11 days ago, a marketer named Jon Williams wrote in to take me up on my Niche Expert Cold Emails offer. I sent Jon the promised training video. Yesterday, he wrote back with the following result (edited slightly):
Hi John!
That didn’t take long at all.
I just got your reply with a better email if possible technique for cold outreach and it gained me some future email marketing work as a kind of white label service for a guy in my hometown of all places lol.
How it worked out:
I downloaded his video making guide and got onto his list. I actually just wanted the guide and was all good with it as it helps me out making educational videos to attract more clients.
Anyhow, I noticed I didn’t actually get the link to download the template.
Worse than that, the email went to spam folder immediately.
After checking, I found it and emailed a reply to him directly saying it went to spam and after running in a quick diagnostic, I found out what was causing that error & told him how to fix it, for free.
(I know it’s a little different than your technique)
He was thrilled to hear about that because he’s needed to fix it and just hadn’t taken the time to fix it before I replied to his email.
After he’d emailed me back a working link the conversation just went from there when he asked “do you specialize in email marketing?”
We just had our first a conversation / intro call yesterday over zoom!
Here’s an ugly truth from my lean-and-hungry freelancing days:
Back when I was hunting for clients, I tried cold emailing on a few different occasions.
Each time, I found it a frustrating waste of time and effort.
But like Jon’s story above shows, cold email can sometimes produce good results, and it can even do so quickly.
The key in my experience is not to get invested in any one lead. Either in terms of your emotions… or in terms of the work you put in to reach out to them.
I know that goes against a lot of cold email “wisdom” out there.
”Wisdom” says you should separate yourself by researching your lead’s family history and his dog’s name… writing a short novel, for free, featuring the lead’s ancestors and his dog… then publishing the novel on Amazon under your cold email lead’s name… then emailing a screenshot of your ghostwritten book along with any earnings the book has made and a message that says, “If this message happens to reach you, can we please please for the love of patience please get on a call?”
On the other hand:
I’m also not suggesting you just spam every potent client with the same canned cold email, regardless of how drunkenly clever you make it. I tried that also. It doesn’t work either, or at least it never did for me.
So how exactly do you make cold emails work?
One possible strategy is described up there in Jon’s comment.
Another two strategies are what I talk about in the Niche Expert Cold Email training. These are the only two cold email strategies that led me to client work (both led to sizeable clients).
And if for some reason I absolutely had to win a client today via cold email… or alternately have an anvil dropped on my head like Wile E. Coyote… then these two strategies are what I would reach for and use.
So here’s the deal:
Niche Expert Cold Emails is a free training I put out last January.
But it’s really only “free” as in “direct-response free.” Meaning you still gotta do something to get me to send it to you.
But if you do want this training, and you want to see what you would have to do, then here’s where to go: