A few days ago, I got on the metro here in Barcelona and I spotted a rare empty seat. I jumped into it, grinning with satisfaction. But in the very next moment, my face sank.
“Oh no…”
A trio of busking musicians — a guitar, a fiddle, and a drum — had entered the metro car right after me. They were getting ready to play and make me listen.
In a panic, I looked to the doors.
They had just closed.
There was no escape.
I sighed and settled in. There must be something worthwhile I can get from this, I said to myself. And there was.
The metro started rumbling and the musical trio started their act. A song about love and flowers, from what little I could understand.
Most of the passengers ignored the music and stared at their phones. A few people looked on and smiled. And the guy sitting next to me, he even clapped along silently.
After all, the buskers were singing and playing well.
They kept playing through the next stop. As the stop after that neared, they wrapped up their act.
Hat in hand, they walked up and down the car, modestly asking for money.
From where I was sitting, it looked like they didn’t get a single euro cent.
Not a cent. Not from any of the dozens of passengers who paid or didn’t pay attention… not from my clapping neighbor… and not from me, certainly.
Sad? Not sad? Serves them right? The trio made their way to the next car. And they got ready to do the whole act all over again.
Now let me tie this up to something you might care about if you are a copywriter or for-hire marketer:
A lot of service providers in this field, including myself at an earlier day, do something similar to those metro car buskers.
They naively think that if they provide a good service – copywriting, ad management, singing and playing the fiddle — then, in a big enough group of random and disinterested people, they are sure to hit upon at least a few who will want to pay for that service.
So these service providers collect a bunch of emails of business owners… they craft the perfect cold email… maybe they even take the time to put on a little song and dance, in the form of a custom sample.
But there’s a problem with this kind of thinking. It doesn’t take into account the disastrous “buying context” that’s working against them:
Prospects who are in the wrong headspace… negative positioning/social proof… technical problems… a suspicious odor of pushiness and neediness… the time, work, and emotional toil of putting on a show, over and over, for people who don’t want to hear it, and who give you no feedback, encouragement, or money in return.
That’s not to say that cold email cannot or will not ever work.
I mean, millions of buskers around the world do well, much better than those guys on the metro.
Just one day after that metro performance, I was sitting in Madrid, and I watched a busking duo — a guitar and an accordion this time — clean up a pedestrian street filled with bars and restaurants. They must have made a hundred euro or more, for about five minutes of playing.
These guys were providing pretty much the same service as those Barcelona metro buskers. But in a different context. With different positioning.
And it’s the same with cold email.
In spite of giving it a good go a few times, I’ve never had success with “standard” cold email, the way it’s talked about online.
But I have had success with cold email a few times, in a different context, with different positioning.
After some thinking, I even formalized this into a system, one I call Niche Expert Cold Emails. And I’ve prepared a training all about it.
And it’s free.
Well, free as in, it won’t cost you one euro cent.
But there is a catch. In case you are curious, you can read more about it here: