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- 🪄 Nick Abraham's Cold Email Masterclass
🪄 Nick Abraham's Cold Email Masterclass
PLUS: Track Hiring Intent To Pitch Your Service
Startup Spells 🪄
September 19, 2024
Nick Abraham's Cold Email Masterclass
Nick Abraham's agency, LeadBird, sends 1 to 1.5 million cold emails per month for over 150 active clients.
The best clients include a yoga instructor who sells classes to local businesses. Her campaign absolutely prints. Another client sells wooden pallets to manufacturing companies, which also prints.
Nick recently went on the In The Pit Podcast and gave a Cold Email Masterclass.
1. Effective Offers
The most crucial factor for cold email success is having a solid offer that solves market pain points.
For example, a video production agency can't just pitch "nice videos".
They need to focus on the impact, like getting more leads or customers through 1-minute VSL videos.
To increase response rates, add a guarantee to your offer that minimizes the prospect's risk.
He recommends having a dynamic pitch on sales calls. So if a client doesn't meet the criteria for the guarantee, you can adjust the pitch.
"Even if you offer a guarantee in your initial pitch, you don't have to stick to it rigidly on every sales call. Sales is dynamic. If you get on a call and realize the customer doesn't meet the criteria for your guarantee, you can adjust your approach. You might say something like:
'Typically, we do guarantee results for clients. However, I've noticed that your situation is a bit different because of X, Y, and Z. While I can't offer the same guarantee in your case, I still believe our solution would work well for you. Here's what I think the results could be. Would you be interested in giving it a try?'
This way, you're being honest and flexible, and you can still potentially close the deal without compromising your integrity or over-promising."
2. Personalization
Nick says personalization and finding intent signals can boost cold email performance.
Examples of intent signals:
Scraping followers engaging with relevant content on LinkedIn - Let's say I have a tool similar to Swell AI, and I'm a competitor. I could input Swell AI's LinkedIn profile into our internal tool. The tool would then scrape everyone who has engaged (liked and commented) with the last 30 posts. This shows intent from people who could potentially use a podcasting tool.
Scraping followers of competitor companies on LinkedIn - Another strategy I like to use for finding intent is scraping the followers of a company on LinkedIn. For instance, if your biggest competitor has 60,000 followers on their LinkedIn page, we'd scrape all of those followers' information. Then we'd email each of them with our value proposition. We might say, "They don't offer performance-based services, but we do." as a differentiation. We generated 450+ leads in under 3 months using this and it was one of the best-performing campaigns last year.
Identifying companies hiring for relevant roles (e.g. SDRs) via job postings - Another approach is to look for intent in job postings. For example, if a company with about 150 employees is hiring an SDR or BDR, they probably don't have a large sales team yet. They likely just need someone to generate leads - which is exactly what we do.
3. Cold Email Strategies
A. High-Volume Emailing Tactics
Nick suggests using educational panels (greyhat) to create multiple inboxes without monthly costs. You could go load up a 1000 domains into these panels to create 10,000 inboxes in there and have no monthly cost.
Educational panels are sold by Google and Microsoft to organizations, often schools in foreign countries.
The cons of this approach are that the entire panel could get shut down, forcing you to start over. Your IP might be based in a foreign country, which could affect deliverability.
Benefits of using educational panels:
No monthly costs for inboxes
Ability to create many inboxes quickly
Can lower volume per inbox while maintaining high overall volume
This approach is particularly useful if you're trying to send high volumes (like 100,000 emails a month) while keeping costs down and maintaining good deliverability.
B. Automation for Efficiency
Nick recommends to automate the process of buying domains, setting up DNS, and creating email accounts.
For example, LeadBird has an internal tool that automatically handles these tasks, allowing them to focus on campaign performance.
C. Focus on Contact-to-Lead Ratio
Nick says you to optimize campaigns by focusing on the contact-to-lead ratio rather than open or reply rates.
They constantly test and refine offers, angles, and CTAs to improve this metric.
4. Cold Email Infrastructure
Nick's agency uses a mix of tools and in-house software:
Inbox providers: Mainly Microsoft and Google, moving away from just Outlook
Domains: Bought on Porkbun, DNS on Cloudflare
Sending Emails: Smartlead with same-provider inbox matching
Validation: MillionVerifier for cost-effectiveness, internal Scrubby tool for catchalls
CRM: HubSpot internally but recommends Streak for others
If reply rates drop below 1%, consider the domain "cooked" and move on to spin up new inboxes/domains. This approach is more effective than trying to repair reputation, as the end goal is to maximize overall volume rather than individual inbox health.
5. Bonus Examples
1. Automatic Account Creation For Users
Nick has a SaaS lead generation campaign for which the following example works really well for conversion.
They have their developer automatically create accounts for potential users on their end. Then they email them and basically tell them about the product.
They say something like, "Hey, we created an account for you. Here's your username and password. Let us know what you think. Feel free to sign in and check it out."
And it absolutely converts.
2. YouTube Clips Offer
Swell AI is doing a similar version of this, with just the offer being a bit different.
They say something like, "Hey, reply with a YouTube URL, and we'll make clips for you for free."
When a prospect replies with a YouTube URL, they create an account for them in their system. They create clips from the provided YouTube video. Then, they drop the created content into the newly created account.
They send an email back to the prospect, essentially inviting them from within the app. The email includes a message like: "We've set this up for you. Here's your login link."
By creating the account and content upfront, they increase the likelihood of the prospect logging in and engaging with the product.
There's no credit card required at this stage, reducing friction for initial engagement. The goal is to get prospects to log in and see the value of the service firsthand.
They only charge the prospect when they actually want to use the service beyond the initial free clips.
This offer accounted for 20% of their new revenue this month.
A tool to Track all Opportunities from Job Postings Automatically
Mantiks allows you to follow hiring intent easily so you can find potential leads who need your service or product, at scale.
One recommended video on How To Build A Look-A-Like Lead List
This video covers how to build a look-a-like lead list for cold email campagins.
This simple strategy can significantly improve outreach efforts by targeting prospects similar to your existing successful clients.
Top Tweets of the day
1/
Having 10k followers and 100k views/mo with the right content is way better and makes way more money than 1M followers and 100M views/mo (short-form)
The second metric- coming from someone who's done it- literally does nothing for you if the content is shallow
Literally nothing
— Zach 🏴 (@zachpogrob)
7:11 PM • Sep 16, 2024
The right followers make you more money than lots of followers.
When doing influencer marketing, choose the influencer with the right followers, not lots of followers.
2/
More people should copy what @AlexHormozi is doing with his newsletter:
✅ Catchy name: Mozi Money Minute
✅ Content: Actionable content you can read in 1 minute (150-250 words)
✅ CTA: 1 sentence at the end
✅ PS: Creates curiosity, funny, increases CTR
✅ Cadence: 1-2… x.com/i/web/status/1…
— Matt McGarry (@JMatthewMcGarry)
8:26 PM • Sep 18, 2024
Alex Hormozi is going hard on his newsletter.
Reason is his reach, just like any influencer, has reduced due to the TikTok-ification of the algorithm.
His image posts on X get half a million views but tweets average <100k views.
Mind you, he has 700k followers and tons of reply guys and still the reach is beholden to the algorithm.
Newsletters take time to build but it has a stable algorithm with guaranteed reach.
3/
Almost everything I care about doing well in...
I get a private coach who often has decades experience & success on me in that field
Business, copywriting, BJJ, strength, poker, etc.
I don't always keep coach forever, but:
Never regretted any $ spent on a good coach. Lesson.
— Tahm (@tahmmygiovanni)
5:23 PM • Jan 1, 2023
Coaches get a bad rep but the best ones can save you insane amounts of time.
I tried to learn swimming when I was a child for 6 months and failed mostly because I was shit-scared of water. But a coach gave me float (a device to stay on top of water without sinking) and threw me in the middle of the pool. And just like that, I learned swimming within 6 minutes. Everything was way easier after that one incident.
Rabbit Holes
What’s the Most Overlooked Marketing Channel Right Now That’s Driving Real Results for You? - Underrated marketing channels that drive real results for little effort.
1 instant money hack to increase profit by 20% - A simple strategy to increase your bottom line by 20%.
Lead List Creator Form - Great set of useful questionnaires to nail down your lead list for cold email campaigns.
Until next time!
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