Cold Email Masterclass with Instantly.ai Founder

Hello everybody. James Blackwell here. In today's video, I'm going to be sharing how to use email marketing automation with one of our favorite tools that I practice and preach in our program, we could accelerator Instantly AI. So I sat down with the founder Nils of Instantly and we walk through exactly the good and the bad about email marketing. What you should do, what you shouldn't do, and everything in between. So enjoy the video and I'll catch you soon. Hi ladies and gentlemen. We've just given everyone a couple of minutes to get in the room because I think the last email wasn't sent out in time. But we will dive in in a second and also we'll use this as quite an interactive chat. So we've got very thankful of Nils time. So Nils is the founder of Instantly AI and you'll talk a little bit about the journey of how they got started and we're going to dive into this, the software. So in terms of what is really working well in 2024 for cold email outreach and what we see the Future as with AI and things like Clay.com, which has been really powerful for our agency and many others that Nils is going to be happy to chat about. So yeah, just welcome Jared. No cold email Francesco. Okay, so you're missing a trick here, so hopefully we can walk you through the benefits of doing that. So Dan's using Zoom Info, Lusha and Duck Soup. Interesting product stuff. Zoom Info, from what I remember when we used it, it's quite expensive.

Yeah, I think it's more for the enterprise, the data product for the enterprise, quite expensive.

But yeah, but from what I understand with Instantly that you're doing now, you're, you can, you can get data from instantly.

Yeah, you can buy data from instantly as well. So in the past used poll to get all the leads, your contacts, depending on your filters, you can do that inside of Instantly. Now as well it looks very similar. You apply the filters of the decision makers and you can push that direct into a campaign and it will verify the leads immediately as well and then put that into campaign and then from there you can use some AI prompts and launch the campaign. So yeah, our goal is to integrate the entire sales, engagement, lead, intelligence stack into one tool so you don't have to jump around three or four different tools and just makes it much simpler and more efficient.

Yeah, I agree because I think like to, to get good cold email back in the day you used to have to have like an email verifier tool. Email domain warm up.

Exactly. All These data, you have the data, you have the verifier tool, you have the warm up, then you have the sequencer, the outreach tool, as it's all separate, you need like a specialized team member to handle all of that. If you have it all in one place. Makes it much, much easier.

Cool. So for those that aren't using cold email right now, what would you say to the people on a chat that have got an agency but they're not using cold email? Why they should.

So yeah, we have so little background about instantly. We launched two years ago and we now have over 20,000 customers. A lot of them also recruiting firms, recruiters that use instantly to get more clients for the agency but then also do the service delivery for the, for the candidate flow or reach out to more potential candidates. And it's just a very simple and cheap way to get your first clients. Compared to having to use paid ads or having to rely on referrals, it's just reliable and cheap way to get more clients. Especially if you're starting out, you know, to get your first five or 10 or 15 clients. It can really help get things off the ground.

Yeah, that's awesome. And did you, was that one of your strategies when you first started instantly to get clients?

Yeah, so how we started instantly is we used to be a lead generation agency and again we were using all these other tools for data, for outreach, for warm up, for verification. Then we thought hey, let's just build this ourselves in house. So we built instantly for our own Legion agency. And yeah, we are getting clients that way as well. Using instantly to grow instantly as well. So yeah, that's how we, how we did it in the beginning. We just built it for ourselves, then we launched it and yeah, yeah, and.

That'S an interesting start as well for, for the people that are on the, the webinar, most of them are agency owners. So you were an agency owner yourself, like a Legion agency?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So Neil's actually did have his own agency and then seen the gap in terms of the tech and the software for cold email outreach. And I think one of the appealing things for instantly in cold email is the fact that he, he practices what he preaches. So how he's grew his SAS business. One of the outreach methodologies is cold email and I think a lot of people still think by 2024 cold email is dead. The different legislations changing with Google and the outreach. Like what have you, what has instantly seen in terms of any changes in 2024 so far with cold Email.

Yeah, yeah. So right, it's cold email has been around for a long time. It's like with Facebook ads. Every year people Facebook ads don't work anymore. I've heard this since 2012. And cold email still works, right? We have 20,000 customers using our tool. If they didn't get any results from it, they probably wouldn't pay for the subscription or be using it. I still see people like booking 500 demos a month just with cold email, like with any channel, you just have to kind of understand the best practices, the strategies and then it still works in terms of some changes in the landscape. We heard this announcement in February by Google and Yahoo. A lot of these things that they said is for example, they would block people that are sending more than 5,000 emails in one day. Which is more related to software like Mailchimp or Active Campaign.

Right.

Where you blast just from one, one inbox. You just blast 5,000 emails in one day to a list. And that's not what we're doing here. Right. I'll talk a little bit about the best system and structure of cold email. We don't want to be sending hundreds or thousands of cold emails from one domain. We'll be spreading that out across multiple outreach domains or secondary sending domains is how you build the structure to make sure you have good deliverability. And then some other best practices like for the people who are doing cold email already, they know about spf, dkim, dmarc, these are some settings in the domain name provider that you have to add. But if follow these, these cold email best practices, you'll be good to go. In fact, Google does cold email themselves. Cold emailing for the B2B business, for the cloud business. So if you, you know, if you're not like spamming out there and you have like a solid offer, you don't, you're not sending out images or too many links in that first email and you don't go overboard with the volume called outreach. And cold email is completely, will be around for a long time.

And what would you say to agencies that have started the first cold email outreach campaign? Because we see it a lot of times in our agency blueprint program where we teach these methodologies and, and they say, oh, I'm not getting many responses or it doesn't work. And one of the key things I found is people don't measure correctly like the metrics or they run a campaign for two weeks and think it doesn't work because they're not having got enough follow up sequences or maybe the the domain's not getting in the inbox or should we put in too many links in the email as well? So what would you say the key things are to people where they've run a campaign and they might have used instantly and then they've quit it or stopped because the port didn't work?

Yeah, what I would say is you can't necessarily expect your very first campaign. Like you just come up with one campaign on the spot and you launch that and it works right away. Like with any type of acquisition method or even advertising, you'll have to try a couple of different angles, different copy, different targeting. You're not going to be most likely not going to be successful right away with your first campaign as you're figuring this channel out. So what I would say for anybody who's launching their first campaign, just take advantage of our split testing feature. So for example, when you're launching a campaign, for the first step you can create an A, B and the C variation. Then you have different copy, different messaging for each variation and quickly find out which message resonates the most and what's getting replies and then make sure to launch it and then go back to the data like you said, James, go back to the data, analyze that and you'll see exactly which brings in the most opportunities. And don't give up if your first campaign doesn't work right. If you run a Facebook ads campaign or LinkedIn ads campaign, most likely your first campaign is not going to work either. You just have to figure out the messaging split test, look at the data closely and once you have the leads coming in, make sure also to respond to them quickly. It's kind of a mistake. I see the lack of them speed to lead. You can, when the positive replies are coming in into the inbox, univox, reply to them quickly. Because if you only reply to them, if you get a positive reply on a Wednesday and you only reply on the first day, that lead has turned cold. So just install the Instantly app on your phone. You'll get an immediate notification when a positive reply comes in. Or you can also activate the AI Inbox manager which will reply to the positive leads for you. Yeah, so based on previous conversations on what you responded to a positive lead, it will figure out what to what to respond. So that will put it on autopilot. You can still do it manually. That's the most reliable way. There's still an experimental feature, the Inbox manager, but yeah, do that. So I would say, you know, don't give up if Your first campaign doesn't work. Split test, launch that, try different messaging, add two free follow ups and yeah, then also you have to do some volume. You can't send out 300 cold emails and expect something to work right away. Right. You can send out 300 cold emails and expect a 5 or 10k a month client right away. It does take some effort and time.

Yeah, I agree with that and I think obviously you're a bigger expert than me on email outreach but I remember when I first started my agency 10 years ago with Ronald James, cold email was like a thing where I worked in an S3 style group recruitment agency and they never did cold email, it was always called call. And when I started learning email marketing and cold email outreach, one of the subject lines I learned was quick question and which I still use to this day. It was like quick question first name.

Or just quick question.

And even the little granular things like making sure the subject line is correct and then making sure in the body copy you're not like just selling yourself as such. It's more about giving value to the prospect of what's in it for me. So when I'm opening a cold email it's like what can, what are you doing to benefit me? And what is even that intrigue. But one of the key things is yeah like you said is volume because people are maybe got a list of 50 to 100 potential clients. It's just never going to be enough.

Because you need more than that.

Yeah. What would you say the percentage conversion rate is in general? Because I know it's very broad but what would you say reply rates like a positive reply rate on an offer. What would generally that'd be so let's.

Say a good benchmark 1 to 2% positive reply rate. So if you're sending out a thousand cold emails, should expect between 10 to 20 positive replies to come back. And then let's say, let's say you get 10 positive replies and not everybody is going to turn into a meeting. Maybe they lose interest, maybe you haven't responded fast enough. But you should be able to book in 50% of the people that replied positively into a call on the, on the calendar. So that's a benchmark to aim for.

That's cool. So there's quite a few people, I've just done a poll there, there's, there's 28 of you don't use cold email software at all. Which I think if you definitely are an agency owner, you've got your own business, you need to be Using cold email. Because the actual cost of sending me an email and even just to pay for your subscription, all it takes is just one client over a course of 12 months and you've probably still even got a 400x return on investment of your strategy. So it's definitely a strategy that should be the holy grail in any business that starts. You want to at least have one of those as your client acquisition system, at least part of cold email. So, yeah, whilst we go through this webinar, I definitely recommend checking out instantly AI if you haven't signed up already. Nils has been kind enough to offer us a 10% discount for everyone that's attending this webinar. So if you use the code underneath Blueprint 10, I just popped that in the chat, then you'll get 10 off your monthly subscription. And yeah, what was really interesting, Nils, which I didn't even know you developed, was the AI response to the speed to lead is a very crucial thing. I think we both watched a, or read a scientific paper on this. About five minutes is the key time to apply to a lead. If not, I think it's a 95 chance that you'll never close that lead. It was something crazy like that. So what's been the impact with the AI auto response? Like, has that really helped people convert more leads, do you think?

Yeah, definitely. Like, the faster response the better, obviously, if you do it as a human and you just, you know, do it from your phone, you can do it on the go. If you respond as a human, that will be the most reliable way. But let's say you're not around or you don't want to deal with this right now, just activate the AI inbox manager and can respond for it. Like the quicker respond the better, obviously.

What would you say the best way is to nurture the lead. So let's say you get. So I put it into three buckets. So I would always say like, no. Like when a client comes back and says, go away, don't want your campaign, or I'm not interested in your service, then you've got maybe replies which are probably like some of the important ones that people leave is they might say, love what you do, James, but just not right now. And then you've got yes replies which obviously you need to be instant on. Like first five, ten minutes you want to ideally manually reply. I think a really good point you said, which is what you've developed, which is an app to get a notification. We, I think we have also Xavier plugged into Slack, so We run our full business through Slack so we'll have a lead channel with cold email outreach and then it comes in it says new lead is replied. So if you're not using just a mobile app I definitely recommend plugging in Xavier with with Slack just so because if you're in Slack every minute of the day or you've got your team in there to reply to the leaders is important but how would you manage the nurture? So the maybe replies.

Yeah just keep following up with them. Maybe if they said maybe they need some more convincing, some more selling sent them some case studies, tell them more about what you do and then just be pleasantly persistent from there just don't lose track of track of them. You can just apply some filters in the Unibox you see everybody that's you can mark them as interested. You put a custom status that says maybe but hasn't booked a meeting yet and just apply that filter and just keep hitting them up. Provide some value like slight bump, follow up and take it from there. I think do it as a daily habit.

And one thing we teach in the program which I say Nils is once you've got your master sheet of your potential clients you can work with so you've got a big Google sheet where it's got all of the niches and all the email addresses, the points of contact. I always say run a campaign every 90 days so you might run a sequence like your first campaign is. It's normally the first message that you A, B or C test and then the rest of the normally just follow up page if you get the message, just seen it slip through the cracks just chasing the one last time.

Yeah the follow ups can be super simple. Like I told you before, before this call I looked at the 150 best performing email campaigns. Also random food, chat, GPT maybe to see some patterns. Also looked at just myself and I was surprised on how simple the follow ups are. So it's nothing. It's not really rocket science. It can be anything from you know, just thoughts, question mark or first name. You know very dynamically insert the first name question mark. It can be it's a really short. Yeah quite short or hey first name. Are you the right person to discuss this with or is there somebody else at company name I should be reaching out to. Some other follow ups that seem working. For example funny stuff can also work like gifs can be little penguin running around with a suitcase and saying hey this little penguin is trying to get a hold of you and then you transition into the pitch from there. And also in terms of the campaign, do the first email and then one or two follow ups after that is the sweet spot. Like the optimal amount of steps, like two to three steps in the campaign. Like don't forget to do those follow ups but don't put too many either. Like you don't put five follow ups after. After a while there's a point of diminishing returns where you keep sending emails but they're never going to respond anyway. You see that 91% of the replies coming in the first three steps.

Interesting.

So after that there's no really.

Is this the cold email or you.

Mean the nurture that's on the cold email? Yeah. So that's before the positive reply comes in and the nurture after that. Yeah, you can. I heard some people, they also so can do subsequences as well instead of instantly which means based on a trigger that happens, you add another sequence behind it. Usually people who kind of hack it in a way where they have had a zap which would send it to Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign and then put them into nurture sequence that way. So we have the built inside of instantly now as soon as you mark it as interested it will put it into that subsequence and gradually follow up and nurture them. You can send them more case studies, a follow up and build it out that way. It's all automated.

Yeah, I like that actually. So I think that would be a better way to handle the nurtures. Especially for recruitment agency owners that are on this call, it is just a matter of timing. So for them to win a client, they're just waiting for an employee to leave or a job opening to come up and then they want to think of our recruitment agency is the next in line. And if we're sending a message to a potential hiring manager at the same day someone's handed in their notice, it's going to be a lot more higher chance to convert that cold email just because it's just a timing thing. So sometimes which is what I say is always running campaigns continuously because yeah, it's the 1 to 3% rule of like that's the amount of clients that are potentially looking to use an agency right now that would reply but you don't know when that time is throughout the year. So that's why you've got to consistently run different new campaigns because especially for recruitment agencies it's not about they might just use the service one off. It's always going to be Just about timing when they've got job openings. So I always say one new campaigns every quarter or so to the list. Because people that ignored the first campaign doesn't mean they're not interested. It's just not interested right now. And they don't even reply because you.

Can repurpose, recycle that initial list and just hit them up again. Yeah, and just exclude the already interested ones. Then with that nurture campaign that I talked about with the subsequence, you can even, you know, maybe do a Hail Mary 30 days later after, do some follow ups for the nurture and then like 30 days later you sent the next one maybe then the timing is right.

Yeah. And there's a few questions in there, so feel free to ask any questions in the chat whilst we've got nils. So do GIFs and adding signature effect, I think they mean deliverability.

Yeah, so we've seen that GIFs. So GIFs are not recommended in the very first email. I always recommend the first email to be just plain text. Ideally not. No links, no images. The signature, you can add some form of signature, just keep it as plain text. This will give you just the highest likelihood of landing in the primary folder. But then for the second step in the campaign when you already have landed in the primary folder, that second step can be a GIF or can be a link if you really want to use a link in that first email. Sometimes a Google Drive link or Calendar link can work sometimes as well. But just recommend first step plain text and then second step you can use gifs without hurting your deliverability too much.

Yeah, it's a good answer. That's what I've always said from day one is black and white text first email. Just the goal is to get in the inbox first.

Yeah. Get your foot in the door with that plain text email and then you can work on the leads from there.

It's interesting and Randy says any future plans for being able to attach thumbnails or other media in the sequence with entrepreneurs in your email deliverability? Is that the same question?

Yeah, so that's a similar question. GIF thumbnails you can already insert into the cold email. But I wouldn't recommend it for the very first step like I mentioned, like this funny, funny GIF follow up. You can add this in the second step.

Yeah, it's funny. One of our members in the program actually run a cold email campaign and said it wasn't working. And I said when you really drill down into it, what she was doing was she was Sending a loom, just a generic loom video on the first email with like a link and then a signature with the website and everything else.

Yeah, that's a bit too many links, too much money. Images also, you know, sometimes people send me their cold email copy and it's all like, it's images, it's different fonts, it's different colors. So just keep it super simple. Like I mentioned this data set that I looked at of the best performing campaigns, I was really surprised at the simplicity. Like the best performing one. I'm not going to go into details but I'm going to tell you about the high level structure is it's literally three sentences. So it's just the first is like hey first name, like hey there. And then the first sentence is what they offer. Second sentences, we can do this for the company. And then the third sentence is the call to action. So, you know, interested to hear more or I'm just going to call about this. And it's just so simple, it's so easy to digest. You can look at it in five seconds and know what it is about. And really the simplicity, you can scale it that way. So if you have writer's block and you're setting up your sequence and maybe you're overwhelmed, you know, sometimes I look at it as well and let's just see the blank page. I don't really know what to say. Even though I've done it quite a few times setting up a cold email campaign, I just go back to like three sentences, super simple and just set it up that way. Set up two follow ups and launch that campaign. Like don't, don't overthink it. Yeah, don't take too much time with that. You'd be surprised how simple the best performing campaigns are. Even though we talk about AI and AI can be super useful, we're talking about maybe complex workflows with clay, you have the AI prompts inside of instantly. But if you're just launching your first cold email campaigns and you just want to get your first five or 10 clients from Cold email, you don't have to be a Legion expert really just focus on launching first campaign and sticking with that simplicity.

Yeah, that's really great.

I'd say sometimes I see people a bit overwhelmed about that.

So yeah, that's awesome. And that goes us into the segue. Let's talk about an agency that's like 20k a month or above and they've done the first basic outreach, but really they want to cover the market and be a Little bit more strategic and in depth in terms of customized personalized email campaigns. And one of the key things that we're doing with Clay.com and instantly Nils, which works really well, is we have the Clay searching for live job openings of companies that are looking to hire. And then it will run this sequence in Clay where it would find the job, find the right hiring manager on LinkedIn, find the email address, verify the email address, then ChatGPT and prompts would personalize the email outreach with what job they're hiring, the key skills and everything else with the follow up sequence. Then it runs it all in Instantly. Is that, have you seen many people starting to do this now with linking clay.com with instantly?

Yeah, seeing more people using like Clay for you know, the advanced copy generation, like hyper hyper targeted and sending that to Instantly as a campaign. For some of our internal campaigns we also use Clay. It's a great tool, just have to be right. You have to be kind of an expert at it. If you're looking at the workflow in some, some campaigns getting us 20, 30 positive replies a day, what I would say, however, if you're more like starting out and like I said, you just want this first five to 10 clients, you can also use the AI prompts, which is in a way a simpler workflow, but you can still use the personalization. So when you're inside of the Instantly campaign and you have the lead overview, it's going to be a little brain icon and you just click on that, select all the leads and you can run some prompts there as well. So for example, if you have the LinkedIn company description or the LinkedIn description of the person or the website or any other info, you can use that as an input. Then run a prompt and say, you know, for example, one of our campaigns is take the LinkedIn description, company description, and based on that come up with three different outreach ideas for this company that we offer them or based on that, come up with a personalized first line, an icebreaker. So you can do that in a, in a super simple way inside of Instantly as well. Yeah, so the good thing about that is also it's crowdsourced. So all the thousands of Instantly users going in there, people share their prompts and if it's good, it gets uploaded. If they're bad and the outputs are bad off that specific prompt, then it gets downloaded. So you'll see some of these AI prompts inside of Instantly have been run millions of times. So they're kind of vetted by our users. And you can play around with that as well.

That's really cool. Yeah. So like with clay.com. yeah. One of the key things is I wouldn't advise that or just an agency just starting out. It would be someone that is. You already had a level and what I would call have like an OPS VA or someone that can actually set this up for you because it does get a little bit complex. So you want to make sure that you have someone that can actually do that. For instance, agency blueprint, we actually supply operations integrated VA's that are trained on all these technical inputs and the playbooks that you use for clay. But this is like what we call cold email 2.0. So like let's just get the fundamentals right. When you first campaign, get that consistently dialed in and then as you scale your agency, you can be a little bit more clever with leveraging ChatGPT speed to lead. So like finding out who is hiring right now. And as soon as that live job comes in, you run this playbook that we've got and the chances of converting that lead are going to be a lot higher because it's. As soon as they've posted the job advertisement, you're already connecting in with the hiring manager and sending a personalized campaign. So that can be really, really powerful. So a few more questions. Here is an option to follow up with a WhatsApp message if the number is provided by us or any other platform. Or are you just sticking to email sequences only?

Yes, so for now we're just sticking to email sequences. What you can do is when you get that positive reply inside of the unibox, you'll be able to see the custom fields and then from there you can also just pick up the number and call from there. But not in an automated way for now. For WhatsApp or a phone or SMS.

Yeah, I think for WhatsApp and stuff like it would just be the nurture sequences. So once you get a reply, the whole idea of cold email outreach is just to get the reply, get the conversation going. So I'm going to win you the.

Client, get people to raise their hand and then you work from, from there you can call them up. WhatsApp, SMS all works. You can go to their LinkedIn as well. Right. It would be more manual step. But to get the positive reply, make sure you also connect to them on LinkedIn.

Yeah, that's probably the biggest takeaway is people need to realize is you don't sell oversell on the email and tell them everything about your company. It's to create a conversation and then it's picking up the phone potentially. Yes, you reply to the lead but call the lead because then it's a warm lead. So you're not cold calling. You are following up with a person that has raised the hand. So less is more in emails and Nils has proven that with the the studies they've seen on the highest performing campaigns, less is more. The more that you look like less like a cold email and it's as if you just typed it yourself, the more higher I think the response rate would be.

That's right.

It was an interesting one. You said off camera Nels was the subject lines. So a lot of people talk about subject lines and what are the best converting subject lines that are going to get the open rates. But you shared like an interesting study with that.

Yeah. So the subject lines, they don't matter as much. Right. Quick question has obviously been around for a long time. Maybe that would be my first go to. But if you have writer's block you don't know exactly what to say in that subject line. Quick question is fine. You can also just use you know dynamically insert their first name or like the company name and the new company name. So really don't or just first name. Thoughts question mark. It's all like super simple subject lines. Like if you were to send an email manually like what would you say in that subject line? Think about it a little bit that way as well. Like you said, like don't oversell in the cold email. Like if you were to send this to somebody one on one, what would you say in that cold email to talk about your services and make that introduction. Same with subject lines. Just don't make it too promotional or salesy. Like don't use spam words like guaranteed or sales or boost or you know all these, all these things. So don't stay away from these words.

Interesting. That's very good. And Michelle asks if you're getting 97 plus open rate which is very big. I've never seen that statistic before and have run several campaigns a thousand plus leads across a few different markets but I'm not getting any. Yes replies only maybe what would you what would be the next things you would tweak to a B test further? I think you need more context on this.

Yeah, yeah, I've seen this question before. So it looks like you have good deliverability. Like you're landing in the inbox. People are seeing your cold email. But if a thousand plus leads have seen it and you're not getting any yes replies yet. There must be a mismatch with your copy. Maybe the copy is too wordy, it's too difficult to read. Maybe it's a. It's too much of a block of text. People can digest it. Maybe your offer doesn't resonate with who you're reaching out to. So I would say like change to copy, like a B test that. Try something completely different than what you're currently sending out and then maybe also like double check if the people that you're reaching out to, the leads, the contact list are the right people. Maybe let's say you're only contacting CEOs and founders, but maybe the actual decision makers or the people who would respond to this cold email, other people in the company, maybe an HR director or CFO or whoever it may be. So it looks like a copy or a targeting issue, but it looks, but the deliverability subject line looks all good in that case.

Yeah, I mean for me ubermats 97% plus is that must be like one of the highest.

Yeah, that seems a little bit odd.

But yeah, especially if it's a thousand.

Usually it's around like yeah, 50 to 60% 70 is also possible operate.

But yeah, I mean whilst we're live on the call, obviously there's only so much we can dive into Michelle. But if you, you just paste in the, the chart what your first email is and what the market is that you're trying to reach out to. So then I can. We could probably give you a little bit of few pointers on that but hopefully those answers have helped you a little bit. Hey Cheryl, I was just about to answer your other question as well. So you asked firstly, does the system count an out of office automated email as a response in the reply analytics?

No.

Very good. Because I remember using the first cold email language tool I ever used. Mills was. What was it called? My memories went blank now. I actually can't remember now. Quick mail. Quick mail. And yeah that was cool back in the day. It was very simple like platform. Are they still around or not?

Uh, yeah, I think so. Yeah they've been around for, for a long time. They're kind of the.

Oh geez man.

2020, 2012. I still was going to high school back then.

Yeah, it was a quick mill and then I tested a woodpecker as well. But I, I like quick mill back in the day but instantly it's probably been the. And I'm not just saying that because we're friends as I, I used, I used Instantly. So, so you know our story was we were already using Instantly a lot in our agency for probably two years before I, I met Nils in Dubai a few months ago and we actually teach that part of the client outreach in our program, the agency blueprint and talk a lot around instantly. So then obviously we met a few months ago through a mutual friend in Dubai and Dubai is a great thing for that. So you meet a lot of other like minded entrepreneurs that are successful and got the right mindset and then Nils literally just lives five minutes away from me and it's, it's just crazy that you bump into all of these people that are like minded and, and got the right ambition. So yeah, I mean that was a, that was a, a good way of like how we introduced to each other and now we spend a lot of time together, play paddle and network. We do a lot of business masterminds together with other friends friends in the group who all have different businesses and everyone always needs called email for, for sure.

That's also cool. Like right. We live so close to each other and like just on Saturday text me hey, a live webinar on Monday. So yeah, of course, why not?

Yeah, it's great. Yeah we've got over 100 plus people live still on the webinar which, which is awesome. So Shovel asks. I've got 12 email domains and instantly now my personal opinion, I feel you don't need 12 email domains.

Yeah, it depends how much volume. Volume you're sending 12 email domains is, is quite a bit. So you're probably going to have like 36. How many is that? Yeah, 36 accounts sending accounts. So yeah, you can send a good amount of volume. Some people have more, more than that even. It depends how much volume you want to send.

I think just to give you context Nils for especially what we teach in the program, I teach a niche within a niche. So I say you want to be micro niched in your recruitment agency. So typically when you build your client market map there should be run around 2,000 to 3,000 companies. Okay. And then I would say get two points of contact, maybe three in a push. So normally on average there should be 4,000 to 6,000 email addresses that you're running campaigns to. So for 4 or 6,000, how many domains would you recommend?

Yes, so let's say well first of all I recommend to set up secondary sending domains, right. Let's say your main domain, your main brand is recruiting.com. then I would set up secondary sending domains like try recruiting.com, meet recruiting.com recruiting recruitingpro.com all these little variations and then for every secondary sending domain you can set up free email inboxes under it. And so let's say try recruiting.com My name is like it's Nils Schneider. So Nils Schneiderryrecruiting.com and.schneiderecruiting.com and so on. And then for every email account you can send 50 cold emails a day. So let's say for one domain you have free email accounts. Each one can send 50, so three times 50, 150 a day. So in your example it would take you roughly 20 days of sending to reach all 3,000. If you're sending 150 a day. Yeah, but you can do it much faster. The more domains you set up, the faster you can reach more people. And you also have a backup. Right. Sometimes it's obviously the nature of cold outreach. Sometimes the domain maybe gets burned or you can't use it anymore. It's always good to have some backup and diversify that a little bit.

So yeah, and you have now because we used to say use warm up inbox to warm the domain but you have the feature already in the software now.

Yeah, yeah. So we have, we have the biggest warm up pool and the most diverse pool in the industry. So over 1 million inboxes just interacting with each other, talking with each other, which over time builds up your reputation of the domain for deliverability purposes. And yeah, it's just, it's a network effect. Right. The bigger the warmer pool, the, the more diverse it is, the more different players are interacting with each other, different domains and that helps with deliverability. So it's included. You can warm up an unlimited number of sending accounts. Just click the little flame. You don't really have to do anything. It's all, you know, the conversations are AI generated and we'll go back and forth, just click the flame, just leave it on and then you're good to go.

Yeah, I mean it's amazing how much the technology has advanced even probably the last two, three years because it was never that feature. And I know there's, I think a lot of people get frustrated knows is like the, the D mark settings and the TM settings because still to this day you have to go into Google and then, or you go daddy account.

And then I remember there was a nightmare the first time I had to, I had to do this when I was just starting out when cold email a few years back and I saw this spf, dkim, dmarc. We do provide Some comprehensive guides and obviously we have a team of 28, you know, people on the team that help through live chat. But yeah, the good news is just this week we're going to be launching a feature where you can just get your domains and email accounts all inside of instantly. So you never have, never going to have to worry about, you know, pasting in the DMARC and the SPF code into your DNS settings and the dkim. So it's all going to be automated, thankfully. So that's, that's big news.

That's an awesome announcement.

Like you're the, you're the first to hear about it publicly. So we're gonna be tomorrow or Wednesday if all goes well, we're gonna set that live.

So big. Yeah, I mean I know a lot.

Of people have been frustrated with that tech setup and sometimes they don't do it and it's just best practices. Your deliverability is going to be better. We just automate all of that.

That's so big because I think that'll it stops a lot of the people that aren't techies that where they think.

Not that it's also tedious. Tedious work even if you're technical.

That's amazing announcement. So very exciting. Okay, so Shovel says PS I don't send any links, gifts, photos, anything, just plain text. Cool. Oh, she said she's still ending up in spam.

Yeah, so. And the emails are three plus years old even. Yeah, I would try some, I would buy some new domains, set up some new domains, try different copy as well. Even if you're using plain text, hit up a different target audience. I would, you know, change the copy and change the wording as well. You mentioned, you know, you've been using the same domains for three years. Maybe you've been also sending the similar messaging. You have to switch up the messaging as well after a while. If you continue to send out the same messaging, it will kind of leave a fingerprint or on it and you have to switch it up. So I would say get brand new domains if you're having issues with the current domains, it's only 10, 10, 11 bucks. And then try some new copy as well.

That's cool. Randy's saying that's big news. Can we transfer our domains and emails from our current host over to instantly?

Unfortunately, unfortunately not. That's not going to be possible. It's just for, for brand new domains and email accounts. That's cool.

Okay, so Michelle, I'm going to quickly look at your copy and, and I'll give my advice from from the recruitment side and Knowles can give his from cold email side so you'll you could spend hours tearing your hair out reviewing creative portfolios industry backgrounds and reading creative ideation copy only to interview 10 of orange creams from New York. Yeah I mean this is like creative outreach but so like my initial feedback on this is it's just too much too wordy trying to be too creative as such and then you put in using 10 plus years of experiences design contact I started my social recruitment agency too okay take this advice as it's not meant to be harsh but no one cares what you do and the same as when I say I've started my agency 10 years ago and we did this, this and this like no one cares about that. It's what's in it for me so they don't that your 10 years experience as a design and content creator means nothing to them and they don't care that you've just started your first recruitment studio so it would be like what can you benefit to them so a infants office treating and core team of creative within my recruitment agency it helps stress on time for a creative agencies increase accuracy yeah I you need to just change the language to like how it benefits them not the ab of like what you've done with your agency because it sounds like it's great what you've done but people don't care about that so if you need a team of creative within your recruitment process to fast track your it's so wordy like from how you're saying this I just I still don't understand what you actually offer Michelle so I would scrap that and go straight to what Neil says in terms of short and sweet and I would start a campaign now just with the MPC so most placeable candidates so you pitch to creative agencies a content creator or a designer so just say how many years experience they've got their experience in projects, what salary they're looking for, where they're located. Would you like to see their profile question mark or you looking to hire I would just go something along those lines but what would your feedback be Nils on this one?

Yeah so I would also make it more concise right now it's quite wordy I'd imagine a very busy CEO or decision maker maybe you're not going to have time to read all of it I would maybe even take just take that and maybe put it into chat GPT and say make this more concise it will already strip down a lot of the Words then how I would structure it it sounds like I would call out so you're having 10 plus years of experience. Instead of saying that I would instead point to a specific case study. Maybe another company that you worked with and you said we helped them place XYZ candidate in this in this time frame something very specific so that can also relate to them. And then at the end what I'd say the call to action is not that clear like the last sentence need.

To tell you more.

Yeah so make it very easy for them to say yes or to respond. It can be as simple as interested to hear more question mark. Bad idea to jump on a 15 minute call to discuss this more or mind if I share more info. We can also say you know on a quick call I can show you some more ideas for company name are interested to schedule something in. So make the call to action also very clear.

Yeah.

And then a specific case study I would add that in there and then maybe the intro the first line break. It could be a question or your value prop or an AI generated personalized first line. Yeah because I would just remove a lot of the words and keep that turn this into like a free sentence email and that's what I would do first.

That's a really good bit of advice and I would say you've either got a really creative copywriting yourself Michelle or Chachi BT's done this because this is just like it needs to look like it's from business owner A business owner sending an email like you've put like a too much effort where it's like over polished and oversold and yeah like I'm not saying it's really bad. I'm just giving you feedback on call looks, call to action and what the benefit is and that's it. Like even subject line people are like a box of chocolates first name like no, just I wouldn't recommend that subject line and definitely not. We are currently adding a discount offer to see if this works. It's just it's the copy. It's not your service that needs discounted because I'm sure you're great in the service you deliver so you don't need to put a discount offer in there at all. It's just changing the parts that we said I think and then that should work. So Jamie asks thought on having a signature with your LinkedIn link or website.

Link So I wouldn't direct if you're just starting out with your first cold email campaigns I wouldn't add the LinkedIn or the website link yet in the signature. If you have a couple of campaigns running already then you can add that later in there. But yeah, it depends on the situation. Really bad if you're just starting out. Good. If you already have some campaigns running and you can add the website link there definitely like in the second or third email when you're following up, you can also say hey, here's my LinkedIn if you need some more info, have some case studies on there or the website link or you know, a YouTube link to an interview that you did or some valuable asset, something like that, you can add that later on in the sequence.

Yeah and, and one of the key things which we help with someone else was they were putting a candy link on the first email and I said don't do that.

No, generally don't do that.

Adam says welcome Adam, I think you're in agency blueprint program so I recognize the name. What are your thoughts on using Spin Tax in the emails? Does it screw up the A B testing? Does it improve deliverability?

Yeah, so generally I recommend spintax for everybody. Spintex is a certain way to format the text so it will automatically generate different variations of the text. So for example we talked about the call to action at the end, you know you can. It'll automatically rotate between whatever you put in. So let's say interested to hear more or want to do a 15 minute call or mind if I share more info? For the first email that goes out, it sends the first variation. For the second email that goes out, second variation. So it helps. You have a lot of variation inside of a cold email copy which always helps with deliverability. I would say though like Spin Tax and a B split testing you can really use together.

It's.

It's too much variation. You're not really going to know which which text works. So just pick a B split testing or Spin Tax. I just pick one of the two. Cool.

Subarna asks I'm still confused with sending emails as Gmail allows us to send over bulk emails. So why do we need to send 50 only need to send 50 emails every day? Second, I have started with two domains for now, one main one for sales so a little confusing as well. What's best to do? Of course I need to email as many clients so which is just a few more domains.

So yeah, okay. Yeah. So the reason why we recommend 50 cold emails a day per sending account per inbox is just so you can keep your deliverability high over time. If you just. If you're sending out 500 cold emails in one day from one account, your domain is probably going to get flagged and there's, it's just, there's not going to be much longevity to that, to that account. So just keep it 50 a day. That way you can run this account, this outreach account for weeks and months and do it that way. Instead of sending 500 from one day, have 10 inboxes where you send out 50 a day each.

That's good advice. Okay guys, we've got probably five more minutes left before we hit the hour, so just let me know if you've got any more questions. Like I said before, Nils has been kind enough to give us a 10 discount for everyone that signs up from this webinar. So if you go on instantly AI even there's a free trial as well, right?

So yeah, two week free trial. You can also just, if you just want free warm up, you can just use it two weeks and warm up your domain for free. We also have the lead finder product that I talked about. You have 100 free verified leads. So we up that. So yeah, you can, you can launch your first campaign, basically you have the 100 free leads, you have free warm up, you can, you have 200 active leads. I think in the free trial you can launch your first campaign already or for free. So you can try it out that way, see how you like it. And we do webinars as well and with the Instantly accelerator and obviously you know instantly also very well and you and your team and yeah, let's try that, try it out that way.

So you mentioned, because you've got other products within Instantly now. So what were the other features that you can use instantly for?

Yeah, so the main thing is now the delete finder. We have a database of over 185 million contacts in there. You know, just select who your target audiences, select them, push that into a campaign and we have the Unibox. From there you can manage, it's like a mini CRM. From there you can manage all your leads. So let's build out as a CRM but you will see all the positive replies that are coming in and managed from there. So yeah. Okay.

And another question from Jamie. Do either of you have any tips on finding email data for recruitment? Sometimes I find some easy to search lead pools can be saturated in terms of CTOs, head of data in London, many of them say they get so many emails per week. So thinking of other obvious less titles. So okay, so what your question was Jamie, was the hiring managers for Your niche, you're looking, you're obviously doing tech recruitment in London and you're trying to find the heads of data and ctos. And what he's basically saying is everyone's got that email address. So those CTOs are getting lots of emails from recruitment agencies using the service.

Yeah, I would say, I was just talking about this the other day. So let's say, you know, in a competitive niche and the example was for E Comm stores or Shopify stores there, you know, the CEOs, the founders of these stores get a lot of emails. But think about the other decision makers in that process. Maybe it's a partner or investor, maybe I don't know your niche exactly, but maybe you can also just put into ChatGPT say, hey, what are similar titles to CTO or who could be other decision makers? So just hitting those up, you know, there's so many other titles besides CTO and CEO and founder that you can get a hold of and get your foot in the door.

Very cool. And what I would say to that, Jamie, would be I would just be doubling up on cold email and LinkedIn. So don't assume so. One of the key things people is they make up these stories in the head of thinking, oh well if everyone else is emailing them then it's not going to work for me. Send the email, tweak the email, test it again. And then I would double up on LinkedIn. So I'll be connecting on LinkedIn personally, I would be doing video outreach, so I'll be doing LinkedIn selfie videos as well as cold email. So that that wouldn't side by side. Because then you can also use the cold email to say, hey James, I also just connected with you on LinkedIn. You might see the connection request or the message from there and I'm just following up again on email. So then what it creates is what we call an omnipresence in marketing. So and one thing I didn't mention, what we teach us in the program, I say when we're running an instantly campaign, we get the list and we send the campaigns. We run that CSV file in LinkedIn automation using Dripify and we're connecting in with the hiring manager at the same time we're sending the emails. So when the hiring manager receives the emails they can say, oh well, I seen James on LinkedIn, this is the guy. And then I'm sending a cold email follow up sequence as well as a LinkedIn dripify sequence. But I'm also recognizing the say on driverfy or you may have spotted an email that I've just landed in the inbox. So you can run the campaign side by side and let's say one of them comes back on LinkedIn, it would still mean they've maybe opened the email on instantly on the cold email, but then they've just, you just came front of mine on LinkedIn. So they work in tandem. So especially the ones that, where you're saying they're getting lots of emails. Jamie, I would use both strategies for that. And Nafesa, what is the usp if someone is moving from Apollo to Instantly.

So I would say, you know, Apollo is a good lead source. They've been around for seven, eight years. It's a good lead source. I would say, you know, our advantage over Apollo is sometimes the issue with Apollo, other lead sources out there is let's say you have a thousand leads, you export them, but then you realize that 40% or so of them, 40, 50%, you can actually call email. Maybe the data is outdated, maybe those email addresses don't exist at all. So that's why if you take it from another lead source, you'll always have to verify them. Because if you cold email leads that, that are going to bounce, that don't exist or that are outdated or don't work there anymore, you're going to land, you're going to run into spam issues. So the difference between really with Instantly is we only charge you for verified leads. So first of all we verify the contacts for you, we run this verification layer and then on top of that we only charge you for the verified leads. Apollo just tells you the leads, whether it's verified or not, whether it's usable for a cold email campaign or not.

Very cool.

Yeah. And also the simplicity, right. You can just, I remember when using Apollo would have to like export the CSV would have to put it into a verification tool, would have to wait until everything's verified, export it again, put it into a campaign. Here you can just select your filters. You know, CTOs in London select all, push into campaign, write the copy and launch it. So it's going to save you quite a bit of time. Or if you have a team member doing it, it's going to save their time as well. So yeah, we only charge for verified leads and it's much simpler and faster to set up that way.

Awesome. Cool. Well, I think that's bang on the hour, ladies and gentlemen, so hopefully that gave you a good insight. Cold email outreach about about Instantly's software platform and the Importance really of cold email even in 2024, linking that with AI and tools like clay.com are going to be very powerful. So. And the actual cost to run cold email is still the cheapest lead generation tool out there. Like there's, there's nothing cheaper than sending an email.

Yeah, like with a tech stack of 2, 300 bucks a month you can, you can really reach out to thousands of potential clients, prospects, you know, here sometimes at dinners. I see also some, some quite young guys that just started with the agency, maybe they didn't have much money when start starting out and they obviously rely on cold outreach to, to get the first clients and they say hey, like somebody has a creative agency and said hey, like my first eight clients I got it with instantly and literally cost. Like it's 97amonth for the outreach plan, a bit more for the, for the leads or I was walking in the marina, somebody stopped me and said hey, you the founder of instantly. And they showed me their phone with the calendar. They had like three, four sales calls booked a day. So that was cool to see. It's just, yeah, it's cheap and it's simple to set up.

Yeah, awesome. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I hope everyone found that useful. There will be a recording going out very soon. It'll probably be published on YouTube soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that. Like I said, if you haven't took advantage of trying instantly, like I said, 14 day free trial, use the, the code Blueprint10 in the offer code so you can get your discount if you do decide to keep it past the 14 days. And yeah, we'll catch you on the next one. And thank you very much for your time, Dom.

Yeah, thanks for having me. That was, was fun. Good session. Thanks guys, thanks, bye.