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
Even when you follow some copywriting formulas like talk about benefits or mention results like "lowered churn by 3%", prospects are unsure how your product would be able to do this for their business. This cold email outreach shares a few examples of specific value they can get from your product, so they can see exactly what it can do for them.
❶Congrats on your recent influencer campaigns! ❷Did 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
❸I 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.
❹I 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.
❺Are you free for a 10-min chat? I’d love to learn more about which influencers are delivering the most ROI for you.
❶Mention something they did recently that is related to your product.
❷Using your product, pull a few useful data points for the prospect.
❸Briefly 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.
❺Ask them for a brief chat, framed in terms of you wanting to learn more about how you can help them.
Approach: reach out to the users of a product that's complimentary to yours
You can find users of complimentary products with BuiltWith, which shows you what tech stack they're using on their website. You can also find them on product review websites like Capterra and G2.
For example, if your tool is an email address finder, a complimentary product would be a sales outreach tool.
❶I saw that you use Outreach for prospecting.
❷You might find Hunter useful as well. It shows you the email format a company uses so you can easily figure out someone's email address. You can verify them as well to make sure they work.
❸In fact, this is how I was able to reach out to you. :)
❹Whose email are you Sherlock Holmes-ing? Let us do the work for you (50 free searches every month):
https://hunter.io
❶Mention that you saw they use a product complimentary to yours, which also serves as your reason for connecting with them.
❷Explain in a non-salesy way the biggest value they would get from using your product.
❸Show a bit of proof your product works.
❹After piquing their curiosity, simply ask them to give your product a try.
Approach: highlight a differentiating feature of your product that your competitors don't have
In your cold email, instead of focusing on core features which your competitors also likely have, highlight a differentiating feature that many of them don't to stand out.
❶I saw that you have a decent following on Facebook but don't post much. ❷I get it. It's hard to keep up with it when you've got a lot on your plate.
❸What if you did something like this? Where a few times a week, when someone orders one of your painted sneakers, it gets auto-posted to your Facebook page? Provides some social proof and keeps it alive:
❹You can do this with Fomo.
❶Describe the issue they have that your product's differentiating feature helps with.
❷Sympathize with why they may be having this issue.
❸Share an idea to help them fix this issue related to what your product helps with and provide a few details of how it would work.
❹Link to your product.
Approach: show how your product works within your cold email
Provide an example of how your product works, personalized to your prospect or their business.
❶How's everything in Chicago? ❷I saw that you do a lot of cold email outreach.
❸Wondering, are you piggybacking on Gmail's high deliverability when emailing a list of people? I find this almost guarantees you land in someone's primary inbox.
❹You can do the same with GMass. It hooks up to your Gmail and plugs in details about your prospects from a spreadsheet.
That's how I got your name and city to appear in this.
And full transparency, I sent a personalized version of this email to 100 other people.
Sales. But someone's gotta do it. :)
❶Start with a friendly greeting to open the conversation.
❷Reference something they do related to your product. This gives them an inkling why you reached out to them.
❸Ask them if they're doing something that your product helps with and describe the key benefits this offers.
❹Mention the product that you're using to have this benefit and describe briefly how it works. You don't have to provide too many details here, just enough to pique their curiosity so they check out your product themselves.
Approach: provide a few examples of what your product can do for them
❶I saw that you're starting a new beauty brand soon, congrats! ❷If 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. :)
❸Here are a few names our Squadhelpers have come up for beauty brands before:
・Lurella
・Purabelle
・GlowEnvy
❹They 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. :)
❺Let me know if this sounds interesting,
❶Mention what the prospect is doing (that's related to your product). This serves as your reason for connecting with them.
❷In a non-salesy way, describe the biggest pain point your product addresses and how it solves it.
❸Provide a few examples of what your product can do for the prospect upfront so they can see your value in a concrete way.
❹Provide a few more details about what they can get out of using your product and mention an additional benefit you offer.
❺Ask them what they think to start the conversation.
"What if I offer a B2B service?" We got you covered. Take a look at 6 cold emails for getting new clients. The approach that works for this is totally different.
Approach: leverage a trigger event to introduce your product
You can use a trigger event, something that happened or is happening with your prospect's industry or company, as a reason to reach out to them. This means their business needs related to your product are top of mind when you mention it to them so they're more likely to take action. This is how Brian Anderson cold emailed Charlie Liang at Engagio, by showing how his product would be useful at an event Charlie was attending soon.
❶I know you'll be spending big bucks at the Marketo Summit next month (unless Jon gets you a crazy discount).
❷I 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.
❸To 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.
❹Our 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:
❺It'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.
❶Mention the event the prospect is participating is, has participated in or is affected by. This serves as your highly relevant reason for connecting.
❷Show that you understand their major goals or needs related to this event.
❸Briefly describe the pain point that they may face (which your product solves).
❹Explain in one sentence how your product solves this pain point.
❺Paint 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 emails to these users to introduce your product as a better solution. You can find these users by searching for the product on Twitter and by looking through its reviews on websites including G2 Crowd, GetApp and Capterra.
❶As 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.
❷Just 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
❸And 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
❹If 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!
❶Explain what happened with the product the prospect's using and the impact this change may have on their future use of it.
❷Mention 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.
❸List a few valuable features your product has that your competitors don't to entice them to migrate.
❹Provide 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
You can also put your product in front of a potential customer by simply asking them for feedback about it. They are more likely to reply since you aren't selling them anything and valuing their expertise.
❶I've looked up to you ever since I binge read Metamorphosis in high school (until my thumbs changed colors!).
❷I built a writing tool for writers like you and would love your valuable input on it.
❸How 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.
❸If 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.
❶In one time, provide a meaningful comment about why you value their work and expertise.
❷Briefly describe what you built and say you're interested in getting their feedback.
❸Mention the biggest difference between your product and what's already available and provide 2-3 examples.
❹Ask 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.
This is how Ilya, the CEO of Datanyze, cold emailed Ben Sardella, then the vice president of sales at KISSmetrics, when he first built Datanyze. Ilya asked Ben for feedback and Ben not only became Datanyze's first customer, he later joined as a co-founder.
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.
❶I wanted to get in touch with your colleague who manages Facebook ads. Who would be the best person to connect about this?
Thanks!
❶Simply 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
❶I 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.
❷This 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.
❸If this sounds interesting, would you like to learn more about how the tech works?
❶Show them a few examples of what their existing setup related to your product or service looks like.
❷Show examples of how your product improves their existing setup or fixes a problem related to it.
❸Ask for an initial chat and entice them with something valuable or interesting they'll learn.
Frequently asked questions about cold emails
What is a cold email?
A cold email is an email sent to someone you haven't had prior contact with.
Is cold email legal?
Yes, as long as you follow the rules of the country your contact is based in.
United States
The CAN-SPAM Act lays out requirements for commercial messages, defined as "any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service". If your cold email isn't primarily promoting a product or service that is sold or traded, CAN-SPAM does not apply. If it is, you can cold email someone in the United States by following these rules:
1. Provide an opt out method
You must clearly show people how they can opt out of future emails from you, for example by clicking on an unsubscribe link or by replying to your email with the word 'unsubscribe'. Your opt out method must work for at least 30 days after you've sent the email.
2. You must stop emailing people who opt out in 10 business days
If someone opts out, you have to stop emailing them in 10 business days.
3. Include your location
This can be your street address, a post office box or a private mailbox you've registered.
4. Don't use misleading subject lines
The subject line must reflect the content of your message. It doesn't necessarily have to summarize your email, but it cannot be about something completely different.
5. Accurately identify who sent the email
Your 'From', 'To', 'Reply-To', domain name and email address must accurately show the message came from you or your business.
European Union
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) isn't specifically about emails or commercial messages but governs how companies process personal data. When you sent a cold email to someone, you are processing their personal data (email address).
Under GDPR, you can still cold email if you have a legitimate interest to make contact. This includes:
Use of client or employee data
Marketing
Fraud prevention
Intra-group transfers
IT security
To use legitimate interest as the legal basis for your cold email, you have to include:
1. How you've processed their personal data
Mention where or how you found their personal information (email address).
2. How your contact can update or remove their data
You can include an unsubscribe link so they can opt out of future emails. If they unsubscribe, you have to delete information from your contact list and/or CRM.
3. Your legitimate reason for processing their personal data
You must include the reason why you're emailing them, which can be covered by the content of your email.
