📧 A fool-proof zero-to-one cold email guide.

Have you ever heard gurus talking about cold outreach and how it can change your life? If you’ve been hanging around the internet for some time I bet you have. It’s a simple tool for making connections and acquiring clients.

No wait! Don’t Google it! (yet). It will take you 5 years to read all the different “Best cold outreach system to 10x your revenue in 10 days” posts and books.

So I’ve come up with my own, highly condensed and slightly sloppy summary guide to get you started.

The best part about it is that it takes you about 3 minutes. With all the time you save- you can go to medical school.

The neat thing about my guide is that it’s easy to go from zero to one and get your first cold outreach response. Zero fluff.

The bummer about it is that it won’t do the work for you and you probably shouldn’t use it if you’re the CMO of Hubspot.

I must admit that a lot of the clickbait out there is true. Cold outreach really is a superpower but most people suck at it. If you want to start bringing in new clients or making new friends, then it’s a tool you need to start utilising yesterday.

Here we go:

Step one: focus on deliverability. 

It doesn’t matter if you have the world’s best copy if it never reaches your target audience.

Follow these rules to make sure your emails always get delivered and your domain never gets blacklisted:

1. Purchase domain variations: never use your main domain for cold email. Instead, purchase try-mycompany.com or gomycompany.com.

2. Purchase all domains through Google Domains for a hassle-free experience. Create separate accounts and add Google Workspace.

3. Follow the setup instructions in the welcome email.

4. Add the following record: DMARC Record:

• Hostname: _dmarc

• Type: TXT

• TTL: 3600

• “v=DMARC1;p=quarantine;pct90;sp=none”

5. Redirect your cold email domains to your main domain website (not email): permanent direct > forward path > SSL on. Anyone searching your domain will get sent to your main website.

6. Use a warm-up service: send up to 30 emails per day on each domain increasing by one for at least 10 days.

Step 2: generating quality leads.

Don’t neglect this step. Invest in high-quality leads if you want results.

There are a few ways to go about this, I recommend them all:

1. Hire someone through Fiverr or Upwork. This may take some trial and error, so be patient. Hire someone with good reviews and give them your exact requirements. Tets 500-1000 leads initially.

2. Lead scraping software: add this to your Chrome and use it daily. Focus on LinkedIn initially or google search for relevant companies and consistently add to your list. I recommend Klean Leads and training a VA to do this.

3. Phantom Buster: a great tool for downloading people’s followers on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can filter keywords in their bio which are relevant to your target audience such as “CEO”. You can DM them or search for an email to add to your campaign. Again, train a VA to do this.

Those are the top 3 which I recommend starting with.

Step 3: Choose a mail software service.

I use Mailty which was built by Cold Email Wizard, specifically for cold email campaigns. It’s dead simple to use and reasonable in price. I highly recommend his material for further learning.

1. Sign up for an account

2. Add your purchased domains

3. Set the warm-up rules.

4. Create a campaign sequence.

5. Import your leads.

6. Start sending.

You’ll find more in-depth tutorials within the software, but it’s fairly self-explanatory.

Don’t overthink this step and get bogged down in choosing a provider.

Step 4: Create your campaigns.

This is also straightforward:

1. Select a new campaign.

2. Build out a sequence: I recommend 3 emails spaced 3 days apart to begin.

3. Import your list.

4. Generate your copy (covered next).

5. Send test emails.

6. Launch.

Step 5: Create copy which converts.

Spend some time on this section and come up with 2-3 ideas initially. If you’re hopeless at writing then simply outsource this or get some help from Chat GTP. Remember there isn’t a perfect fit so you need to get in the habit of testing variations (covered next) so just start and keep iterating.

Make sure your copy has the following:

• Subject line.

• Personal opener line.

• Body.

• CTA.

Aim to keep it brief, custom and concise. Test out common subject lines such as “had a question” with something bolder. You can use tools like Quicklines.ai to generate custom lines.

Focus on telling them one or two benefits which your product or service will bring them, not your life history.

Lastly, add a simple CTA such as jumping on a call- be sure to add your Calendly link.

Step 6: Analytics and testing.

Remember that cold email is trial and error and has multiple factors which can impact the success rate, such as:

• Subject line.

• CTA.

• Body.

• Lead quality.

• Deliverability.

You need to test one thing at a time such as the subject line. Mailty lets you easily create an A/B test and choose how you want to allocate your daily emails between them.

Create a schedule to regularly review your analytics tool and make changes. Aim for a 60% open rate and a 10% reply rate. The most important factor is how many meetings you’re getting booked and what leads to those meetings.

Summary:

1. Deliverability.

2. Lead generation.

3. Mail Software.

4. Campaigns.

5. Copy.

6. Analytics and reviews.

My current read 📖

The Third Door by Alex Banayan. I mentioned this in last week’s email but it’s so good I need to tell you about it again. It’s a super inspiring and actionable book about a young freshman interviewing some of the world’s most successful people such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

Armed with some cold email tactics and pure willpower, he got himself in front of some of the modern-day titans to learn directly from them.

That’s it for this week. As always, any questions or thoughts just shoot me a reply here or on Twitter.

Have a great weekend.

Tom Scourfield.

Curious entrepreneur.