In the past few months, as a Growth Hacker at NUMA Bengaluru, I’ve been experimenting with cold emailing. I’m telling you, email is still one of the most effective ways to reach out and leverage a community. I developed a 5-step process to go from cold to warm emails:
1) Get targeted email lists
Once you proficiently understand who your target audience is, you need to reach out to them in order to demonstrate how you can solve their problem. Emailing is still one of the best ways to do it, and here is how you can build that email list:
Hunter on Linkedin
By downloading the hunter chrome plugin, you will be able to get emails directly from Linkedin profiles. Let’s say you are targeting every CEO in Bangalore: start by searching for your preferences and grab every email you need using the hunter plugin. This plugin provides you with 150 email addresses for free per month.
Serp-Digger to scrap the web
This tool is my favorite. You will be able to extract emails from Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and almost every website. No need to code — it’s simple and fast.
Let’s take you through the process of scrapping Instagram to get entrepreneur’s emails in Bangalore:
- Start your free trial on Serp-Digger
- Download Serp Digger plugin
- Go on Google Custom Search Engine
- Add a new search engine and copy paste http://instagram.com
- Once created, click on a public URL to get the URL of your new search engine
- Launch Serp Digger plugin on this new page and target your audience
Then download your email list and copy-paste it into a google spreadsheet.
2) Verify your email list
Now that you have a huge email list of potential leads, you will probably be impatient to contact them. Wait though, we are not sure that all these emails are clean. You need to check if each of them is deliverable to, to avoid bounces. Indeed if your bounce rate is high, your email reputation will decrease and your chances to land in a spam box increase.
Neverbounce to check and clean your email list
Neverbounce is a great tool to verify and clean your email list. They will allow you to analyze your email list for free and give you an estimated bounce rate. You can then clean it by paying a fee depending on the number of emails you have.
3) Build emails, which convert
Now you that you have a clean email list, it’s time to write the content of your email. Here are my 6 steps to build a mail that converts:
- Personalize your emails as much as you can.
- Start with who you are, show your target that you are not a bot.
- Display the credibility of your company.
- Explain the purpose of the email.
- Provide a Call to Action. It should be one link, be single-minded.
- Offer to answer any doubts (show that you are available).
1) Hello <<First Name>>,
2) My name is Pierre, I am “role” at “Company name”. 3) “Company name” is an international company with 10+ years of experience in… 4) We have built a product which allows users to…. I invite you to check it through a free trial, I truly believe that you could benefit from it:
5) Start a free trial: “Link tracked”
6) If you have any questions, let me know, I will answer ASAP :).
Kind regards,
Pierre
If you are not confident about the target, change the purpose and ask for recommendations:
Instead of: I invite you to check it through a free trial, I truly believe that you could benefit from it.
Use: I am contacting you because I think you might know someone in your network who could find a real value in this product and might benefit from it.
4) Send your emails to the main box
While it’s not hard to send emails today, it’s quite another thing to make sure people receive them in their main inbox.
Yet Another Mail Merge to reach the main inbox
Go back to your spreadsheet, where you copied and pasted your email list. Click on Add-ons and add YAMM for free. This tool connects your email list to your gmail account. You simply have to draft your email in gmail, as I showed you above, and YAMM will find it in order to send to your list.
Furthermore, YAMM allows you to personalize your emails by naming each column in your spreadsheet. For example: Column A is “First Name”, if you put <<First Name>> on your draft, every email will be personalized with the first name (row by row).
You can send 400 emails per day for free or 1500 emails per day if you upgrade your plan and have a GSuite account.
If you are facing troubles setting up your Gsuit account with YAMM, use CheckMX to see how to fix it.
5) Convert your leads
Some of these cold leads will open your email and a part of them will even click on your unique link. It should drive them to a Landing page optimized to convert them. Provide them with enough value, thus they would want to subscribe with the help of a powerful Call to Action. Make it clear, make it simple: LESS IS MORE.
ConvertKit to convert your leads
ConvertKit helps with creating a landing page or just the form that allows your visitors to subscribe. You’ll be able to personalize it as well as receive a data report.
When you get a new subscriber, you can then enroll him in a sequence to send a drip email campaign — using automation processes. Finally, you can build a referral process to develop your acquisitions faster.
Here is the workflow you should look for:
- 1st email: Free value (Instant value for what he subscribed)
- 2nd email: Free value (tips, pdf, ebook, articles…)
- 3rd email: Soft sales (Call to Action: Discover the product)
- 4th email: Free value (tips, pdf, ebook, articles…)
- 5th email: Hard sales (Call to Action: Buy the product)
- 6th email: Follow-up (Feedback if they bought, discount if they didn’t)
Sending cold emails is not spamming. Sending cold emails to someone who doesn’t care about your offer is. The warm up process will start at the moment you show the right product, to the right people, with the right content. As soon as they will click and subscribe to your drip email campaign, 50% of the work is done. Then you’ll need to show them real value for free to build trust and position your company as the best solution to solve their problem.
-Pierre Guilbaud, Growth Hacker at NUMA Bengaluru
