77: The State of Cold Email in 2023
77: The State of Cold Email in 2023
What's changed & what to do about it
Read on jed.substack.com
Read time: 5min
Welcome back to The Practical Prospector Newsletter! If you haven’t joined yet, subscribe here to receive future posts:
Today we’re discussing the state of cold email in 2023. More specifically, why you need to adapt your strategy (and how to do it).
Agenda:
The State of Cold Email in 2023
How to Stand Out in the Inbox
How to Master the Offer
My Updated Email Strategy
P.S. If you’d like additional support, I’m accepting a limited amount of slots for 1:1 coaching sessions on Hard Skill Exchange.
The State of Cold Email in 2023
There are 68 billion more emails being sent per day in 2023 compared to 5 years ago in 2018.
Why is this?
I think it’s due to a few reasons:
More people are remote. So email communication is higher
Companies need leads now more than ever and cold email is the most scalable channel to get them
AI and automation tools make scaling cold email easier than ever
But that’s not the only thing that’s changed.
If you sell SaaS, you probably have a lot more competition than you did 5 years ago.
This is because it’s easier than ever to build software. The number of new SaaS startups slowed down during the pandemic but it’s picking back up.
Not only are there new SaaS startups being built every day, but the existing ones are becoming “platform” solutions.
In other words, they’re expanding into other verticals.
What does all of this mean if you rely on cold email as an outbound channel?
Two things:
The old cold email strategies aren’t as effective (or simply don’t work at all)
If you sell SaaS, you probably have way more competitors than before
Put simply: it’s harder than ever to stand out in the inbox.
But you probably didn’t need me to tell you that :)
My first sales manager, Troy Barter, gave me great advice on this: The only certainty in sales is that things will always change.
This is something we all have to accept. And if you do, sales become a lot more fun.
It’s a game of cracking the code.
How to Stand Out in the Inbox
The answer is not volume.
It starts with finding companies that are THE best fit for your solution.
9 times out of 10 companies have an ICP that is far too broad.
I made a whole post on this so I won’t go into too much depth.
But narrowing your ICP criteria starts with deep research in two areas:
Your competitors (and your tangible differences)
Your customers (and the specific problems you solve for them)
Once you’ve done research in these two areas, the next step is to master your offer.
How to Master the Offer
Below is a 10-minute video where I break down exactly why mastering the offer is so important in today’s cold email landscape. And how to do it.
Some things are better said via audio than text :)
Ask most people, “What are you offering in your cold emails?” and they’ll probably tell you “A meeting”.
This is a red flag. Prospects don’t want to take a meeting unless they’re already in the market for your solution.
This is why most people can’t get past 5% reply rates. Because the only prospects that respond (besides the ones that tell you “unsubscribe”) are those who were already in the market for a solution like yours. You just happened to find the needle in the haystack.
No tactics or copywriting tips can make up for a shitty offer.
Watch this video and learn how to do it:
Timestamps:
→ 00:00 Introduction
→ 00:38 The Importance of Your Offer
→ 02:22 Examples of Mailshake Offers
→ 04:42 Building Trust with Free Value
→ 06:53 How to do it (live example)
My Updated Email Strategy
The biggest change was significantly decreasing our email volume.
Now, we’re much more intentional about the accounts we target (I have an upcoming newsletter about the math of how we determine the number of new accounts we target each day to hit revenue goals. Stay tuned).
Beyond that, our email sequence structure has also changed.
Here’s what it looks like now:
Email #1:
Hey {{first-name}} - [mention the buying trigger we found].
[Make a hypothesis about a problem they’re experiencing because of that trigger].
If it sounds relevant, I think I found a way we can help with this.
Mind if I share more info?
The key difference is we’re being more vague about how we solve the problem. The goal is to “show them we know them” in the first line. Then, nail the problem they’re likely experiencing in the second line.
In the third line/CTA, we’re trying to create curiosity that motivates them to respond to find out how we solve this problem.
Email #2: same thread
For more context, {{first-name}} - it involves [your solution for solving the problem].
Here’s a visual to explain how it works:
[Insert a screenshot of what your product does to solve this problem]
Think this could help?
In the second email, we're explaining how we solve the problem with a visual. This gives the sequence synergy and flow.
Email #3: same thread
{{first-name}} - If [problem] is top of mind given [buying trigger], I thought this could help: [insert helpful resource].
Happy to share more resources on this if you’d like.
In the third email, we share a helpful resource with no CTA. The goal is to help them solve part of the problem for free with a helpful resource.
Ideally, this resource comes from a 3rd party (i.e. not from our company so that we don’t come off as biased).
By giving first, we build trust so that hopefully, they’ll come back to learn how we can help them solve the whole problem.
One week later we repeat this thread in a new email chain. This time, we focus on a new problem.
If you’d like to see real examples of:
These email templates in action
How to find relevant visuals for your sequence
How to find the “helpful resources” I mentioned
How to find buying triggers
How to make assumptions on the problems they’re facing as a result of those buying triggers
You can become a paid subscriber and check out the 75+ archives + join my subscriber community where I can go more in-depth on these topics.
Thanks for reading,
Jed
P.S. I dropped a free course with Sell Better: How to Build an Outbound Sequence From Scratch. If you sign up before the end of the month, you’ll also receive My Top 7 Email Templates!