I’ve collected everything we’ve learned from one of our client’s cold email prospecting campaigns and we package it all in this article for you.

Cold Email Prospecting Campaign Results

2,402 people
5,241 follow-up
81 interested leads
3 new clients
$144k in LTV

Cold email prospecting is the only channel that allows you to contact any person on Earth, including CEOs, CMOs, VPs, and local store owners.

Cold email works incredibly well if you try to:

Get a B2B client
Get a job
Get funding
Get a podcast guest

Cold email can do it.

It’s the scalable version of writing letters. Or meeting somebody in person.

So what is cold email? It’s just sending an email to somebody who doesn’t know you.

When you send a cold email, there is both a right and wrong time to do so.

Cold email prospecting is best used for B2B transactions which can include anything from SaaS to Agencies and Real Estate.

The general rule of thumb is that you can only send cold emails to business contacts but never consumers.

For example, if you sell roofing services to homeowners, you cannot send them a cold email as they are considered your customer base.

Can I send cold emails to homeowners?

I would certainly not do that. Homeowners are customers, not another business. These cold emails are unsolicited.

What YOU CAN DO: Send cold emails TO roofing companies that serve homeowners.

Cold email prospecting is only for booking sales calls or demos.

The cold emails cannot and will not generate revenue or get you customers. You do that on the sales call.

What a cold email do is make potential customers want to hear YOUR sales pitch on why they need YOUR services.

Let’s get started…

Table of Contents

How To Create Your Ideal Client Profile

The old way of creating your ICP was to look at the industry you serve.

The new way is by identifying SPECIFIC and COMMON traits among your current clients:

The common PAIN they want to solve
The common GOAL they want to achieve
The common MISTAKES they want to avoid

By focusing on these common traits instead of only targeting a specific industry you can 5-10x your TAM (total addressable market), and make your cold email prospecting effort 100x more effective.

SIMPLICITY is the simplest (and in this case, quickest) path to earning $500,000 per year more in your company.

One market, one offer, and one system for lead generation (cold email prospecting) and enrolling them into their best lives are all that you need.

It’s critical to understand the challenges and mistakes your target market is experiencing.

If you don’t know them well enough to list their issues in the worksheet below, you’ll have to ask them (don’t make it up).

How do you go about doing this?

You go find them, invite them to a brief 10-minute phone call so you can offer them assistance or support for free, and ask questions of them.

There should be depth here (what are they concerned about on weekends, what have they tried that hasn’t worked, etc.)

The better this is filled out, the higher yield your marketing will be.

Nail down your ICP by answering the questions below.

1. What is the biggest problem(s) you enjoy solving for clients?
No more than 3:
2. Describe the best client/patient you’ve ever had?
Personality, communication, place in life, etc.
3. What did your best client/patient WANT before they became a client?
4. Describe the “worst case” / nightmare scenario for your client/patient?
Describe in detail what would have to happen for them to experience this worst-case scenario. Your job is going to be to prevent this scenario.
5. List any MISTAKES your client/patient is making right now in an attempt to solve their problem on their own.
At least 3 mistakes here:

No-Brainer Offer For Cold Email Prospecting

When it comes time to start a cold email campaign the number 1 thing that will make or break it is the quality of your offer.

Leads that come from cold email prospecting are NOT like your inbound leads or referrals. They don’t know you. And they probably get 10-20 pitches per day.

So, you only have a split second to GRAB their interest in learning more about your services or scheduling a demo/appointment with you in one or two sentences.

The ABSOLUTE best way to engineer an offer that I’ve seen is ” The Value Equation” created by Alex Hormozi in his bestselling book “$100M Offer” (Mandatory read!)

Dream Outcome: Solve problems worth solving ($$$)
Perceived Likelihood of Achievement: Leverage case studies and testimonials
Effort & Sacrifice: How can you make this easier? More Seamless? Convenient?
Time Delay: How can you make this faster? How can you show progress?

Obviously, a cold email is WAY SHORTER than a pitch deck.

You don’t want to bore your prospects with blocks of text. Nobody reads that.

So, how can you craft a no-brainer offer in just 1-2 sentences for cold email prospecting?

I’ll show you a quick example that helped one of our clients print meetings and then analyze it with The Value Equation.

Example for a Klaviyo Marketing Agencies targeting 7-figure brands:

“We just helped {{competitor}}, a 7-figure brand in {{niche}}, add an extra $57,000 last month in new revenue with a simple campaign that we crafted for them.

If we could help you add $25k-$100k next month on a 100% performance basis would that be something of interest to you?”

Dream Outcome: “Add $25k-$100k per month”

The dream outcome of most businesses is generally focused on money:

Increase revenue/income
More predictable revenue
Cut costs

So, it makes sense to craft your cold email offer using money as the hook.

Perceived Likelihood of Achievement: “We just helped {{competitor}}, add an extra $57k” PLUS “100% performance basis offer”

Whenever you make a claim, you want to back it with proof. Especially with cold emails as NOBODY will believe a word you say if you don’t back it with proof.

Adding a case study to your cold email prospecting campaign will go a long way in increasing your conversion rate.

If you don’t have a great case study yet or if you simply want to make the prospect feel “stupid” for not taking you up on your offer, then simply add a guarantee:

Examples of Cold Email Guarantees:

If you don’t achieve X in Y time we will work for free until we do.
If you don’t achieve X in Y time we will give you back the setup fee.
No retainer. No set-up fee. Simply pay us when you close a customer.
If you feel like I’ve wasted your time on the call I’ll send you $30 for a complimentary drink.

Effort & Sacrifice: Done For You offer

People generally already have enough on their plate and schedule. There’s a reason why the supplement business is 2x bigger than the fitness industry.

People like easy. They prefer to take a pill to lose 10lbs than going to gym for three months 3-4 times per week and watching their diet.

If you have different types of offers that help your ICP achieve the same Dream Outcome, pick the one that has the least effort & sacrifice for your prospect.

Generally, it will be a Done-For-You kind of offer.

Time Delay: “Next month”

People don’t like to wait. If you want something, you probably want it sooner rather than later, right? The same applies to your market.

Simply tell them how long will it take to achieve the Dream Outcome you just promised them.

How To Find Emails For Cold Email Prospecting

Apollo.io is an affordable and reliable lead source for cold email prospecting.

It provides the basics that you need, and then you can layer other more advanced lead sources like LinkedIn Sales Nav.

Before adding leads to a cold email prospecting campaign, verify them to confirm they are qualified.

It’s possible to produce the lead lists 10-15 times yourself in order to grasp how they’re constructed and what prospects are feasible with the filtering choices.

Then, later on, it is simple to delegate the task to a reliable team member so that they may construct it for you. Delegate and ascend.

Follow the instructions below to set up a search and export Apollo contacts to a CSV file.

Clean the CSV file and then it’s ready to be uploaded into your cold email prospecting campaign,

Setting up filters

When you login to your account, click on the Search tab and then on the People tab.

On the left-hand side of this page, you will find a list of very useful filters.

These filters can help you reach out to your ideal target market by changing some of the values.

We will go over each one of these in detail below. The most popular filters are Job Titles, Location, #Employees, Industry & Keywords, Technologies, and Revenue.

Start by typing the job titles that you want to research. You need to have your ICP identified before you start the search.

This is the basic use of the Titles filter:

If you’re looking for a more sophisticated search, you may use both title keywords and management levels. Type all of your keywords first, then pick the appropriate management levels:

You can exclude the specific titles by clicking on “Advanced Search“, and switching on the “Is not any of” button, then typing in the titles and hitting Enter after each one of them.

Apollo also supports Boolean Operators in search queries. They aren’t available in all searches, but they’re usually accessible through the “Advanced Search” option.

The following step is to decide on your contacts’ location. Keep in mind that there are two separate contact and company location filters. One or the other, or both, can be used.

You may enter a continent, region, city, or even a certain street. You can filter the locations that appear on the map by clicking Exclude icons next to them.

#Employees filter allows you to choose the size of the companies that will appear in the results.

Industry filter lets you target the types of companies you want to appear in your results.

LinkedIn has a similar function, but Apollo’s categories are not as specific and there are fewer of them. If you need a very precise industry category, include some keywords related to that industry in your search.

You can also combine keywords with the Industry filter.

For example, if we want to filter for a mobile app company, the most probable industries are IT services and Internet.

In the keywords section, we can type “mobile app”, “ios app”, “android development”, or android app”.

By doing this search, all of the companies that match these descriptions will be brought up as results on Apollo.

All the company’s online technologies are listed in the technology filter.

E-commerce, CRM, HR software, and so on may all be included. If your ICP is an e-commerce firm, start typing “e-commerce” and select all of the applicable tech.

If you want to target Shopify stores, simply type in “Shopify” and select it from the drop-down list. Keep in mind that only the most popular technologies will be listed here.

If you turn the revenue filter on, please keep in mind that not all companies have available revenue data, so your number of results will be lower.

In some cases, it might be better to use the Employee filter instead because it is more accurate and the majority of accounts listed on Apollo have this information.

Saving results to a list

By applying all the filters, you can save contacts to a list for later exporting.

Click on the checkbox above the Name column and choose Max people per company 1, apply selection, so that only one contact from each company is downloaded.

Then, click on Lists and Add to Lists.

Once you have generated your list and added the initial leads, be sure to reload the page so that the changes can take effect.

You can keep adding new leads by simply navigating to the next page and selecting your newly created list.

Enriching the list of domains

A great way to use Apollo is by enriching domain names for companies and finding contacts that correspond with those domains.

You can upload a CSV file that has all of the domains you want to enrich.

To do this, go to the Search tab and click on Company.

Then, on the right side, find Import and select Bulk Import From CSV beneath it.

Select the CSV file, and map the columns by selecting the account websites and names.

Then scroll down and click on Import.

The companies with the domains that you have imported will appear in the next list.

Click on Saved, and select all companies.

The people profiles associated with the selected companies will be loaded. This option lets you choose a filter to apply, as you would with the normal search.

You can modify lead details and add them to the list in the same way as before.

Exporting lead lists

To get your csv, go to the Lists tab and find the list you created.

Open it, select all people on that list, and click Export. Keep selection as “Export all emails” since they still need to be verified by an email tester tool.

Click Start Export and then Download when finished.

In order to confirm the validity of your leads, export them into a csv file and then use an online email verifier.

Domain Set-Up

STEP-BY-STEP

Create a new Gmail account so that you can access all the Google Workspace for the cold email prospecting domains.
Go to domains.google.com/registrar
Type in a name similar to your company’s domain.
At checkout: Put in your favorite email as back-up
- Example: Your domain is: companyxyz.com
- Search for: (.co) (.io) (.net) (.info) (.com)
- MYxyz.CO
- TRYxyz.CO
- GETxyz.CO
- GOxyz.CO
- DEMOxyz.CO
- YOURxyz.CO
Log in to the new Gmail account to set up the new purchase domains
Open Google’s email for a domain, copy the temporary password, and then click on the “Sign In to new domain”
Create a new password
To add a picture, go to admin.google.com
Log in with the new Google Account
Then choose the new workspace email domain to change the picture
Go to User
Click on the profile
Then click on the image next to the name to add a new picture.

Congrats! The domain is now registered.

Now it’s time to Forward the new domain to your landing page.

Go to domains.google.com/registrar
Click the new domain name
Under “Forward to an existing webpage, click; Add a forwarding address.
Enter a URL or IP address in the “Website URL” field.
Click on “Advanced Options” and choose “Permanent Redirect 301 “ And “SSL On”

And that’s it. So now, every one of your cold email prospecting domains will redirect to your landing page.

How To Write A Cold Email

I’ll lay this out simply. A cold email has four parts.

They are as follows…

Part 1: The Subject Line
Part 2: The Personalization
Part 3: The Angle
Part 4: The CTA

Let’s walk through each, but first, you might be wondering…

How Long Should A Cold Email Be

A cold email prospecting message should be as short as possible.

Ideally, no more than 3 paragraphs.

Your cold email prospects by definition are “cold” and they won’t read your 10 blocks of text.

They likely get 10-20 emails like yours every day.

So, you have to make your emails:

Stand out
Intrigue them
Position your offer as a no-brainer

Cold Email Prospecting Template

Example

Hey Cristina,

Your LinkedIn posts are amazing! Have you thought about turning them into videos? Because we created a tool that turns your posts into TikTok videos automatically.

Mind if I send more info?

Lawrence

This email is a short and direct way to show your interest, by complimenting something unique and offering more information.

You can always personalize the compliment even further, and add case studies or other sentences, but this is a great starting point for any niche.

What’s A Good Subject Line For A Cold Email

The sole purpose of the subject line is to get the prospect to open the email.

The first line also plays a part because of the preview (more on that below). But the subject is important.

I’ll give you some examples of subject lines to A/B test…

Quick question about {{Company_Name}}
Quick question for {{Name}}
Idea for you
Thoughts?
{{Name}}, meeting next Monday?
Thanks for your time {{Name}}
{{Name}} – quick question
{{Name}} – (your name)
Thought you’d like this {{Name}}
Quick question
Interview request
Weird question {{Name}}?
Thoughts {{Name}}?
Can you help {{Name}}?
Love {{Company_Name}} !

See how simple these are?

Your open rates should be above 50%. If you’re getting below 50% then keep changing it up until you’re above it.

How To Start A Cold Email

The best way to start a cold email and make people want to read it is with :

The first name
A compliment

According to studies, 47 % of people choose to open cold emails based on attractive first lines seen beneath the subject line without even reading the message.

Our own data has shown that personalized first lines in emails result in a 2x increase in reply rates and a significant rise in open rates across all industries and services.

Never send a cold email if you don’t have a first name.
Never send a cold email if you don’t have a compliment to give them.

A compliment is meant to demonstrate that you did your homework on them. This implies you must do research on them in real life.

The amount of time it takes to get emails sent is significantly increased as a result of this, but the increase in conversion rate is worth it.

In fact, this works especially well if you’re sending the email to a CEO, founder, or other high-ranking executives.

They are much more likely to reply if they know for certain that your email is not automated.

Here’s the litmus test…

Your emails should be so personalized that you couldn’t send them to another person.

The smaller your TAM, the more personalized you want your cold emails to be.

If you have millions of prospects you can of course make a fortune simply by sending templated generalized emails.

But if your TAM is below 1,000, you don’t have that luxury and you must make sure your emails don’t appear as spam or templated mass outreach.

So how do I personalize my emails fast?

What I do is, inside my Google sheet, I have my prospects laid out with columns:

Website, Company, First Name, Title, LinkedIn, Personalisation.

After finding someone on LinkedIn, I explore their profile for any awards or posts. If they have an award, I congratulate them.

If it’s a post, I find a key point and tell them why I think it’s interesting or cool. If there’s nothing of interest on their LinkedIn, I check out their website instead.

If you’re ever feeling lost when it comes to thinking of a compliment, try this strategy: go and find some case studies or testimonials related to the work they do, and comment on them.

It’s an easy way to show that you’re genuine and interested in what they do.

You could customize your first lines either with a VA or with an AI tool.

However, from our experience, human-made first lines work best in terms of reply rates and positive replies. It all comes down to deciding whether time or quality is more important to you.

And most email senders make it super easy to integrate first lines in your cold email prospecting campaigns.

This is how you can send out personalized emails at scale.

Step 1) Prepare a lead list in Google Sheets and add a column named Personalization.

Step 2) Write your first lines manually or use an AI tool

Step 3) Upload the lead list to your Instantly campaign. It will automatically detect the personalization column and attribute the {{Personalization}} tag.

Step 4) Insert the {{Personalization}} variable in your body copy.

That’s it.

Top 5 Cold Email Prospecting Strategies

What is the Angle you ask? The angle is the hook. The reason why they’d be interested.

Here are some examples…

I’ve helped 5 other brands make an extra $100k with Facebook Ads
I help realtors get 15 seller leads per month with Facebook Ads
I’ve got 3 email flow ideas that could increase your revenue by 15-20%
I help consultants grow their email list with Instagram

Oftentimes, the best angle you can have is to leverage your best case studies.

Strategy #1 – Leverage Case Studies

My name’s XYZ, and we just recently helped CLIENT, an ecommerce store just like yours double their traffic from June to July, and 9 days into August it’s up another 70%.
Just curious, do you use email campaigns to drive sales?
Hi, my name is Kyle. I took a company from $19,000 in email revenue per month to over $170,000 within the first two months. How did we do it? We segmented their lists and created new marketing flows that generated nine times more revenue than their previous campaigns. Plus, we managed everything so all they had to do was sit back and watch the sales come rolling in.
Just recently we’ve helped CLIENT increase their bottom line by $22,000/month using a few simple tweaks to their email flows. We handled everything, and they just watched the income coming in.

Some critical components here:

Name dropping the client. If you name-drop the client, it will work 100% better.
“Just like yours” indicates you did your research again and the client store is exactly like their store.

Strategy #2 – One Sentence

Keep your emails short and sweet if you want people to read them. A good rule of thumb is to keep each email down to 1 sentence.

We built a tool that can help you convert your tweets into TikTok viral content in minutes. Mind if I send more info?
Are you relying mostly on referrals to generate new leads and clients?
If we could help you get 2-3 new clients each month on a performance basis, would that be something of interest to you?
Would you be interested in getting more demos generated outside of your word-of-mouth and inbound marketing efforts?

Strategy #3 – Asking For The Right Person

Instead of immediately pitching, inquire about who the right person in the business is to discuss your service.

Who is the right person in {{company}} to talk about {{offer}} ?

Strategy #4 – Customized Image

Use customized Images in your emails to increase your email curiosity.

Use a real picture to begin.

It might be you standing in front of a board or any other object, such as a stock photo of a billboard. Add text and other images on top of the image.

For personalization, use merge fields that have been customized.

Strategy #5 – Loom Video

Instead of sending them an email, make a Loom video for them or ask if it’s alright to send them a Loom video demonstrating how you can help them.

CTA

Generally, if your meeting book rate is low (below 0.5%), it means your CTA needs work.

Here are some examples to help you start split testing on your own:

Do you have 15 minutes for a quick call this week or next?
Would that be something of interest to you?
Are you the right person I should be presenting this offer to?
Can I send you a Google Doc/Free training that shows you how this works?
Do you have any time this Friday for a quick chat?
Would you be against having a quick call this Friday?
Mind if I send you a Loom video about it?
Choose a time from my Calendar here.
Would you be interested in doing a 15-minute interview with me?
Can I send you a link that explains how it works?
Please see more on this blog post here.
Mind if I send more info?
Can I send you a PDF that explains how we do it?
I’ll send you a burger with UberEats if you can jump on a quick 15 min call this week.
On a quick call I can audit your (branding/SEO/FB ads/sales etc.) strategy. Interested?
Interested to hear more?

Sometimes, the best converting cold email prospecting campaigns will be when the angle is also the CTA.

For example:

Are you relying mostly on referrals to generate new leads and clients?
If we could help you get 2-3 new clients each month on a performance basis, would that be something of interest to you?
Would you be interested in getting more demos generated outside of your word-of-mouth and inbound marketing efforts?

Sequence

Always send follow-ups.

If you didn’t follow up with everyone who didn’t respond, you’d be wasting your precious lead pool. I almost always get more replies to my follow-ups than I do for the first message. I’m going to show you some of my favorite follow-up methods.

Follow up #1 – 3 days later

Hey {{First_Name}}, know you’re busy, just bumping this up!”

Follow up #2 – 3 days later

Hey {{First_Name}}. Wanted to reach out again because we just had another huge win with a client… (then you present a new niche relevant case study)

Follow up #3 – 3 days later

Hey {{First_Name}}. Wanted to reach out again with 2 ideas on how you can {{achieve Dream Outcome}}…

Follow up #4 (Break up) – 7 days later

At this point, I’ll assume (your offer) isn’t a priority right now. Feel free to reach out when it changes.

Follow up #5 – 45 days later

Hey {{First_Name}}. Are you still looking for {{achieve Dream Outcome}}. ?

I send 4 follow-ups max for 5 total emails.

Turning Interested Leads Into Appointments

When you start getting sales opportunities, it’s crucial to turn that lead into a booked meeting right away.

Time is of the essence when working with leads–the sooner you can contact them, the better. This first interaction is vital in the sales process, and each lead has the potential to be worth $5K or more.

So treat every lead as though they’re a valuable prospect instead of just another random response.

Here are key aspects that go into this.

Reply Fast To Interested Leads

We’ll get right to work right away on your request and reply in a timely manner.

The sooner you respond to interested leads, the more likely they are to make a booking for a phone call. It’s best if you responded within 1-3 hours of seeing it, but you may also do so the same day. The sooner the better.

You can literally double your income if you respond to leads in 15 minutes. You don’t have to go as far as that, but keep it in mind.

Any company’s lifeblood is a conversation with prospects, therefore don’t allow anything else to distract you from the cash flow-generating activity of talking with prospects.

Schedule 15 Minutes Per Day For Replies

When you’re faced with a large number of leads, it might be difficult to maintain your focus. We suggest scheduling a daily 10-15 minute block on your calendar where you respond to all the good prospects. At the very least once a day.

Be Specific

Always make your response specific to what the prospect has told you they want or need. If they say they’re available next Monday at 10AM, book that time into your calendar instead of sending them a link to choose their own time slot.

The same goes for phone calls – if they give you their number and ask to be called, don’t send over a calendar link, just call them at an appropriate time.

Obviously, we always want them to book into our calendars, but in order to maximize meeting numbers and revenue potential, we should do discovery during the demo by any means necessary.

Build A Copy/Paste Cold Email Reply Swipe File

If you want to make your life easier, copy all of the main questions and answers into one document which can act as a resource for future reference. You’ll find that 90% of the questions are similar if not identical.

Follow-Up With Interested Leads

The money is in the follow-up. If a prospect hasn’t booked a meeting within 24 to 48 hours, don’t be afraid to follow up and send them another reminder, as well as an explanation of how they might benefit from setting up a phone call.

Most qualified leads will most likely appreciate you for sending them a reminder!

Never Share Pricing In Cold Email

Be vague with your pricing and strategy. You’ll want to first look at their business to see whether you can help them on the phone before offering a price. Offering a price via email might turn away prospects who don’t understand why paying you that amount of money is worth it. If they keep asking, offer a wide range of prices.

That’s it. If you follow these rules most of the interested leads will turn into a booked appointments.

How Many Emails To Send Per Day

Once you know your numbers, achieving a revenue goal simply can simply be solved by sending more cold emails.

Emails opened: If below 50%, then split-test new Subject Lines
Positive replies: If below 5% reply rate, then split-test new angles.
Appointments booked: If below 0.5% meeting book rate, then split-test new CTAs.

Let’s do some math…

If your:

LTV is $50k
Closing Rate is 20%
Meeting Book Rate is 0.5%

Then, for every 1,000 cold emails you send, you know for a fact that you’ll get:

5 new appointments
1 new closed client
Add $50k to your revenue

Want to make that every month?

Then simply send 1,000 cold emails every month, or 50 emails per business day. It’s that simple.

Cold email scales very easily if your TAM is big enough and you know your numbers.

Final Thoughts

Your cold email prospecting campaign will likely fail if you do not plan and prepare it.

Fortunately, if you leverage what you’ve just learned in this article you’ll put all the odds in your favor.

Make sure your cold email content is as good as possible, and you’ll be rewarded with high open rates, lots of interested leads, and get qualified appointments on demand.

To recap:

Nail down your ICP
Create a no-brainer offer
Find ICP emails
Set up new domains
Craft a compelling cold email
Split-test Subject Line, First Line, Angle, and CTA
Follow-up
Laugh your way to the bank

How To Get High-Ticket Clients With Cold Email Prospecting