The owner of a creative agency signed up to my list a couple weeks ago, and had a question:
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Would love to learn more about what kind of materials / services you offer in regards to specifically email pitches.
[My industry] is pulling back some right now, so we are having to put a larger emphasis on outbound, which we never really had to do before.
We are services based business and everything is so customized it makes it a challenge to really blanket offers.
However, we do get pretty good responses when we do put stuff out there.
Are you able to share some of what services you offer / any preferred reading that I should check out on your website etc?
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There’s nothing on my site I would recommend for learning about cold outreach, and there are no cold outreach services I offer at the moment.
But I have been experimenting with cold emails myself, and I have been reading up and listening up on it.
It seems there are two schools of cold emailing:
#1. Carpet bombing, where the bulk of the work goes into setting up the technology for sending dozens or hundreds of automated “personal” emails each day, and feeding that with more or less qualified leads from various databases or from virtual assistants.
The idea here is to send out thousands of cold emails and maybe get two or three qualified responses.
#2. Social engineering, where, much like a red team in cybersecurity, you try to find a way into a specific organization by sending just the right message to just the right people.
The idea here is to send out 10 emails and maybe get 10 responses, which you then have to somehow twist and turn into suiting your purpose.
There’s been plenty written and said about the first approach to cold emailing.
There’s no doubt it works, but I’m personally not interested in it. And maybe, if you’re like the agency owner above, it’s not really an option because of the way your business is set up or what you offer.
So what about the second, social engineering approach?
It’s tricky and time intensive.
But if you’re after large accounts or valuable partner relationships, it can make sense to invest that time and to learn the tricks.
Again, this is not something I personally am teaching at the moment. But I do have something to recommend.
The worst part of this recommendation is that it’s free, which will make many people shrug and say, “Oh, I will come back to this later.”
The best part of this recommendation is that it might stop being free or disappear at any minute, particularly if people like me keep linking to it.
If you’d like to get it before it goes away, or before it gets a big price tag stuck on the side of it: