Writing Cold Emails That Get Responses (No BS)

Hey, hope you're doing well. My name is Jimmy Fung and in today's video I got something really cool to share with you. Pretty much what I'll be doing is I will be taking the different cold emails that I have received over the last few months, last few years, and I will be rewriting them live with you. So I wish I had this when I was first getting started, when I was first building my own lead generation agency, when I was first learning how to do cold emails, because the largest issue that I had was was I joined a lot of courses, I bought a lot of programs, different types of things like that, and people just teach you how to do it. But the largest confusion, the largest question mark I had was how to take the learnings, the theory of how, of what worked for that individual and apply that for my own offer or apply that for my own business. And in this video I want to peel back the curtains and share with you exactly what I would do to rewrite different cold emails that I have just received over the last few months. All of these are different offers, they're all selling different things. And I hope you find this video valuable, right? Because if you're selling lead generation as a service, Facebook ads, email marketing, SEO, web design, whatever that is, the way you would approach cold emails, it would be slightly different. And in today's video, I'll be rewriting all of those cold emails. Hope you find this valuable, hope you're able to apply this inside of your own business. And if you like what you're seeing, please make sure you check out my Instagram, drop me a follow scroll through all my past content where I shared with you a lot more different business insights, how to make cold emails work, how to scale your own lead generation agency from zero to $10,000 a month. And I think this video is very valuable as well because if you are building your own lead generation agency so you're doing cold emails, you're obviously trying to book meetings for yourself. But down the line, once you have cash, once you have a few clients, you also need to use the exact same system to get results for your clients. And in this video I'm breaking down different offers that are not just lead generation offers and and you'll be able to apply that concept into different offers that you'll be using down the line. So hope you find this valuable. If you do drop me a subscribe, drop me a comment as well. If you like the video, if you find it valuable, if you have any feedback or any questions, make sure you drop that down in the comments below and hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you. Hey, so in this video I will be taking different cold emails that I have received personally myself over the last few months and, and rewriting those cold emails the way that I think would increase the amount of replies and the amount of book meetings for them. Right. So right here you see this picture, right when I was putting this video together, I just searched up Shakespeare because in this video I really had to pull out my inner Shakespeare and rewrite a bunch of these emails. So there are three examples here, all selling different offers, all to different industries. So let's jump right into it. So the very first cold email that I will be rewriting is this one. I'm just going to read it to you. The subject line is Jimmy, just message you on LinkedIn. Hi Jimmy, I messaged you on LinkedIn to arrange a call but thought this might be better. We book sales calls for small businesses who sell B2B. Most of our clients rely on referrals and networks for new businesses. Very few have a successful have a productive sales machine. We do the sales outreach you know, you should be doing. We build large targeted prospects list. We write up sales pitches that actually work and then do the actual outreach to excite decision makers to speak with you about your solution. End of the day, we put sales calls on your calendar and are trusted by reputable companies like Bounce X Power, Inbox and Constant Contact. If I have an automatic source of booked sales calls. Sounds exciting. We should talk. Can you chat later today? So I received this email earlier this year and there's a couple of different things that I want to talk about. This email, I wrote them out over here. So in terms of this specific email, the first thing is it's way too long. Based on our data, it says that the most successful type of cold emails by the metric of reply rates and book meetings are emails that are sub 22nd long. So what you want to do is any cold emails that you write, after you write it out, you want to highlight the whole thing, copy it and go on a website. You just search on Google, Read to text calculator, something like that, read to text timer and you paste in the cold email you write. And it will literally tell you that for the average person, how long or how quickly will it take them to read the email. So make sure you're keeping it below 20 seconds. Our most successful cold email campaigns are all below 20 seconds for myself and for my clients. The second thing is this email has way too much Fluff. And it's kind of selling features as opposed to benefits. So as you can see, this second paragraph right here, it's just really, really long. It talks about a lot of random stuff like building targeted prospects, list writing up sales pitches and do the outreach to excite decision makers. You don't really need to say all of those things. They are important. You could talk about them in your VSL or in your sales assets or even on the sales call, but it's not necessary. In the initial cold email outreach. And by the way, right, the initial cold email outreach where this person is reaching out to me for the very first time and I have no clue who they are. So way too much features, not really a tangible desired outcome, not really any benefits. Third point is no specific desired outcome. So this person does not use any specific numbers to describe the result that they're selling. You should always use numbers, always, always, always be as specific as you can. So that when you're reaching out to people, they can imagine inside their own minds what the expected end result is. So I read through this entire email and I still don't really know what they are really doing as a tangible end result other than the fact that I'll book meetings. For me, this email has no outcome based case study. So they did name drop a couple of companies, but they didn't really tell me what they did. Right. So it's kind of useless in that sense because case studies are most effective when you're able to explain. We recently worked with XYZ where we did 1, 2 and 3 results. So this person didn't necessarily do it. They just chose to name drop a couple companies at the same time. So that could be improved. And then the CTA is pretty bad, right? They're directly asking for a call. Again, I don't know who they are. This is the very first time they reached out to me. They and you should never reach out to people for the very first time and ask for a call right away, right? That's a strategy that a lot of people talk about on YouTube in different courses, stuff of that nature. But in 2024, you really can't do that anymore because there's just so much noise, especially on emails in the inboxes. I know myself, I get cold email 10 to 20 times a day and every single person is asking for a call. They're asking to get something from me before they give me something in return. Right? So one of the strategies that I have seen the most success with is leading with value, asking for Permission A permission based value CTA asking for permission to share value to them. So this is my feedback on this current email that I have received. I went ahead to rewrite again. I pulled up my inner Shakespeare to rewrite this code email and this is what I would write it as. I'd say hi, Jimmy, just sent you a message on LinkedIn but wanted to shoot you over this email. So the intro was pretty good. I probably wouldn't say message you on LinkedIn to arrange a call, but this might be better. I just say message you on LinkedIn but wanted to shoot you over this email. And then what I wrote is we help B2B lead gen businesses add 5 to 10 qualified calls every week to their calendar by leveraging our tailwind outbound system. So this offer by itself is just already so much more direct, so much more outcome driven. I don't know who they specifically work with. I run a lead gen agency so I assume that if they're reaching out to me, they're probably looking to work with lead gen companies as well. So I just wrote we help B2B lead gen businesses. Inside the initial cold email they just wrote, we book calls for small businesses who sell B2B that's a little bit too unspecific, is too generic and I don't really feel that relevant when they reach out to me because this can mean millions of different people as well. Right? Like there's millions of B2B businesses in the US in Canada and UK, Australia, wherever that is. And this is just very nonspecific. So I just chose to write we help B2B lead gen businesses. I don't know if they are or they're not, but this is how I would do it. I'd be very specific. And then as you can see, I am using quantifiable numbers. So again, I don't know what the offer is, but just based on my interpretation of their cold email of what they sell, I might want to say we will help you add X to X. So specific numbers, five to ten qualified calls every single week. Right? So we're being very specific in terms of what, what we are offering. So that I can see in my own mind, oh, if I work with this person, they can help me add five to 10 qualified meetings to my calendar. Again, I write every week to put a quantifiable time result because if you don't do that and you just say add 5 to 10 qualified calls but how long Right. Will it take you? 90 days. 5 to 10 across 90 days 5 to 10 calls across, 2 months across a month. How long does that take? So I just wrote every week by leveraging our Tailwind Outbound system. So this is kind of the unique mechanism. So you should always give a name to your system. I just wrote this. I don't know if it's relevant. I just chose Tailwind because I see in the domain it looks like it's Tailwind Consulting. So I just wrote Tailwind Outbound System. That's just a unique name. You don't really need to get too fancy or spend too much time thinking about this. So I just wrote that. And then in terms of the case study, I kind of reworked it a little bit. Again, you want to be using real case studies where you could talk about it inside your VSLs, you on your sales calls. And I don't know anything about their case studies, but what I would say is I would take one of those specific companies and I would attach a result to that. Now, obviously they have three different companies. What I would do in this specific scenario is split test each of those case studies against each other and run with the variation that just gets the most replies and gets the most booked meetings. But the one I chose was Bouncex. I just wrote, we recently worked with BounceX adding nine sales opportunities to the calendar in the week leading up to Christmas break. So you see how by calling out this company and by stating specifically we were able to work with Bounce X to do this specific results, then it's just so much more effective than just saying, end of the day, we put sales calls on your calendar and are trusted by Bounce X Power Inc. Box and constant contact. So the way I do it over here is just so much more specific. Right. And this email, I think a really big theme is they just have to be a little bit more specific in terms of what they're saying in terms of desired end results in terms of the case studies, as opposed to just staying very generic, very general. They just need to be a little bit more specific. And my CTA is I put together a quick video running through how we did this. Mind if I share it with you here? So obviously someone who will read this email, they'd be like, oh, they could Help Me, a B2B Legion company, add five to 10 qualified calls every single week to my calendar. They recently worked with this company adding nine sales opportunities in a week. This is very interesting. How does this work? So rather than asking for a call right off the bat, what we're doing instead is we are basically asking for permission to share with them a quick video where I personally break down. This is how we added nine sales calls for Bounce X. This is how we work with lead gen agencies and Help them add 5 to 10 qualified sales calls and every single week to their calendar. Right? So by me asking for permission to give them value, I'm not asking for anything in return. I'm asking for permission to give something to them, give something valuable to them, to answer their questions, to show them how this works. So this by itself, this cold email rewrite is already a lot better. Obviously I'm biased because I'm writing these code emails myself, but this is personally how I would approach this specific offer. And I think the main things that made it better was number one, there's a lot less fluff, it's a lot more direct with a desired outcome, very specific and has a value permission based cta. So we're not asking for anything in return other than a simple yes. Right, let's see it. Something like that. So this is the first example. The second example I have is a video editing code email. So I get a ton of these. Right now I'm going pushing pretty hard on YouTube and on my social media pages. So. So every single day I'm getting three or four cold emails of people asking to edit my videos, stuff of that nature. So this is a very competitive offer. A ton of people are doing it. And I recently got this email, it says, hi Jimmy, if you're like most YouTubers, you know how frustrating it can be to put all your blood, sweat and tears into a video and then only get a small number of views. That's why I'm willing to do the thumbnail design for the YouTube videos to get the highest possible CTR, so click through rate and to let you have several hours more every week to do what matters most, making videos. Would you like me to send you some sample thumbnails so you can see what I can do for you? So this is a pretty decent cold email. Obviously there are very specific things that I will tweak which I will share with you in a few seconds. But in terms of the feedback, I really like the intro, but it could be interpreted as sales. So this person in their coding mode, the way they let it, is with a pain point, which is you're putting all these hours, you're spending a ton of effort. I spent a ton of resources creating these YouTube videos only for it to flop and get like 50 views, right? I think that's a pretty common pain point. As someone who's making YouTube's right. YouTube videos right now I wouldn't want to invest five hours into a video only to get 50 views. Right? So this is a very good pain point I will say is if you want to go with pinpoints for your own cold emails, you want to be smart about it. Because if you write it the wrong way, it could be interpreted as extremely salesy. You're just trying to sell something right off the bat which will instantly turn off whoever receives and reads these emails. But I like the intro. I just be very careful about it. The intro could also be a little bit more relevant. So this is an intro that the way I think about it is if this person could have sent the exact same cold email to 2000 youtubers for all I know. Right. It's not very specific to me. It's not relevant in that way to me as well. And you want to be a little bit more relevant. The offer is pretty bad, to be honest. Right. It's very poor. It's very non direct. Other than talk about getting the highest possible CTR click through rates, but there's no specific numbers to it. Similar to the past cold email, the one we just reviewed, you want to be as specific as possible. There's no desired outcome. So again, it doesn't necessarily sell or talk about a desired outcome that I'll be looking for other than a click through rate. But what does that mean? Right. And there is no case study or risk reversal. So whenever you're sending cold emails, especially because you're reaching out to someone that had never heard of you, it's very important that you identify a case study. So if you have a business and you have cases, you want to leverage that as part of your cold emails, or if you're a beginner and you do not have any case studies, then you need some form of risk reversal. Because in 2024, again, right. I'm getting tons of these emails. I'm sure most of these business owners are getting 10 to 20 cold emails a day as well. And the number one question in their mind is can this person actually help me with what they say they can. Right. And the number one way to reverse that risk is by using some form of guarantee. Not necessarily refund guarantees, but there's a bunch of different guarantees. I recommend you read the book 100 million offers by Alex Hormozy. He talks a little bit about guarantees and risk reversals. And if you have case studies, then you want to leverage that. And you might not necessarily need a risk reversal. Right? But this is kind of my feedback for this specific cold email. Again, the cta, it's a value cta, so it's better than just pitching off the call. But it could be written a little bit better, it could be worded a slightly bit differently. And I think making those changes will increase this person's reply rates tremendously. Right? So jumping right into the actual rewrite, this is what I wrote. Hi Jimmy, I just watched a YouTube video about how you sent 1 million-plus cold emails. Super valuable. So that's my intro line. You see how this is way more relevant because as someone who's getting multiple video editing emails every single day, cold emails every single day, not that many of them are calling out specific YouTube videos. They're just saying, hey, I saw your YouTube video, this could be better. But if you call it specific code emails, sorry, specific videos that you have watched on my YouTube, then now I know it is super relevant. So if you want to be personalized, this is how I would recommend it. There's tons of scrapers out there that could give you this information. So it's not even like you have to manually sit there and write this out, right? There's scrapers out there that will give you these variables and you just want to use them, right? So by being able to do this, this emote is already so much more relevant and helps stand out in the sea of other emails pitching the exact same service to myself. In terms of the offer, I say reaching out because I had some ideas for your thumbnails which could lead to a 5 to 10% click through rate increase within the next 45 days. And we only get paid after we get you this result. So obviously I don't sell this service myself. I don't know too much about video editing like that. So I'm not certain if a 5 to 10% CTR increase is a realistic number, but I want you to make sure that you're using specific numbers, right? So While this number 5 to 10 might be unrealistic, you want, if you are selling this service, obviously you know what is realistic and what is not and you want to use realistic numbers, but you want to call it out specifically. So even here I'm writing 5 to 10% CTR increase because now in my mind I read this email and I say, okay, this person can help me if they are able to do what they claim they're able to do. I can see a 5 to 10% click through rate increase right within the next 45 days. So again, I attach a timeline to that so that I know by working with them within 45 days I will get this result. And it wouldn't take me two years or three years or indefinite period of time to get this 5 to 10% CTR increase. So that's what I say. So this offer is a lot more direct. I read through this and I know exactly what they're doing. The offering to redo my thumbnails for me, which will lead to a 5 to 10% CTR increase. This is my guarantee and we only get paid after we get this result. This is a performance based guarantee. If you're a complete beginner and have no case studies or you're looking to sign your first few clients, I strongly recommend you go with a performance based guarantee. That way, in my mind as a reader, I'm like, okay, cool. By working with this person, there's not that much risk because worst case scenario, the thumbnails are the same or worst case scenario, they're worse than what they currently are. But if it does work, then I'll get a 5 to 10% CTR increase. I'll probably get more meetings off of my videos, whatever that is, and I only pay them after I achieve this desired result. So this is exactly what I'm talking about in terms of guarantees. You don't even need a money back guarantee or anything like that. In terms of the cta, the value based, permission based CTA that will really skyrocket. The results of this cold email is I put together a quick video running through five variables of a 9% CTR thumbnail. Are you the best person to send this to? So once again, I'm asking for permission to give them value. I'm not asking for a call, I'm not asking for time on the calendar. I'm not asking for 30 minutes later this week to chat. I am offering to give them a very specific thing. I'm telling them I could redo their thumbnails which could lead to a 5 to 10% CTR increase. Can I share with you a quick video on YouTube showing you exactly how we do this, explaining the five variables that can lead to this result? Do you want to see it? So if I was interested in getting that 5 to 10% CTR increase, this is a pretty no brainer. It's pretty irresistible. And it's so good you make people feel stupid saying no, right? So I'd reply back to yes. And this person will likely send me over to a VSL or another form of lead magnet which they set up, explaining the five variables of the 9% CTR thumbnail. So this is a value CTA. And by rewriting this cold email, hopefully you're starting to see how much better this email is and how it will be so much more efficient. This will definitely get a ton more reply rates for a ton more book meetings. I don't know what the analytics are for this cold email, but I would imagine they're not the best. The other thing I'd also like to point out is this person is reaching out with a personal Gmail account. I do not recommend you do that because it comes off as extremely unprofessional. If you're trying to make money from your services, you're selling to a business. This is the low hanging fruit. Just get a domain, right? It doesn't even cost you that much. It costs like 10 bucks. Get a professional domain and connect that to your main website. So if I was to highlight this and search it up, it will lead to your website and you show up on Google because now I don't know who this person is. They could be a scammer for all I know. They could be someone who's just set this up yesterday and now they're just trying to make some quick money from me. I don't really know. Right. And this kind of looks a little bit unprofessional. So if you are doing cold emails, never ever, ever reach out from ortlook.com hotmail.com@yahoo.com always set up an email domain and use that as part of your cold email outreach. It's the low hanging fruit. It doesn't take a lot of time and it just will 100% add a lot more credibility. Right? So that's what I will say about this video editing code email offer. And finally the final code email that I will rewrite is email marketing for E Commerce. Right. So I assume this person is selling Klaviyo email marketing. They're working with E commerce brands, helping them build out those emails that you might receive on Black Friday or Unboxing day. Talking about this is our sales for our products, right? From Gymshark, something like that From Lululemon, something along those lines. Right. And what they have right now, the subject line is quick question Jeff. They have a domain midnight marketing and marketing247.com so that's good. Hi Jeff, saw on LinkedIn, you're the VP operations at Zazy, so wanted to reach out. Noticed a few things about the store that might be hurting your conversion rates. Mind if I share a video explaining More so, a little so a couple of things I like. The intro is very, it's very good. It's very relevant. If I was Jeff, which I'm not by the way, but if I was Jeff, I'd be like, oh wow, this person did some research into me. They know that I'm the VP operations at this company and now they want to reach out. Probably something about a responsibility under my. Under my watch, under my rope. So a very good and relevant intro. The next point is this email is very short and to the point is that's good in that sense because this is definitely sub 20 seconds. But I think it's a little bit too extreme because at this point it's just so short and so direct that it's legitimately missing out important details. It leads a lot of question marks which I understand why he did it because now as a marketer I have questions and I do want to reach back out to them, to Matthew, if I was relevant, if I was Jeff. But at the same time sometimes it's not that good. You need to find a balance basically between adding curiosity, which is why we use unique mechanisms and names like that, but giving enough details that that person answers a lot of their questions and they don't have to go out of the way and add additional friction into the sales process to get these answers, simple answers. Right. So it's very short and to the point, but it has a little bit too little details. This email could also be a little bit more specific on the few things they noticed. A few things. What are those few things that is hurting conversion rates. They could also be more specific with numbers and they have a very strong value per mission based cta. So at least a CTA is good, which by itself should get a couple replies and get some book meetings. Just by itself. So what I would do to rewrite this email is I'd say hi Jeff, saw on LinkedIn, you're the VP Operations at Azazi. So again I'm taking the exact same intro because it's very relevant and it's a very strong one. No bs. Basically I'm reaching out because notice that your site email pop up, has blurry product images and is missing a headline which can negatively impact email opt in rates by up to 17%. So this is kind of our offer. They are a klaviyo email marketing agency. I went on the website to take a look. So I know this is one of the services that they do, but you see how I'm specifically calling out a problem. They have I'm saying, hey, your email pop up, the images are blurry, you don't have a headline that's negatively impacting you by xxx percentage sales conversion, whatever that is, whatever metric is important to Jeff. Right. So I'm being very specific in terms of what are the problems and what could be done differently to increase the results of the email popped in. So by doing it like this, you're very specific and you have a very clear offer. The next one is the CTA is I put together a quick video walking you through three must have components of a successful email popping. Mind if I share this video with you? So again I'm taking what they did, I'm adding a little bit more details so that it segues and the whole email just flows a little bit better. But basically I'm asking for permission to share something with with them. So by doing this again, you're not taking something away from them. If you are Jeff and you know that you actually have a problem, you're identifying a problem, you have product, you have blurry images, you're missing a headline. Let me show you what you can do today to increase the results of that pop in to fix these blurry images, to fix your headline. Let me show you how to do that yourself. It'll take you 10 minutes. And that's kind of the idea that we want to convey and that's exactly why These permission based CTAs work so well. So this is kind of what that looks like in this video. I rewrote three cold emails. Hope you found it valuable and hope you're able to see some of the common patterns as to how I personally write cold emails. The cold emails that have produced the best results and what I would do differently as opposed to what I have received. So I hope you enjoyed this video and thanks for watching. Bye bye.