This Cold Email Campaign Made Me $1.8 Million (STEAL IT)

If you could replicate this cold email strategy I'm about to show you, you could make millions of dollars. My name is Matt, and in this video, I'm going to show you the cold email campaign that did over $1.8 million in sales from my agency. And the main things I'm going to talk about are the offer, the list, the script, other things that affect cold email that aren't necessarily cold email itself. And then I'm going to finish it off with how you can do something like this for your business. So let's get started. On my screen here, I have, I guess you could call it a little Miro board going on here. And at the top, we have our four main buckets that have to do with cold email. We have the offer, we have the list, the script, and we're what we're going to call other factors for this video. And there are many. I have a spot for notes and then I have a spot to show you what I did, because that really is what this video is about. But I want to balance what I did with what you should do to be successful for yourself. So over here, I have five main points that I want to talk about for each of these things because in order for it to really be useful and to make sense, you would have to know a little bit about these things. So let's zero in on the offer first. And the thing we need to understand is that our cold email offer is our main leverage point. And if we've gotten all of our business from referrals or our network previously, the stuff that worked on our network and referrals is not going to work on cold emails. Because what are some things that are true? These people that you're emailing don't know you. They've never asked to be emailed. They might not even be in the market for what it is you're offering. They don't trust you. It's all of these things. So that's an uphill battle to climb, right? So you have to be a lot better than you would have if you are trying to sell it to someone your friend referred you to face to face. So we have to ask ourselves the question, how will we stand out? Because not only are we fighting an uphill battle, there's tons and tons of other people cold emailing them too. So how are we going to stand out from the, let's just call it 20 other cold emails they get per day or per week? Let's go for per week just to, you know, be a little Bit generous to ourselves here. How are we going to stand out? And the main way that you stand out is we want to give them something for free. That doesn't necessarily mean free work, although it could. But we want to essentially prove ourselves and give them some value. Give them something that's useful, given something that, you know, will make us stand out, will make them know, like, and trust us. And the easiest way to do that is to center it around a video or a loom. So what I mean by that is, let's just say, hey, my name is Matt. I saw you are an agency owner. We have an agency program that has over 200 clients. And then you say, based on our results and our research in our group, these are the five things that, you know, contribute to agency success. I recorded a short video going over them. Mind if I send it over? Like, that kind of thing, as opposed to, please get on a call with me. I'm desperate. Very important. So the video strategy is very good because you can, number one, you can get a lot more information and you can make it a lot more in depth than you could an email, because the email would have to be huge. Or you can show your face, which is one of the biggest benefits of it. So you're just actually a real person, not some random on the Internet. And hearing your voice is the same thing. It's very, very good. It's very, very important to have something like this because it's the only way you're gonna build trust, stand out, and get a little bit of reciprocity by giving them something for free. The final part is like cold email. By definition, it's right in the name. The leads are super, super cold. And that's not necessarily a good thing for us because cold leads are going to be the most hesitant, most skeptical, most conservative buyers possible. So what we're offering, we really have to be able to explain how for every dollar that they risk. So let's say it's $1,000 what we're offering. Does it have potential to get them 100x or more return on investment? So if they're risking $1,000 if successful, is this going to make them $100,000 or more? And this is not a hard and fast rule. Like 100x is just an arbitrary number. But it's a very good way to be thinking about all of this kind of stuff. It's very, very important. So let's go to the offer and the offer notes. The main thing I'm going to say is the offer is your Highest leverage point this list. Well, as long as the list is relevant and you don't massively screw up the script, you will find success. If you have a great cold email offer, and this is not really exclusive to cold email, having a great offer is always the highest point of leverage in pretty much anything. But especially with cold email, let's just say the next is going to be the list. So I've opened up some of this stuff. I usually exported my lists in Apollo and used a Apollo scraper basically to get them for cheaper. Do that if you want or you can pay and then I clean them with million verifier. So when I was doing it and I'll show you what I was doing after. But you can get and build your list like whatever you really want. So if you want to just do, you know, CEOs in the United States, for example? Let me just show you that CEO, there's 573,000 people with the job title CEO in the United States alone. You can narrow it down further. But that's just an example of how easy it is to get cold email leads these days. The problem with this is it's not updated in, you know, up to the minute real time. I'm not sure how often it's updated. So whatever you do, you want to run it through million verifier. So you'd export a list here, run it through million verifier. And the purpose of that is we don't want to email, we don't want our emails to bounce. So situation where it's bounces, they have like too big of security settings, the email doesn't exist anymore. You know, those are the two main situations. We want to remove those because if our emails bounce, that indicates that our domains that we're sending the cold emails from are spammers basically. And a larger percentage of our cold emails are going to go to their spam and if it's going to their spam, not really going to make any sales, are we? So it's very important there. So build it with Apollo. The three main, in my experience, like the three universal criteria or filters that you use are location, job titles and employee counts. I really prefer the employee accounts. I've had way better success with that at least because you can. A lot of people will do it by revenue and that's fine if it's a public company, like you can kind of just see their revenue. But if it's not a public company, which is most companies right the way that they. This is what I'm trying to say is this is a guess or an estimation at best. And you can really get a better, in my experience, result by sorting through employees. For example, if you're trying to get a small business, you might do, you know, the 3 to 10 employee range. And that's going to give you a much better result for who's actually a small business and who's not. Because if you have under, if you have three employees, you're not really poor or anything, like you have some level of success. And then 10 employees, that kind of implies that they're making a million dollars or less. If you just take the average 100,000 revenue per employee, depends on the industry. It's not perfect either, but this is something that is very, very strong to do. So job title, location, and then the employee count. There are situations like for example, when we go over what I did, you know, I'm targeting e commerce companies using Shopify, right? So if it's that simple for you, like you just if it's built on Shopify, like the Scraper is going to know that. So here's just an example of the situation where that happens. All of these are going to be Shopify stores, but I'll go with that later. So if you can use technologies like, if it's relevant for you, definitely use it. But a lot of this is going to be, you know, guessing at best. Let's just say once you build it with Apollo with the location, the job titles, the employees, you scrape it with an export Apollo or another Apollo scraper, you clean it with million verifier. The next thing, best thing to do is once you build up a list, swap it with friends, swap it with partners, people who sell the same to the same type of customers as you do, but aren't competitive or aren't selling the same service as you. So if you did Facebook ads for E commerce, swap lists with your friend who does email for E commerce or SEO for E commerce and it'll just, you know, you'll get a lot bigger lists a lot faster that way. But it's just one of those things. So let's go. We, we want to export the most accurate list as possible and then we must clean the list. If we don't clean it and a large percentage of our emails back bounce, our deliverability will be absolutely crushed. That's just the reality of it. Very important. So let's go to the script now. So the script is very important. Of course, I said the offer is the most important. And then having the proper list is important. And then the script. I said, as long as you don't screw it up, like, you're good. And that is true. But, you know, most people screw it up. Let's just say so. We want to have it as simple as possible. A lot of people treat this like they're doing like a sales page or they're copywriting. It should be more conversational, like you're actually trying to talk to someone than some sort of marketing copy. As a rule of thumb, I always do 75 words or less. And you just go to like word counter, type it in after. Oops, look at there. That's my script. Gonna ruin the video, ruin the surprise. But so 75 words or less. If it was 78 words or 81 words, like you're not gonna not do it, but just not like 600 words like so many people do. The call to action shouldn't be a, you know, get on a call with me. It should be something centered around that video that we said over here. Do not be fake or hide your intentions. A lot of people will do something really stupid like say they love your content or they love your business, and then you say thank you, and then they try to sell you something. Whoever's teaching people to do that should be shot. In my opinion, that's one of the stupidest things I ever heard. And then the overall structure of the script, you know, intro, offer, call to action, 75 words or less, simple call to actions. The video, we don't need it to be super complicated. The gist of our script should be a simple 75 word or less script that is focused on providing value by sending them a video. Not too complicated. Just, just. We're just gonna go with basis. Never use the word gist in my life. Except for in this situation. The final thing should be other factors. So these play a lot bigger role than a lot of people think. So the first thing you want to do is Google yourself. Like, I run a business now called 1000x leads, so actually Google yourself because a lot of people will receive your cold email, not respond. Google you and see what comes up to see if you're legit or not. And if nothing comes up, that's not going to be a good thing, right? So the first thing you want to do is Google yourself and optimize your search results and pack your search results as much as possible. So in my situation, like in my line of thought, rather the, you know, anything showing up is better than nothing. You want to put your business name in your YouTube video or YouTube name, your Twitter name, your LinkedIn name, you want to have some reviews, you want to have all of this kind of stuff so that something does show up. Very, very, very important because a lot of people are going to just Google you and then not respond and then go to your website and, you know, go from there. Next thing you want to do is click on your website. So where's my website here? So my website is 1000x leads and my main website's not showing up. But this is what my website is. So maybe I got some work to do after this video. But what shows up on your website, you should have a video sales letter or some sort of something like that. You should have something that really explains what your offer is in plain English, all of that kind of stuff. So go to your website, especially on mobile. I'm not going to do mobile for this video just because it's going to be unnecessarily complicated. But go and see what shows up on your actual website and what it looks like and be, you know, honest, be unbiased, because this is very, very important. So people will Google you, they will click on your website and then they're gonna go from there based on what they see. So make sure you have, like I said, reviews. So there's some reviews there, you have some client wins, you have some case studies, you have logos. All of this stuff is very important for your cold email, believe it or not. The next thing you want to do for a couple of different reasons is let's go back to where I was Googling myself. You want to have your name in your YouTube. So like, my name is Matthew Larson, but a thousand X leads is there. So if someone searches my brand, it shows up. Same with the LinkedIn, same with the Twitter. Matthew Larson. A thousand X. So it's very important because a lot of people will Google you. They'll stumble across your LinkedIn or they'll stumble across your Twitter, or they'll stumble across your YouTube and start watching. So if someone goes to my YouTube and starts watching, like, and then 30 days from now, they'll actually book a call, like, that is a very, very common scenario. So these are things that have nothing to do with the list, nothing to do with the offer, nothing to do with the script, but make just as big of impact on your cold email results as anything else. So it's very, very, very important that you do this as well. So basically, right here, a lot of people will read your. Oops, not rad. Read, not Read again your cold email. Not reply. Google you go to your site, check out your content, check out in that way, check out your case studies, reviews, et cetera and then eventually book a call down the road. Make sure they like what they see. Very, very important. So let's get into what I did because we've already gone over the offer, the list, the script and the other factors and we have some notes for each. So now it's, you know, what did I do? So I kind of ruined it already. So we'll go out of order in my situation like this was essentially my cold email script. So let's just copy and paste it in here and let's drag it down a little bit. Let's put it there so it's easier to read. Let's drag all of these down a bit. No problem. So my offer was basically I will make. So let's just put my offer, my landing page. So who is this offer for? This is, this is an important background. This is for E commerce brands running paid ads on Facebook and TikTok like that's who it was for basically. So that's kind of important background. My offer, my landing page will outperform your current landing page by at least 10% in a 30 day a B test or I will give you a full refund in a legally binding contract with no funny business. So that was my offer. So like I said before, what works on cold email is not going to work on or what works on referrals and your network is not going to work on cold email. This is going to be a lot better. And this is example of what I would say a good offer to be honest. So it's for E commerce brands. My landing page will outperform your current one. But you'll notice in my script that I don't go for that immediately. Right. So I said, you know, hey there with their first name because you're going to get their first name from here. I make landing pages to help E commerce brands increase their paid ad conversion rate and lower their CPA cost per acquisition. That's the main result. That's what I do and that's why I'm reaching out to them. So I helped you know, X brand get why we did had over like tons and tons of clients. So I would change this up and I would change this up based on the number of employees because if they have you know, three to 10 employees that it's not going to be helpful if I say like a huge brand that does 500 million a year. But the opposite is also true. If I'm emailing the huge brands, I'll put like we helped another huge brand get y result. We do over 200 landing pages per month. I recorded a six minute loom which is a video going over the top eight things you need to do to make sure your landing page converts oops at 4% or more from cold traffic and Facebook ads. Do you mind if I send this video over Matt? So that is my script and spoiler alert, right? So that was the script that I was using I used instantly for this. So I had, you know, know this is where you'd upload your leads. But there's a lot of tools instantly smart leads. There's some but the script would basically go in here with some spintax and if you don't know what spintax is, you know, beyond the scope of this video, I guess you could say spintax basically, I guess not beyond the scope of this video is if you put, you know, random like this and then you put a bunch of different options. So let's go option A, option B and how you add the spin text is going to be different from based on your cold email software. So if you're not using instantly, don't do this. So what this does is you'll see random here and there's four options what it will do and you'll have usually multiple pieces of spin tax in there. So you might, if you have a thousand x leads here, you might have multiple different things like a thousand xleads. Com, you know, founder, a thousand x leads Matthew Matthew Larson. And the reason that you have a bunch of different options is it'll randomly select it and make different combinations on your emails. So if you just did the same email for everything, very easy for Google or Microsoft or whatever their email service provider is to just see that you're basically sending it to everyone, call you a spammer and ban you. But if you have a bunch of different options like this, it will make you know, if you have enough different options, no two emails will be the same. Because think of it like permutations in high school. That's basically what you're doing. If you have, you know, five different options up here, you know, five different options here, five different options here, five different options here. Eventually you know, there's millions of different combinations of emails plus you have the infinite randomness of their first name. You know, no two emails would be the same. And it's very important for deliverability. So just important note and I Wouldn't consider the, you know, spin tax to be part of my word counter. I wouldn't do like this crap down here. Like that doesn't count. 75 words or less with the actual script. This is 74. Simple as possible, very important. So we kind of did this out of order. But let's go back to what I did for the actual lists and I basically did the same thing. So CMO stands for Chief Marketing Officer, you know, co founder. Because at this level 3 to 10 employees, it's mostly going to be the founder who makes these decisions. As you grow up it'll be different. But this is like what I would be doing. So technologies Shopify. I was sending a ton of these cold emails, like 20,000 a day at the very peak. So I had to expand this target audience very aggressively. But when you are first starting out, you can make it tight and then go from there. So three and eventually I started at three to 10 employees but eventually had to do tons of. Because you work through the market pretty darn quick. So for here you know, 72,000 contacts. There's other spots where you can save their contacts as well and you can basically paid ads. You can basically expand the list of job titles. So this is what I did basically. So location United States because that's where the best cold email laws are in terms of. Founder. Founder CMO Director of Marketing. That's where the loosest cold email laws and regulations are. To go back to what I was saying, just because the in Europe and stuff there's a bit different laws. So it's just like you might get in trouble. Whereas the United States is the most free. That's why I usually stick to the United States on these ones. Employee count three to 10 technologies used. Shopify Let me zoom in on this. I noticed that it's Shopify plus Magento WooCommerce. So you know, 3 to 100 realistically at the end. But these are. This is what I did for all of this stuff. And to be honest, the other factors, like I didn't do like a lot of what I was saying to do. So if I did it probably could have worked out even better for me. So I had a VSL on site. I had some reviews. I had not many case studies. I think I had three case studies out of thousands and thousands. Not thousands thousands, a couple thousand clients. I did not have great PR or search results. Not that I had bad pr, just didn't have it really. I was not super well known in my industry. I my company keyword was very competitive and didn't show up at all without Google search ads because I was competing with all of the landing page building softwares. So it looked super unprofessional, let's just say. So I didn't even do this super well, but it worked pretty pretty good. So I hope this video is helpful. This is the kind of stuff that you're going to need to think about when you are trying to do a cold email campaign. When you get it right, you can really make a ton of money and that's the good news. So if you like this video, like comment and subscribe and I'll see you in the next one.