How to reliably get new clients
Cold emails to get new clients
Follow ups to get replies
Link building emails
Partner with influencers
Graceful apologies
Pitch journalists
Onboard new users
Ask for donations
Ask for referrals
Approach: share useful data they can get from using your product
❶ Congrats on your recent influencer campaigns! ❷ Did you know there are other influential people who already like or follow North Star? Of the people who recently commented on your posts or tagged you in theirs, here are a few of them with the biggest followings (50K+) and highest engagement:
・@username - 5.7% engagement
・@username - 3.8% engagement
・@username - 5.2% engagement
❸ I find it's much easier and cheaper to collab with influencers who already know about or like your brand. And their audiences find their campaigns more authentic = higher conversions.
❹ I was able to find your influential fans using Clout - a one-stop shop to find the most relevant influencers, see their verified metrics and plan campaign details.
❺ Are you free for a 10-min chat? I’d love to learn more about which influencers are delivering the most ROI for you.
Signoff
❶ Mention something they did recently that is related to your product.
❷ Using your product, pull a few useful data points for the prospect.
❸ Briefly explain how they can leverage these data points and the benefits of using them.
❹ Mention you were able to pull the data points using your product.
❺ Ask them for a brief chat, framed in terms of you wanting to learn more about how you can help them.
Approach: provide a few examples of what your product can do for them
❶ I saw that you're starting a new beauty brand soon, congrats! ❷ If you're stuck coming up with a name and a 5-hour thesaurus deep dive doesn't sound super fun, you can actually hold a contest and crowdsource it. :)
❸ Here are a few names our Squadhelpers have come up for beauty brands before:
・Lurella
・Purabelle
・GlowEnvy
❹ They can come up with 100+ unique beauty related names for you, checked to make sure the .com domain is available. Because as creative as domain extensions are getting (.website anyone?), let's face it, .com is still the best. :)
❺ Let me know if this sounds interesting,
Signoff
❶ Mention what the prospect is doing (that's related to your product). This serves as your reason for connecting with them.
❷ In a non-salesy way, describe the biggest pain point your product addresses and how it solves it.
❸ Provide a few examples of what your product can do for the prospect upfront so they can see your value in a concrete way.
❹ Provide a few more details about what they can get out of using your product and mention an additional benefit you offer.
❺ Ask them what they think to start the conversation.
Approach: leverage a trigger event to introduce your product
Brian Anderson cold emailed Charlie Liang at Engagio by showing how his product would be useful at an event Charlie is attending soon.❶ I know you'll be spending big bucks at the Marketo Summit next month (unless Jon gets you a crazy discount).
❷ I wanted to see if we could help you convert more of that investment into pipeline, by boosting the number of leads that convert into post-event meetings.
❸ To quote your own blog post, poor event follow-up can result in S$$$ of pipeline being left on the table in your best-case scenario, you're only reaching 20% of your leads post-event.
❹ Our app reduces the need for "the follow-up dance" (as you put it) by directly scheduling a meeting into the calendar of your most-engaged prospects (and a hand-picked salesperson), all while on the event floor.
It works something like this:
❺ It's a different approach, but helps filter-out non-leads at the booth. prioritizes your sales team's efforts post-event, and saves your guys from "the dance" with unqualified prospects.
Happy to give you a 15 minute overview if you're interested.
Signoff
❶ Mention the event the prospect is participating is, has participated in or is affected by. This serves as your highly relevant reason for connecting.
❷ Show that you understand their major goals or needs related to this event.
❸ Briefly describe the pain point that they may face (which your product solves).
❹ Explain in one sentence how your product solves this pain point.
❺ Paint the scenario the prospect (and their team) would face by not using a product like yours to nudge them to learn more.
Approach: reach out to users who were negatively affected by changes in a competitor's product
Follow the news about your competitors' products. If they make a change that a lot of its customers react negatively to, you can send cold emails to introduce your product as a better solution. You can find customers of these products by searching for complaints on Twitter and by looking through reviews on websites including G2 Crowd, GetApp, Capterra.❶ As you may have heard, Alvo acquired Trellis. Sometimes acquisitions work out and sometimes ... the product gets shut down. Or starts drifting from its vision. Or the new owners increase its price by a lot.
❷ Just wanted to share another option with you. Swell has all the features you're used to:
・Draggable cards
・Choose the best workflow for each project: Kanban board, list or cards
・Attach different types of content including checklists, docs and images
❸ And Swell also has:
・Native iOS and Android apps for phones and tablets with real-time data sync
・Can be used for bug tracking with open/pending/closed statuses and the ability to reference code in the comments
・Ability to create subtasks under main projects
❹ If this sounds interesting, here's a demo account with placeholder projects and tasks you can play around with:
[link]
Let me know what you think!
Signoff
❶ Explain what happened with the product the prospect's using and the impact this change may have on their future use of it.
❷ Mention your product as an alternative and show them that it has the same must-have features as your competitors so it's easier for them to make the switch.
❸ List a few valuable features your product has that your competitors don't to entice them to migrate.
❹ Provide them a link to a demo account with pre-populated data so they can play around with its features. Place prominent 'Create account' calls to action through this demo.
Approach: reach out to a potential customer by asking them for feedback
❶ I've looked up to you ever since I binge read Metamorphosis in high school (until my thumbs changed colors!).
❷ I built a writing tool for writers like you and would love your valuable input on it.
❸ How it's different from what's already out there: it takes care of those annoying in-between steps when you're writing such as:
・ You can easily rearrange blocks of text in a document. No need to copy and paste paragraphs to move them around.
・ Save text as insertable blocks. This lets you easily add text from one doc to another.
❸ If this sounds interesting, can I invite you to a demo account for you to play around in? Your brutally honest feedback would make a world of difference.
Signoff
❶ In one time, provide a meaningful comment about why you value their work and expertise.
❷ Briefly describe what you built and say you're interested in getting their feedback.
❸ Mention the biggest difference between your product and what's already available and provide 2-3 examples.
❹ Ask them for their feedback and reinforce how helpful it would be for you.
Like this approach? Here's another example of 'ask for feedback' email from Marketing Examples.
Ilya <ilya@email.com>to Ben
I'm a first time entrepreneur and I just started to build my product. I'm looking for experts in this space and several of my friends pointed in your direction. So I was hoping you could give me your feedback before I spent too much time building something that nobody wants :)
Here's my idea I have a crawler that crawls millions of websites daily and can see who started a free trial with Mixpanel Instantly. Do you think Information like that would be valuable for somebody like KISSmetrics or I just wasting my time here?
Thanks in advance!
- ilya
Approach: ask your prospect's colleague for a referral
Before cold emailing a prospect, you can ask their colleague for a referral to boost your credibility.❶ I wanted to get in touch with your colleague who manages Facebook ads. Who would be the best person to connect about this?
Thanks!
Signoff
❶ Simply ask them to refer you to their colleague who manages the business department related to your product or service.
Open the conversation by leveraging the referral from your prospect's colleague
❶ I noticed your ads on a few websites - here's how they appear now:
[screenshots]
You may notice that some of the images haven't been proportionally resized. On mobile, some of the text is too small to read.
❷ This is how your ad would look, dynamically adapted to any context it appears in:
[screenshot on news website]
[screenshot on mobile app]
You'd only have to provide a few image and copy variations for this to work.
❸ If this sounds interesting, would you like to learn more about how the tech works?
Signoff
❶ Show them a few examples of what their existing setup related to your product or service looks like.
❷ Show examples of how your product improves their existing setup or fixes a problem related to it.
❸ Ask for an initial chat and entice them with something valuable or interesting they'll learn.
How to get new clients with cold email
Getting new clients with cold email is a lot different than getting prospects interested in a B2B product. A lot of the cold email best practices like talk about your benefits and results are tailored for B2B products and don't work well for getting new clients. Why? No matter how great your benefits or results are, the prospect isn't sure how you'll actually be able to apply your skills and experience to help their business. The key to overcoming their skepticism and getting an interested reply? Come up with a few valuable improvement ideas related to your services and tailored for your prospect's business and share this in your first email to them. This is what I call the VIU (valuable ideas upfront) approach. Now you’re not just offering them benefits and results your prospect has to figure out how to put to use, you’re offering them ready-to-go solutions to improve their business. Here's a template of this approach in action:❶ I came across your comment on Product Hunt about LeadBot.
❷ In terms of attracting more ready-to-convert leads, I found asking these questions work well for coming up with the best content topics:
❸ ・ What would someone who would benefit from my product be searching for? For LeadBot, topics would include: checklist for qualifying prospects, how to score prospects, how to identify the top sources of qualified prospects.
・What key points do the top ranked articles for these topics cover? Enter each topic into Google and see what points each of these articles cover. If there are actionable steps or valuable insights most or all of the articles miss about one of these topics, this is great opportunity for you to create a 10x better article to attract more readers and in turn, more leads.
・Create and offer a downloadable resource related to the topic of each of your popular articles. Someone is much more likely to give you their email address in exchange for supplementary material about the topic they just read. After they sign up, you can nurture them about LeadBot.
❹ Would you be open to a 15-min brainstorm where we can come up a few high converting content topics for LeadBot?
Signoff
❶ In one sentence, mention where you found the prospect to open the conversation.
❷ Mention you'd like to share your process for achieving a business goal that's important for them (and related to your services).
❸ Share 2-3 key steps of your process. This lets you provide value and demonstrate your expertise upfront and shows them exactly what you can do for their business.
❹ Ask them for an initial call, framed as a brainstorm session so they are excited to learn more from you. The call will give you a chance to build trust and rapport with them and further demonstrate your value to further entice them to hire you.
