Five tips for cold emailing best practices.

Hey there, it's Megan Killian of Megan Killian Consulting. Today I'm going to talk to you about cold emailing a little bit. Excuse the sweatshirt, it is cold in Florida today for some unknown reason. So we're going to jump right into it. Everybody knows why cold emailing is so important. You want clients, whether that's because you're in sales or you're an agency owner, freelancer, or consultant. You need money, right, at the end of the day, and therefore you need people to open your emails, respond to them, and book meetings with you. So there's a whole lot that we can talk about in subject lines, and I will make a separate video about that soon. For today, I'm just going to talk about the actual context of the cold email, and a lot of these tips will also work for LinkedIn if you're doing your outreach on LinkedIn as well. So first and foremost, use permission-based openers. If it's the first email in your sequence, one of the key things to do is get permission to keep going. This can improve your reply rate, whether it's a positive or negative, and get you to that vanity metric that you're looking for, for open rates. But it also immediately lets your prospect know that you are respectful of them, their time, and you're going to get their consent before you do anything to or with them. So an example of how I use this in my business, is I will send a first email in a sequence. And the major call to action in that email is, can I send you a 3-minute video reviewing your LinkedIn presence or your website? I'm asking, is it okay for me to keep engaging with you? Do you want me to give you my critique? Do you want my help? And I'm gonna give it to you for free, which rolls me right into the next thing, which is that you are going to add value from the very moment you start engaging with these people. It's especially important when you work in high-end sales, when you are talking to business decision makers, C-levels, that you are respectful of their desire to engage with you by immediately making it clear that you're going to add value. And if you add value in that first email, they know you're probably going to keep adding value throughout the whole process. So an example of this is first email that I sent. Might start with something like, hey Chad, I was checking out QuickPage the other day and I noticed that you don't have a call to action above the fold of your website. Would it be okay for me to send over a video explaining how you can get up to 10 times the amount of leads from your website by adding a clear, concise, and compelling CTA above the fold? I'm asking permission, I'm adding value. The value is that maybe he didn't know. You know, if Chad is the CEO of QuickPage, perhaps he's not looking at the website every day. And if he is looking at the website every day, he might not be a marketing guy that knows that he needs a call to action. And he may not be looking deeply at the metrics of how many leads he's getting from the website. He may not even know that his website should be generating leads for him. So we're gonna do that little bit of education and roll right into it. There are a lot of other ways to add value immediately. You can share tips and tricks. You can send over something for free. Lots of opportunity in there. So that number 3 is make the customer the hero. I will tell you that if you start an email with I, you're almost always making a mistake. It's not about you. Someone who you've never interacted with, who you don't have a relationship with, they don't care about you. They don't care about your business Or your methodology or your product or your services. They don't know you. So they care about them and their business. When you're talking to anyone beneath the C-suite, making them a hero means making them look good to their boss. It is about how they can increase their job security and look good to the person who signs their paycheck. So for example, that could be something like, hey Chris, your company is leaving money on the table by By not leveraging LinkedIn as their number one social outreach. Did you know? And then I insert some stats about LinkedIn, like how often executives log in or how much reach individual accounts have over business accounts. Whatever. I'm going to share something relevant to him. And then I'm going to say something along the lines of, would it make impact for you if you could double the revenue that you're generating? It's going to look good to his boss. Now, when you're talking to a C-level, There's only a handful of things they really deeply care about, right? And it depends which C you're talking to, but CEOs, for example, owners, founders, people who are at their core responsible for the business care about revenue, profit, and productivity. Outside of that, there's not a ton they care about. They want to reclaim their time, they want to have time to themselves, and they want the business to make more money. So when you're talking about making them the hero, you want to keep hyper-focused on those issues and not talk about kind of further down individual criteria. You're gonna talk about outcomes, not the tactics that get the outcome, at least in your first email. Later on in your sales process, your customers, your clients may ask you about the tactics that go into the outcome, but right off the bat, they don't need to know how you're gonna get them more leads or how you're gonna make them more money. They just need to know that you're gonna do that. Number 4 is to follow the 3 C's. Anytime you are writing any type of copy, whether it is for a website or outreach or whatever you're writing for, you need to keep it clear, concise, and compelling. That means clarity is writing so that people can understand it. If you're not familiar with it, go check out Hemingway. I'll put a link somewhere. What they do is Hemingway checks to see what grade level you're writing. I'm gonna give y'all a moment to think about this one. What do you think the average reading level is of people in America? I gotta think about it. It's 5th grade. Okay. For those of us with higher reading levels, high writing levels, we may be called to be a little bit verbose in our emailing. We should not be. Keep in mind that when people open an email, they might spend 30 seconds reading what you wrote to them. So you need to make sure that you're optimizing for that. And that's a best case example, might I add. Really, you have probably 5 seconds to capture someone's attention. And if it's not clear, they have to think about what words mean, you're gonna lose them. Concise is just, again, keep it short, especially in an initial email in a sequence. You're kind of warming the prospect to you. Statistically, most outreach campaigns don't get responses until the 8th to 12th touch. So this first touch, while it's amazing if we get a response and we want to optimize for that as much as we can, we have to be realistic that we're probably not gonna get a response to this first email. So don't dump on them a whole bunch of information. Keep it short and get that permission to continue to interact. And then compelling, right? So you should always have like a CTA, and that CTA should be directly related to human psychology and what influences behavior. If you're not familiar with behavioral marketing, Google that. It'll help you get a head start here. But essentially, you just need to understand what makes people do things. A compelling CTA is not learn more or let's jump on a call. So especially early on, I see a lot of junior sales reps making this mistake where they're reaching out and the first thing they ask someone to do is jump on a 30-minute call with them. We don't know each other and I charge $300 an hour for my time. You want me to give you $150 worth of my time? Why? That first CTA should be something like, can I send you a video? Can I review your social media presence? Would you like a case study? Or, you know, a great one is like if you put together any type of like thought leadership content or trick content. So like for me, I have a long list of email subject lines that my clients can use to get better open rates. I might send that over like, hey, are your emails getting opened? If not, would you like 60 free email subject lines. And then last, just be authentic. You are a human being. The person that you are talking to is also a human being. I don't do business with robots. Do you? Okay. So if you're not doing business with robots, then you need to genuinely connect with your prospects. It is okay to be yourself. And part of that means not grabbing templated emails Off of the internet and inserting your crap into it. It means coming up with something that's genuine for them. I know that we all want to automate outreach, and that we want to make outreach as simple as we can. And there are cases when you can do that, but you need to make sure that you're doing as much personalization as you can. And if someone's really a key strategic account that you want to close, take the time to write them custom emails and don't automate the process at all. Just Reach out and talk to people genuinely and connect with them, and you will be surprised how well that will go for you. Questions, comments, concerns? Drop those in the comments. As always, please like and subscribe to the channel, and if you think a friend could benefit from this advice, send it over to them. Also, for the month of January, I am offering a handful of one-on-one email review calls. So if you would like to do one of those, comment and let me know. I'm going to select five people to do that with this month. Thanks, guys.