. There's a strong chance that you emailed them when they were in a meeting, when they were out of office, when they were chilling with their family, with their kids. And maybe they just never actually saw your email. So make sure that you're setting up multiple long email sequences and making sure that you're actually following up to people to really increase the likelihood that people actually see your actual email. Now the next point is your emails just aren't being delivered, right? No one's seen your messages. You're sending a bunch of cold emails and all of it is going into the junk folder or, or the spam box. And I actually got this image. I found this on Google which said the average cold email open rate, a bad open rate would be anything below 40%. A good open rate is anything above 60%. And an exceptional open rate is really anything above 80%. Right? And I think that's a really good benchmark because when people think about open rates, they think the number one determining factor of open rates is just subject lines, right? Oh, I have an open rate right now of 30%. If I just use a different subject line, maybe it'll suddenly go to 60%. But what I found from my own data after sending over a million cold emails is open rates is the largest predictor of deliverability. Right? If you're sending your cold emails, are they hitting the junk folder already landing in the inbox? And the open rate percentage, the KPI open Rate is the largest tracker of that. So make sure that your open rates are relatively high and if it is high, if it's above 50%, if it means your cold emails are actually being read, because it doesn't matter if you have the best scripts, you're seeing all the right things, you're reaching out to the right people, but if no one sees your emails, then it's just not going to matter. So make sure that you're setting up all your emails the right way. You're setting up your domains with dmarc, with dkim, with spf, the email forwarding, all of those things, are verifying your email list, all of those things, making sure that you're following good deliverability practices to ensure that your emails are actually being delivered and people will actually see your emails. Now finally, the last reason is you're just not replying back to leads in a timely manner. And there's a term for this, it's called the lead to response time. And based on this image that I found on Google, right, it's the source's lead responsemagnet.org it says something about the five minute rule which it says you are 100 times more likely to connect with a prospect within five minutes as compared to waiting 30 minutes. And, and the other statistic is you're 21 times more likely to qualify when you respond within five minutes. So a really large mistake I make, and this is more so under day to day management is let's say you're sending cold emails, people replying back to you and you get kind of lazy or maybe you forget and it takes you two days to reply back to a lead who asked you a very simple question to asking you about how you can help them and it takes you two days to reply back to the leads. Well, based on the statistics, if you are not replying back within the first five to ten minutes, your chance of converting literally drops by 100 times. Quite literally. Right? And that is called the lead to response time. Now obviously you probably have stuff to do on a day to day basis. You're probably not able to just sit in front of your computer refreshing the button in your inbox, waiting for replies to come in. But make sure that you're actually replying back to leads in a relatively timely manner. Right. For me, inside my own lead generation agency, the general KPI I have is two hours. So I have inbox managers who replies back to leads for me and what I tell them is make sure you are replying back to all leads within two hours max. Whether that's for my own campaigns, whether that's for my clients campaigns. That way it ensures that people are just likely to reply. People are likely to actually see your email because if you are taking multiple hours, even days to reply back to leads, the chance of them actually converting drops to next to zero. And that's just exactly what the statistics back up as well. So that's basically it. This list is a list of nine reasons why your cold emails just aren't working and you're sending cold emails and you're just not getting replies. Or you're getting replies, but you're just not getting any book meetings. These are all the reasons that I have personally found as to why cold emails might so what you want to do is, after watching this video is think about your own cold email campaigns. Ask yourself, based on all these nine things that I talked about today, do you fulfill all nine of them or are you missing certain aspects of it and think about what you can do to implement the solution for it. So that's basically it for today's video. If you like this video, make sure you drop me a Like make sure you drop me a subscribe if you are interested in building your own lead generation agency or then in the description below I included a link to my calendar where we could set up a time to chat to talk about how I could personally help you. Or if you're running a B2B company and you want help with your cold emails, right? Maybe you're sending cold emails and it's not working. Or maybe you're just not sending cold emails at all and you want to implement cold emails. Then use the link in the description below and we'll set up a time to chat about how we can help you. But I'll see you in the next video. Thank you. See ya.