This essay covers practical tips, history of learning, industry direction, skills acquired, tech stack, data tracking, and the role of automation from my experience with cold email at scale.
We closed 9 deals worth $102,000 from cold email alone. Average deal size (excluding Sykes at $38,900) = $8,900. This represents roughly $50k per month over 2.5 months of active work.
This comes from the ICP. List-building is founded on a hypothesis around a certain trait of a Person/Company that means they are a good fit.
Tactically: Platforms like Ocean.io, clay.com, builtwith are good for building lists for agencies. Cheaper option: Apollo.io's $60/month plan. Expensive: Prospeo, Leadmagic & Findymail. Verification with Million Verifier.
Generally, there's 2 elements to copywriting in cold email:
AI personalisation & data extraction for websites is mainly useful to filter a list based on a variable e.g. all wix sites. However, it also plays a role in making the prospect think that you have taken the time to research them.
1. Had some experience with Clay & Smartlead earlier in the year when I tried to start the agency
2. Watched Nick Abraham talk about Cold Email. Launched campaign that night to Restaurants in Sydney with existing lead list on Instantly.ai. Got one close — Bernadette Gore
3. Weekend — Watched all of Nick Abraham's channel on Youtube
4. Started launching Smartlead Campaigns & setting up domains
5. Fired out emails continuously in large lead lists
6. Went deep into Eric Nowoslawski & Clay.com rabbit hole
7. Today — Collectively made $120,000 from Cold Email in 2.5 months of work
My thinking on learning goes:
I was fear paralysed by spending the money I earned the hard way via cold calling. As soon as we got clay, the learning curve was much quicker — being able to integrate with other tools.
Takeaway: Spend more money initially when learning/investing into a new skill. It catapults the learning curve.
Initially, the ratio of consumption to learning was really good. When watching Nick Abraham, I took away bullet point notes. But when I started watching Eric — I watched too many videos without trying to action what was said.
Takeaway: The consumption/creation ratio is not linear. The more you watch, the less you need to watch — especially of mainstream stuff.
This includes more documentation to come back to, trying to setup a system. Even simple notion pages can be helpful because that allows you to track your thoughts & come back to them.
Takeaway: Document thoughts throughout. Do a better job with documentation & note-taking.
Cold Email has been the catalyst for the most growth I've had in terms of thinking about outbound sales & how to effectively utilise it as a channel.
To a cold audience, your offer is the thing that matters the most. Your personalisation, lead magnet only gets you so far. Because of the objective data & sheer amount of data you receive from cold email, you get very quick feedback on:
Demand Capture offers necessitate extreme amounts of volume. You are trying to cast a net as wide as humanly possible to reach as many people as possible.
Investment: We invested roughly $18-20,000 into cold email and got back $100,000 from it.
Technology & the competence of web-scraping now allows you to get proxies/signals for different companies that accurately determine whether a company is in the market.
For example — exposure to how you can aggregate data from SimilarWeb & other providers makes it much easier to build cold-call lists with companies that find their websites valuable & are likely to pay more in the sales process.
My naive prediction for cold email was that we could simply send out 5-6k emails per day with basic homepage design. Close at a 8-10% clip & make tonnes of money.
Problem: This is not very profitable because typically those interested or that would buy because of a homepage offer are acting on desire. And desire historically does not pay as well as pain.
Nevertheless — Cold Email is fun, interesting & alluring because it is automated. Once you understand fundamentals of list-building, data enrichment & sending out emails, the things that are optimised over time are:
AI SDRs cost $3-5k per month for between 5-10k emails. That means you get 20 qualified leads per month. Paying about $500 per meeting. Average agency/SaaS company closes at 20% clip. Meaning that you pay $2500 to acquire a customer. For a $10k project, that would leave us with around $1500 profit. Horrible.
Cold Email forces you to think about data: how many emails did you send, how many were replied to, how many replies were positive, how many positive replies booked meetings, how many booked meetings become 2nd calls, how many 2nd calls become closes.
Initially when we started, I cared a tonne about reply rates. We even got 8-12% reply rates on some campaigns where we filtered only for gmail accounts.
But you stop caring about reply rates when you sit on 10 calls on a Friday & realise 90% of them are broke. And only 2 of them was ever going to be a close.
Then, you realise: It was never about replies. It was about qualified leads that actually care about their website & have a reason to be on call.
Caveat: I probably could've done this 1 or maybe 2 months earlier but no earlier than that. It takes a lot of data to be able to make a decision about what are best next steps. I'll be cautious going forward that I don't pre-emptively make decisions based on limited data or time.