Jeremy Chatelaine - Grow your business with cold emails: Everything you need to know about cold emails to get an avalanche of responses

Intro

Im Jeremy, founder of QuickMail.io , a platform that helps you automate cold emails and get more replies without having to sacrifice much time.

Unlike many consultants who rely on tactics that worked three years ago (and only partly work now), I will tell you what works right now in 2016.

No bullshit. Just pure unfiltered knowledge.

I will even share five templates so good that MORE than half of the people who receive your email sequence will be moved to reply. (Thats right. Sending two emails will result in one person hitting reply, writing something back and then sending it to you.)

Imagine the difference it would make to your business if you could interact with half the people you contact.

And all of this without the need to hire an entire sales team.

Yes, its that powerful.

Cold email is how I started my business. I originally used it to get interviews to gain knowledge about a specific market, then to get feedback on what I was building, and finally to get demo calls to gain new customers and expand my network as a founder. Its what made my business profitable. So I know firsthand that it can be a really lucrative channel when executed properly.

The problem is that most of the things you read on the Internet are highly subjective to the Survivorship bias . Information is often outdated or grossly inaccurate (revealing only half of the story, or not enough data). Theres a lot out there thats just plain wrong and totally misleading.

So, be ready for a ride because all of those fancy posts you read on the Internet on cold email won't account for a fraction of what youll learn in this book.

Some examples of what Ill cover with you:

- Ill let you know the number one reason why cold emails fail or succeed (based on real data after analyzing both winners and losers).

- Ill explain why almost everyone is wrong in the way they build their cold email campaign (and how to fix this easily).

- Ill tell you about every possible way to build your prospect list.

- Ill show you how to setup cold emails so that people will thank you for your perseverance (even though you didnt spend more than a second on it).

- Ill share five email sequences built for different purposes, all performing at a reply rate of more than 50 percent.

And Ill share many more things that will give you all the tools you need to crush it with your cold email campaigns.

Ready? Lets get started!

PART I

Before you write your first email

Master the game

To win the game, you need to know what game you are playing.

Interestingly enough, most advice on outbound email focuses primarily on the writing aspect. You will get plenty of advice in this book on how to approach the writing part, but its really just one piece of the puzzle.

To get all of the pieces of the puzzle together and really grow your business with outbound cold emails, there are a few more things you need to master first.

What no one will tell you is that the game is either won or lost before you even send your first email.

In this section, Im going to show you what you need to know and look for so that you can be successful at it, while at the same time minimizing the negative impact of failure on you and your business.

CHAPTER ONE

The most important metric you have to know

Sender Reputation

Because cold email can be a very cheap way to acquire new customers, it's very often abused. As a result, a lot of different techniques are used by email services (receiving but also sending) to quickly determine if emails sent are spam or not.

Everyone knows (or should know) that adding Viagra or cheap loan to your subject line won't do you any good and will be intercepted by most spam filters. But there is a much more problematic and persistent criteria that you need to know about. Why? Because it could kill your business over time.

It can affect every email you send from your company domain name and can take weeks if not months to fix. In fact, it can be so annoying that some companies have gone so far as to migrate to new domain names just to solve the problem. This is especially important to know when you begin cold emails because you may not recognize the problem until its too late.

Im talking about sender reputation. Its a simple number that gets assigned to you and can vary from 0 (bad) to 100 (good).

Its important because while a good reputation will get you almost straight to the inbox, a bad one almost certainly guarantees your email will land in the spam folder. Its a strong factor to watch for good deliverability, but it gets worse. Because the reputation is actually on the domain, creating new emails wont actually help you get out of this. In fact, once your sender reputation is damaged, it's very hard to undo and you run the risk of being blacklisted.

In reality, this spam killer criteria has one fundamental flaw: its based on your domain email server IP address. So you may wonder why it is such a problem if your email is hosted by Google Apps or sent by SendGrid. After all, its their IP that gets the blame.

Well for sure, but in order to protect THEIR own sender reputation, they will rely on similar mechanisms to determine your sender reputation, too. In the case of SendGrid, they will even kick you out if your sender reputation falls below 70 percent.

What affects it?

Okay, so now that you know its important, you need to know what key factors will hurt your sender reputation the most so that you can take care of this.

There are five factors that will badly impact it:

1. High bounce rate

With emails, there are two sorts of bounces:

- Soft bounce, when the problem is temporary (e.g. inbox full)

- Hard bounce, when the address has been rejected by the destination server (the email doesnt exist)

A high bounce rate strongly suggests the message is spam and will therefore impact your sender reputation.

You should go through significant effort to lower this in order to preserve your sender reputation (and ultimately your deliverability). So, just make sure that you are indeed emailing people with actual working emails.

This can be achieved by a combination of good prospecting (getting quality emails) and verification tools (well cover this in the Prospecting section)

2. Spam complaints

When people label an email as Spam or Junk, not only will it reduce your ability to reach this users inbox, but all of those complaints will be aggregated to determine whether or not your email will land in other peoples inboxes, too.

Similar content is easily flagged as spam. So take advantage of personalization capabilities as much as you can to minimize this.

Note that emails like info@, marketing@, sales@, support@... and other generic emails usually generate more complaints than individual targeted emails like john.smith@company.com

3. Spam traps

This is a bad one.

Spam traps are fake (or obsolete) email addresses that are set by email providers and arent supposed to actually receive any emails.

Sending to these emails is a strong indicator that a list has been purchased and therefore a stronger likelihood that the sender is a spammer.

Currently, there are no tools to identify these obsolete email addresses, and even list cleaners remain clueless.

To minimize this, you need to make sure prospecting is done well.

4. Volume & consistency

Sending 500 emails in one day is another indicator that you are spamming. Instead, spread your usage over time so that you dont send bursts of emails.

Its best to send 100 emails a day, in one week, rather than sending 500 emails all in one day.

5. Too many recipients

This one is easy to avoid, as youll get the best results when youre sending to just one person at a time.