Ultimate Cold Email Guide for Life Science Companies

Before we start the episode, Nick and I are doubling down on our YouTube content and this video can be found on our YouTube channel. So head over there to watch the full video. The link is in the description. We've sent hundreds of thousands of cold emails for life science companies that are selling into biotech, pharma and academia. And through running all of these different campaigns, we've generated thousands of leads and meetings for our clients. Yet most life science companies still think that cold email is dead. But I can prove based on these numbers, that is in fact not dead. But what's actually dead is lazy, cold, generic outreach a scientist could spot from a mile away. So in this video, I'm going to break down exactly how we build the infrastructure, write messaging, build lists in order to help actually make cold email work. Let's dive in. So the first thing where I think a lot of people go wrong is they send cold email from their main domain, right? So if your domain was pfizer.com and you're sending messages or emails about pfizer.com, that would be considered your main domain. The problem with this is that no matter how good your cold emails are, some percentage of them will you'll definitely you'll get marked as spam, right? There are people out there who just are going to mark messages as spam if they don't know who the sender is. The last thing that you want to do is have that, you know, those spam complaints be applied to your main domain, where you're communicating back and forth with customers, where you're sending your marketing content from. And so what you want to do is you want to set up a separate infrastructure that is dedicated specifically for cold email. And so in order to do this, you're going to want to get new sets of domains that look like yours that point back to your main domain. You're going to want to set different inboxes up as an email providers from Google and Outlook because oftentimes when you're sending from like Google to Google or Outlook to Outlook, or Google to Outlook or Outlook to Google, the deliverability is quite variable in how those things are applied. So you might get more likely to end up in the quarantine folder, the promotions tab, spam, et cetera. And so you want to have a wide range of different inbox providers that you're sending from. And then as well, you're going to want to make sure that you have all of these domains set up. Because if for whatever reason one of these domains get burned, you can just shut it down and you still have have other ones as the backups that are always running on an ongoing basis. The other thing that a lot of people don't do as well is they don't have what's called email warmup going on an ongoing basis as well. So what email warmup is, is the process of having your email infrastructure and inboxes that you're using for cold email, sending emails back and forth with other people who are in what's called the warmup pool. And that what's happening is you are sort of forcing these inboxes to send messages and get responses and so to Google or Outlook or who going to look like that inbox is getting a certain set of replies. And so what it does is it takes the aggregate reply rate of all of your messages and bumps it up and so it looks like more of your messages are actually getting replied to. And that's what we want. And so you want to have that warmup always going in the background. So let's say you're sending her inbox. Maybe you're sending you know, 15 to 20 warmup emails every day, but then you're sending, you know, 15 to 20 cold emails. Some percentage of people are going to respond to the cold. Most of your warm up emails are going to get responses. And so your aggregate reply rate is much higher than if you only were sending cold emails from those inboxes. And then the other thing that you want to do along the way as well on the infrastructure side is you want to be constantly looking at the reply rates, bounce rates and sort of all of those metrics around each of these different domains and the inboxes within those domains. Seed accounts will let you know did it hit the inbox or where is it in the spam folder, promotions tab, et cetera. And they'll send that information back to you. So then you have a good idea of are my messages lighting as spam? Are they going to the promotions tab? Maybe there's keywords or messaging that I'm using or certain language that's getting these messages caught up with spam. So you want to be checking this on a regular basis as well. And so that's kind of the core concepts around the email infrastructure side. And like if this sounds complex and it sounds like no, I need my IHE team to come and set this up for me, it can be pretty complex and it can be challenging to learn. There's lots of YouTube videos out there that'll teach you how to do this stuff. But alternatively, if you were to say work with succession, we can help set this all up for you and execute these campaigns to get you running. So if you want to chat with us about that, there's a link down in the description below where you can book a strategy pod with us. All right, so now that you've got your email infrastructure all set up, now what we have to do is we have to define the target profile of the types of people that we're going to be going after. The thing that I find most common, when we work with clients and we're trying to hone in on an icp, they tend to just give us a list of titles or like maybe like types of companies. It's like oncology companies and we want, you know, directors of research. And the challenge with that is that that's still so broad. Or if you were to say scientists as a title that you want to go after, the problem with that is, is like there 50 different types of roles that a scientist could fit into. And so you have to get really, really specific in how you're thinking about your list building process. You want to make sure that you get down to the very nitty gritty. Like you want to be looking at the modalities, the therapeutic areas, potentially even looking at what tools or technologies or services are they using already. And you could pull a lot of this stuff from like job postings from company websites, et cetera. And so you really want to get honed in on exactly what that ideal customer profile looks like and build the smallest, most targeted list of those people. Right. So that's kind of like step one is you want to go super narrow. On the flip side, you could also decide you want to go really broad. And the advantages to going really broad are that have a lot of volume at which you could send to. The problem is, is like the messaging is probably not going to resonate as well. And so if you're looking for high reply rates, you need to get hyper specific and targeted on your list building. But if you're looking for I just need volume, then you can go a bit broader. But you want to sort of balance the threshold between this is a general message that's not really going to resonate with that many people. And like this is hyper super specific where it's written just one to one for this person. You're thinking about what the goals are for specific campaign, you'll be able to better understand how you're actually going to go and target campaigns. And so now that you kind of like, understand, like what is that core ideal customer profile that we're going to go after? Then you need to actually go and build those lists. And so when you're building lists, you want to make sure you're using scientifically relevant databases as well. And you likely want to have many different sources of data that you can work with. If you are using like a ZoomInfo or an Apollo, those are fine if it's just searching for titles. But if you want to dig into like what is this specific scientist doing then and what are they doing within their role? You're going to need more, you know, life science focused databases, things like Silence, Gosset, Sinewire, Biopharm, iq, Global data, right? These are the types of tools that you're probably going to want access to in order to actually get relevant data and enrichments for your list. Right? You kind of have this like ICP that we're going after. We're going to get our companies that we're going to be targeting related to that. Then we're going to go build our people list. But then the next step that we have to do is we have to then enrich and get more information about those people. Just because a database has an email address for somebody, that does not mean that that is a valid email anymore. It doesn't mean that they're still working at that company just because it says they are in that database. So what you're going to have to do is first make sure that they are actually still working at that company. We use tools like Clay that really help us run a systematic pipeline of different enrichments that we can do for every single campaign. So we want to look at are they still at that company? We want to go and validate email addresses. If they don't have them in the database, we want to go find email addresses for those people. If we can't find, if we don't have that LinkedIn for whatever reason, we'll go find the LinkedIn profile. The next section of Enrichments is where you're going to get deep into how you're going to personalize or pull out unique insights about these companies and people. So you might want to do enrichment to go see are there any buying signals that are relevant for us, like are they hiring, they just got funding, you know, whatever it is. So make sure that you're going out there and you're first looking for what are all these different buying signals that might be relevant that we could weave into our messaging. Then you might want to go into that person's individual LinkedIn profile, go look at about section, their headline. The latest company experience is a description that they put in there. And then you're going to leverage that as well for an additional set of contexts that you can have in order to best craft your perfect message. Another interesting one too that we've seen is are they new hires to the company? So if somebody's been in a role for less than three months and maybe it's a leadership role, it's a great indicator that maybe they're coming into that new company and they're going to want to make a change, they're going to want to disrupt what's going on already. It's a great buying signal as well to connect with. All right, so now we pretty much got our list built. We've got everything enriched that we're going to need in order to draft the best possible messaging. So what does good messaging actually look like? There are a number of different things that we need to be thinking about with messaging. One is don't start with I hope this finds you well. Some of the most important text of any email is the first like five to seven words. The reason for that is that actually impacts the open rate of your message. If you go and you pull up your email right now on your phone, on the web computer, wherever you access it, you'll typically see it as a subject line. And then next to it or under it is a set of preview text where you could see the beginning of that message. And so that message starts with I hope this finds you well. Right, you're wasting that valuable real estate of that message. And so you want to make sure that that beginning part is super hyper personalized and relevant to that individual to get them to open it. It's not just about subject lines, it's also about the preview text that you put into the window guide. And the reason that we need to optimize for that is that if somebody doesn't open their email, it doesn't matter how good your message is. And so we need to optimize around opening first and then once we get them to open it, how do we get them to continue to read? Well, the first thing we've done is we personalized that sentence at the beginning, we've made it relevant to them, have a wide 10 year reading and then the next thing that they're going to look at is this a giant block of text. Is this a really long email that I'm going to have to sift through? Like if the answer is yes, they're probably just going to delete it. And so you want your messages to be super short and sweet. You know, ideally you're keeping it under 100 words, maybe even less if you really want to make sure that they're consuming the information in there. And if you're saying to yourself, yeah, but then I can't tell them about all the things that we do. And then that's the point. The point of an email is to get somebody simply to respond. You want them to read it and you want them to respond. If you give them all of the information about what your company does, there's no reason for them now to respond because they have that information. So you want to basically pique their curiosity without satisfying it. The next thing that we really want to do with our messaging is we want it to be about them. If your message has a lot of eyes and we's and hey, our company, whatever, like if you're really just talking about you and your messaging and your capabilities, that's not something that they care about. You need to flip all of that on its head to say what is relevant to this person. How can I say, like, I noticed this about you, you're likely facing this particular challenge. You'll be had this which can help you achieve this outcome. And so the idea is that you make this whole message about them relevant to them and not about you. And then one of the other core elements of any sort of cold email is call to action or the offer, right? Which is what isn't the thing that they're going to get by responding to your message. And so if every message that you end with is, hey, can we book a 30 minute conversation? That is a big lift for somebody to say, yeah, I'm going to take 30 minutes out of my day to go talk to a salesperson. And so what happens is you're only going to get, you know, the absolute top, like 1 or 2% of people that are actually interacting. Buying window. If you do that. And so what you want to do instead is you want to look for a softer call to action or provide some sort of additional value that's going to be relevant to them. You know, that could be a relevant publication, could be an abstract that's around a therapeutic area or modality that they're focused on. It could be inviting them to a specific webinar, maybe it's a full free like consult or demo of your instrument, whatever it is, or could even be a video or software. So whatever this thing is that you come up with. You want to be able to like provide this as value to them so they're more likely likely to actually respond and then have you then send them that information. The caveat here is in your emails, especially for cold emails, you don't want to be including links. You don't want to be open tracking all of this stuff. That's the types of things that are going to end you up in spam or the promotions tab. All of Google and Microsoft, you basically pick up on these things and identify, oh, here's a link. We haven't ever talked to this person before. It could be a phishing link. So we're just going to put this in the quarantine folder. It's very common practice that we see a lot nowadays. The call to action might be, hey, can I send over this abstract to you? Or hey, would you like me to send over this abstract? Would you like me to send you the link to the webinar? And so you just ask for permission and then when they respond, yes, then you can send them the link. And so now you've gotten some level of engagement and you kind of know that they may have some interest at some point. Now, when it comes to the personalization components of the email, when I talk about personalization, I'm not talking about like, hey, I saw you walk your dog at 3pm at the park over on a street, right? Like, we're not trying to get weird with the personalization and we don't want it to come across as creepy. And so what we want to do with our personalization is we want it to be relevant. Like relevancy beats like personal. There are things that you can pull out from a personal perspective. You have publications post, they've authored things of that nature that's obviously super valuable, but that's valuable in the context of what your message is about. And so you want your message to focus on relevance. And that's why it's important when you're doing your enrichments to be looking at the buying signals that are going on within that company, looking at things within their profile that you might be able to pick up on that make your message personalized and relevant. And so you want to basically take that personalization component that you've identified and then you want to put that at the very beginning of your message. And again, focusing on relevance here, how it ties back to what it is that your product, service, instrument, whatever it is, can solve relevance over personalization. Now, if you're using tools like Clay, what's great is you can take all of the enrichments that you've done, the buying signals, pulling in the LinkedIn profile information. What you can do is you can use that as context to actually help you craft personalization section of the these messages. And so the way you would do that is you take all of that information, these different columns as you would have in clay, all of this information as context, you feed it into a trained AI agent that is then able to take that context and put it into like, hey, here's an example. Here are great examples of what these personalized first lines could look like and should look like. And then that way you have this like your trained agent that is constantly getting better and constantly improving on how is writing personalized first lines. This isn't something that you just take and you copy into ChatGPT and say, hey, give me a personalized first line for this. It's not going to look good. It's not, it's going to be crap. Part thing with using AI is it has to be trained, you know, quite a bit, right? You almost got to treat it like an employee where you're constantly going back and forth, you're getting your feedback things that you don't like, how it can improve what you do like. So it's sort of this whole constant back and forth like reinforcement learning process like you might treat with any employee. And then when you have this, you know, agent working really well now, you can just start feeding it stuff and it's just going to, you know, output really good content in our heads. When we get emails and we see, oh, this is clearly AI generated, like those are examples of bad and lazy AI generated messaging. AI generated content, the good stuff you probably don't even notice, right? It's like if that was so good, you probably didn't even notice that it was AI because again, it's trained and it knows how to look and write like a human being would. If you are feeling at odds with using AI for any of your emails, it's likely because you are predisposed to really bad AI messaging. And so then you assume that that is what all AI messaging looks like. And so I'd really challenge you to really think about how can I write and how can I train an AI agent to write really well and write good content and write good messaging, that those messages actually perform well and don't come across as AI. So the next piece that we really have to talk about here is follow up, we've kind of talked about, hey, how do I send these initial messages. But then you can't just send one message into the abyss and hope for a response is you have to have multiple touch points over a period of time. Typically it can take 8 to 11 different touch points across different channels in order for you to get responses to your messaging or for to get somebody to actually convert into a meeting. You know, simply sending an email is not enough. You have to have sets of follow up that continue. So one of the best, I'd say follow up emails that we like to do is you're providing additional context to that first message. So you take that first message and then the second message is adding additional context to the first one. Right, because we're keeping that first one really short and sweet. So we try and pique their interest and get them to respond. But then if they don't respond, we want to provide additional context in that that second message. And what that's going to do is it's going to repurp the personalization and the message that you sent the first time and it's going to be able to repurpose it because they'll go back and be able to see it in the threaded response. And then that follow up message is going to have the additional context that might give them more information about why it might be worth it while to jump on a call to get that abstract to go on that webinar, whatever it is, for the purpose of your outreach. And so you'll want to basically string together a set of follow up messages along the way. Now the thing that you don't want to do is just thread second messages over and over because then you're constantly reminding them that they didn't respond to the first six messages messages that you sent. And so if you send 1, 2 to 3 as like called burst of messaging, that's like a good set of things, then what you might want to do is hey, they don't get a response, you might pivot to a different problem statement, a different offering that you might be able to provide to them and then create a little burst of one to two to three messages of that as well. And so now you have like these different six touch points, but they're broken up throughout an extended period of time. You know, this isn't something that you're going to send all in one week because that's how you annoy people. So you do want to have self separation of these things. It doesn't mean you're waiting two weeks between each message either because then there's no way in Hell, that they're going to remember any of your previous messages at this point. Now we've got our email infrastructure set up, we've got our lists that are highly targeted and we enrich them to make sure we have all of the data and information that we need in order to have our messaging stand out. Now we have all of our messaging that's written as well, all hyper specific and targeted to those specific individuals. And so now we're ready to launch. So we go ahead. We've launched that campaign, but now we actually need to then monitor and optimize what's going on. One area that I see a lot of people kind of fall short on is they'll send like one messaging variant. So hey, here is the problem, here's the value prop, here's our whatever template that we're going to be sending and they use one of those. The problem with that is what if it's that message just doesn't resonate with the audience, or the value prop is off, or the problem statement is off, or some of the language might not totally resonate with the recipients, then you have like nothing else to fall back on. And so what you want to do with every campaign is have like five or six different female variations that you're testing for that target audience. And then when you're going back and reviewing what messaging is working, you have basically the analytics of all of those different variants to say, okay, variant C is clearly performing the best. We're getting the most replies, we're getting the most interested leads that come in from it. So I'm going to turn off A, B, D, E and I only send the volume of the remaining messages to variant C. What is also useful with this is then you can look at what is in that message, what is it? Maybe the thing that's resonating more with people. And then you can take that information to help you better craft other messaging towards that audience. Whether that's going on your website, whether that's, you know, potential content that you might want to build around it, whether it's, hey, I want to expand this audience a bit more and focus on this particular value prop, because that's one that seems to be resonating. That's something that you can now do because you've tested all this messaging and so some of the benchmarks that we want to be looking for to see is messaging actually relevant is we want to be shooting for at minimum a 5% email reply rate. And then of those email replies that we get, we want 20 to 30% of those to be interested. And so what that means is that basically if you have a list of say 100 people or a thousand people, you're going to be looking for about like a 1 to 2 ish positive response rate, meaning that those messages generated, you know, valuable leads from the outreach that you're doing. And so if you're below that, then you have some troubleshooting to do. And if you're above that, great, you want to double down on what that campaign is. You want to double down on that particular set of messaging. So those are just some benchmarks to work with. We have clients that do way better than that. And then we have some, you know, that don't do, you know quite as well. It just really depends on what is the offer that you have that you're putting out there. What is the thing that you're selling that's going to get them interested and want to respond. Cold email is one of the best channels that you could use in order to test this, because you're testing purely messaging to an audience who has no idea who you are. And so if you're able to get cold email to work right, you've clearly hit on something, you've tapped into something that will resonate with that audience. And so all of this does sound like it's a ton of work. It really is. Like in order to optimize these things, it does take a lot of work. It takes a lot of iteration. It takes a lot of tooling and tech and expertise in order to make this stuff happen. This is just on the email side. This doesn't include LinkedIn messaging, this doesn't include paid ads, this doesn't include content. Right. This is just one channel that we've talked about and how complex that one channel can be. And so, you know, if you're a life science company and you want help with setting this type of stuff up, you just want to generate more leads, more pipeline for your organization. You know, give us a call or you'll go down below and click the link in the description and book a strategy. Call with us and we'd love to chat with you and see how they might give the help.