Transcription
Welcome to day two of the Cold to Gold email challenge, sponsored by Upticks and Lead Engine. And as I shared a couple days ago, you know, you can use that spreadsheet and that documentation to generate as many customers as you want with cold email.
So today's agenda, as I talked on the first call, all right, so a little bit of a cold email master class today. I'm going to go through infrastructure. I'm going to be sharing a lot of tools and resources with everybody today. We're going to go through some list building strategies, tools, and resources again. How to build and write your campaigns. Good copywriting again, tools, resources. How to fight AI with AI, be kind of a common thread or in theme throughout. And then we'll have this special guest, Eric from Growth Engine X. Please stay until the end on this. I mean, the guy got a huge cold email agency, really big in the space, a lot of followers, and, you know, was very responsible for CL the software getting to where they're at today. So he's, he's an awesome guest to have on. Here's a little QR code, scan it with your phone. This is a link to the master planning document.
All right, so the first thing I want to get to is infrastructure. Again, I'm going to be cruising here. So first, I want to go through some deliverability tips before I get to tools. And basically, I mean, everyone pretty much knows this on this call, but it's worth repeating. You can't get results with cold email if you don't maintain deliverability. Just know you're not going to always land in the inbox, but you have to do all these little things right that I'm going to talk about in just a second. These tips will probably save you a lot of time and headaches. I know they seem really simple bullet points on the screen, but in terms of inbox management, if you're worried you burned your inboxes, don't try to revive them, okay? Just create new ones.
All right, this is a simple tip, but it can save you a lot of time. A volume kills all things with email. So always err on the side of caution. Never crank your volume with cold email. People always ask me, you know, what, you know, how much volume can I send per inbox? You want to send the least amount possible per inbox, okay? And then in order of importance for deliverability tips, being marked as spam is the number one killer with emails. So this goes into like copywriting, okay? So I'm going to talk about copywriting third on on this call. I call this shadow banning. After that, it's bouncing. You're getting your emails bounced. So we always want to make sure to validate and use catchall scoring to reduce bounces. Writing spammy content, okay? You can make your, you just have to make your emails less spammy, sound less spammy with with your email copy, okay? And then repetitive content. So you got to use heavy spin tax. You can use AI, you can use a lot of A/B testing to to vary things up.
All right, so those are just just a few initial tips. I'm not going to spend a ton of time on this, but as you're setting up your like Google, Microsoft workspaces, I'm going to give you some tools and resources to help you do this much easier. Used to be, you had to build all this stuff yourself. There's a lot of services and softwares that can do this for you now, but always isolate things. So never put too many inboxes in one single Google or Microsoft workspaces, okay? So I like to cap it at five domains and 15 inboxes for every workspace. So just divide things up, and you never want to give too much much power to any one workspace, okay? So you can have a lot of issues with deliverability if you're not erring on the side of caution.
Okay, terms of your inbox and domain strategy, how many domains and inboxes you want to set up. I did have inside of the calculator I showed you a couple days ago. Here's some quick back-of-the-napkin math you can do, though. So for every thousand leads in your total addressable market, set up one domain. So if you have say 50,000 leads, set up or buy 50 domains. And then depending on how big of an offer you want to have to basically compensate for issues you might experience, okay, you know, double it from there or, you know, increase it by 50%, so on and so forth. And then set up two or three email accounts per domain. Always use a reputable domain host like a GoDaddy or, you know, Cloudflare or, you know, someone like that for your hosting.
All right, and always have those backups as I talked about. And then from a naming perspective for those domains, always buy .coms. Don't be a tight ass, you know, don't try to, don't try to use XYZ and like all these weird things, just buy .coms. And these domains, a a decent strategy is to resemble your core domain. You know, for instance, like for Lead Engine, you could use try leadengine.com or for Uptick, try uptics.com. But a better strategy is to decentralize the naming, okay? So, you know, you might instead of Lead Engine, I might say AIoutboundsales.com. Instead of, you know, Uptick, I might say scalecoldemail.com, okay? So try to decentralize as much as possible, use just key terms and things of that nature. If you're doing lower volume, you can get away with adding just like a prefix word or something or a suffix word to the end.
All right, same thing with email accounts. An okay strategy if you're doing lower volume, you could get away with using your name for the naming conventions or using employee names or spouse names, things of that nature. But a better strategy is use digital SDRs, I.E. fake names. Some people don't like that depending on your industry, you know, if you have skeptical prospects, some people just don't like to do that. But that is the best practice. Probably don't use words like Sally Smith, try to make them sound real, but this is the best strategy you can use for your naming conventions.
All right, in terms of email provider options, there's three main ways that you can, you know, set up your email infrastructure. You've got Google, you've got Microsoft, and then you have custom email servers. For the sake of simplicity, it's usually best to set up a 50/50 mix between Microsoft and Google, okay? Just depending on, this is a broad stroke statement that I'm making here, but I don't understand everybody's, who who you're targeting in terms of leads. If you're doing small to medium volume, you're going to be just fine with doing these. If you're going to start doing very high volume, then you may want to get into using custom email servers through SMTP, IMAP, things of that nature. There's some pros and cons to every single one of these, okay? But Google, Microsoft, you really can't go wrong with. Google's sort of the favorite, but you may want to mix some Microsoft into there.
The biggest tip I can share here is don't try to save money. I know everybody wants to save money, but if you try to save money, you're going to sacrifice something. So what I recommend is spend the same amount of money that you otherwise normally would send or spend, but lower your volume per email account, okay? So have as many email accounts as you can, but just lower the volume. As I mentioned before, volume kills all things. So just ask yourself, you know, how much can you possibly afford to spend on your email infrastructure, and then spend that amount. Don't try to skimp out.
Here's a few resources for you to set up email accounts. Some of these are, a lot of these are done-for-you services. Some of them just make it a lot easier. Scaled Mail, scaled mail is is kind of an aggregator of email inbox setup. This is a QR code here. It's also, I have a tab inside of that workbook I shared at the beginning with a link to all of these, okay? Here's a five email inbox service, sets up your domains and inboxes for you, DNS records. Full disclosure, this is our own service, all right? And then Mailreef is for custom servers, so they're not going to be set up on Microsoft and Google, okay? But just in terms of overall, you know, it's good to have Microsoft, good to have Google, and then maybe you do custom if you're doing doing a higher volume play.
Okay, in terms of email software for infrastructure, I'm a little bit biased here because I have obviously a couple platforms for sending emails. So I've got Upticks, but, you know, obviously there's household names like Smartlead and Instantly. And then my new platform, Lead Engine, is is coming soon. But just in terms of, I don't really care who you use, it should just have some of these elements that I want to talk about real quickly, okay? For email warming, you want to have a clean warm-up pool. Now, this is basically impossible for you to understand and know how the email warming pools are, if they're clean or not, but a good rule of thumb, the easier it is to access an email warming pool, the the more polluted it's going to be, okay? And, you know, not to plug my own product, Upticks, but we make it a little bit harder for people to sign up. We require require credit card during the sign-up process. So it actually turns away a lot of people from our platform, and that means our warm-up pool, it's smaller, but it's cleaner, and we have less bad actors. And there's been a lot of talk in the space recently about warm-up pools and people having issues with them, okay? So that's one thing with email warming.
In terms of your sender, whoever you use, and pretty much all the mainstream platforms are going to have things like multi-inbox rotation. So this is going to spread your sending volume across multiple email inboxes. They're going to have volume management to manage your volume at the inbox level, at the campaign level. And then a lot of them will have human-like sending, although it's a bit archaic, you know, it's basically a delay between sends by like a minute or two. Our new platform, Lead Engine, will take this to the next level with human-like sending and make sure you have email validation at the time of send, and hopefully even catchall scoring for those riskier emails who, you know, people are run, who are running your leads, who have Microsoft and custom email servers. And then go heavy on the spin tax. So we released a feature, Hold Intellispin, that you just toggle one button on inside of the email templates and it rotates, uses AI to rotate content in your emails, okay? So those are some elements you want to definitely make sure, no matter what cold email software you use. This is most of these are table stakes, not so much these features down here.
Now to dive into list building, okay? So getting into list building, it's after deliverability and your infrastructure, of course. Like, you're, your strategy is your list, your list is your strategy. And I often times see people take their list and they, they do kind of a shotgun approach. And so just imagine you're closing a deal, is this, is this X right, right in the center of a bullseye? But if you have leads that are irrelevant and you're scattering leads over here, over here, over here, over here, you're going to have a hard time getting results, okay? And you're going to have a hard time with email deliverability because the more relevant you email people, the less engagement you have, and the more relevant, the more times you're going to get marked as as spam. So think about every time you build a list, to if if anyone's familiar with archery or, you know, shooting or anything like that, these, these are called groupings. You want to tighten up your grouping of leads. You want to, you want to hit this X. So the tighter you can get it, the better with your lead list, okay? So it takes a little bit of time to build these lead lists, but the more relevant and the more tight you can get this grouping, the more success you're going to have with your leads.
All right, and just some tips here. Foundations for lists. Don't use the cheapest data sources. I know, I know it's obviously, try to save as much money as you can, but, you know, often times the cheapest data sources aren't always the best. And I always say, never let a, a teller, like a bank teller, count their own till. You always want to revalidate your emails from any data source that you have, okay? So you don't want to risk bouncing emails. And then in terms of just relevance with list building, in order of importance, you want to try to find intent signals. So we talked about this a little bit a couple days ago on the first call. The more intent signals that we can find, gets us closer to relevance and tightening that grouping within our list. This is going to substantially increase our engagement and our reply rates, our conversation and positive reply rates, and our opportunity rates within. And if you can start here and get really good at this, you may not need to use some of these other data sources.
Okay, then you got your lookalikes. So find similar companies to your, your customers are obviously your best, your best lookalike type companies, but then you can find lookalikes based on your highest intent signals, okay? And then third, you've got your standard leads. Standard leads are good for scaling, but only when you master like demand creation, only when you master deliverability, only when you master copywriting. Scaling up at that point is only after you master these, these first few buckets, okay? So there's a couple tips just to dive deeper into those three buckets of lead list building intent. And I'm going to share some tools with you guys as well.
Some of the biggest, the best intent signals you can find is job hiring companies posting for jobs. So for instance, you know, if I want to sell Lead Engine, for instance, you know, I could target people who are posting jobs for like go-to-market engineering, maybe even SDRs or account executives. And, you know, it, it just shows, it's a signal that they're, they're growing, okay? So they might be more inclined to want to pick up a product like ours, okay? Social media engagement, people commenting and engaging on particular topics. Job changes, if they've moved companies. Actually, even if they've been at a company a certain amount of time, that's even a trigger as well. So the more intent signals you can find to make your your outreach more relevant, the higher you're going to improve your engagement with them.
And then just to expand a little bit on lookalike data. So again, just matching the characteristics of people in these buckets or your best customers. And then the best, you know, the thing I can share with with the standard data is don't go broad. And make sure your, your lists, they're very, very targeted. So add as many filters as you possibly can. I'm going to show you a study quick in just a second here, but your standard data, mostly for volume campaigns. So to get your fastest wins and have the most successes humanly possible, start here, then move here, then move here, all right? And make sure to build automated processes to qualify your leads using AI with this, and I'll tell you about that right now.
So you always want to trust your list, but verify, right? So use your reputable data sources. Let me just show you a study I did. So I grabbed like 12,400 leads in this study, okay? Here's some of my lead filters: companies with, you know, a couple employees. I'm targeting VPs of sales, USA, employee range 5 to 10. I excluded some industries and filtered for email status verified inside of the, the list building tool. Well, we revalidated and only 91% came back valid, meaning almost 9% were invalid. So always trust, but verify. But then we did another level. So we actually did AI lead scoring. So we scored the leads on an A/B/C level, and only 63% were actually A-list leads where the AI recommended these were the top prospects. B means that they were, the AI was unsure, and C means don't reach out to them, okay? So if you just imagine, if you didn't revalidate, you've got 9% bad leads, and if you're reaching out to these C-list leads, it's about 20, almost 25% of the leads you don't want to reach out to. And those are the 25% that are going to get your infrastructure, your deliverability in trouble, and you Ely want to avoid that. So make sure to go through this.
Here's another quick study, little bit better list building process where we added an industry here. So filtering by industry can help weed out the noise. We still had a bunch of invalids, but our C-list leads came down, but it's still 12% of our lead list, okay? And 12% can get us in big trouble still, all right? So try to go through this process. I do have an AI prompt inside of the workbook to help you with this A/B/C list. I platform Upticks and also Lead Engine, you can do both inside of it, but you could also use like a Clay to run an AI prompt through as well. And I have that AI prompt saved towards the end of the tabs inside of that workbook that I shared.
All right, and here's some data providers. All right, we got Lead Magic. We've got Ocean. Lead Magic, they have job listings inside of there in addition to an email finder, email validation, and then a bunch of things for list building. You guys can, you know, sign up for that if you want. Ocean's good for lookalikes and standard lead lists, okay? All right, Triii gives you social intent signals, people who are engaging with content. This is, this is pretty cool. You do have to use this in addition to another email finder like a Lead Magic or an Ocean. And then ListKit is is a, a lead database that has intent signals, kind of like an Apollo as well. So here's a few lead sources, and again, that's in the workbook.
Third, I'm going to get into copywriting here before we hop over and and get Eric on the line. So the makeup of a good cold email in terms of copywriting, we need to answer a few psychological triggers that's going to help persuade your leads to want to take an action. So first of all, the problem that you solve and how quick you can solve it, usually is a good thing to also include. Who you are and and what you do. This can be implied in your email, you don't have to directly state it necessarily. Who you help and the impact it makes. And then what is the risk or the upside? Any time, you know, what time might it take or what timeline could they expect a result? Can they make money? Can they save money? And if you have a guarantee, these are good things to make sure to always include in in your emails. I see a lot of bad copy out there, obviously. It's get starting to get better. There's more and more tools that are helping with that, but those are some good tips.
Some other good tips here for copywriting. Google and Microsoft decide on inboxing your emails based on content. Now, it's not just technical setup. So you need to randomize your copy as much as possible. AI can do this for you. I'm going to show you how. And don't just use ChatGPT word for word. Always refine and edit, cuz people can sniff out AI-generated copy. But if it's relevant, it's going to win regardless if it was AI-generated or not, okay? If it's relevant and you have good angles, people don't really care if you're going to help them solve a problem, okay? But your copy needs to innately speak to your prospect's desires and problems.
All right, you, you need a strong offer and social proof and/or lead magnet. If you have, you can use one of these, you can use two, you can use all three in an email. If you have all three in your email, it's a really, really good email, okay? It's going to increase your positive reply rates and your opportunity rates substantially. But I want you to think about, you can't convert everybody on your list. So you need to stop trying to convert everyone. And I have a saying, to focus on getting 10% of your list to reply 100% of the time, not trying to get 100% of your list to reply 3% of the time. So we want to appeal to and really stand out to the people in that that are most likely to take an action. And I'll teach you how we can do this. And we want to use short, punchy sentences that are easy to read, okay?
Now, when you're reaching out and you're one building copy, but two also building list, target as much or niche down as much as possible. So iron out your, your job titles, location, company size, industries, the niche you're targeting, are they funded, are they not funded, any relevant information that you can have on your prospects is a good thing. Then what you want to do, I might have had these out of order. Yeah, I had these out of order, sorry about that. You want to drill into your persona's deepest desire, their problems and frustrations, their implications of the problems, and then failures and missteps. I'm going to show you how you can do this much pretty simply, all right? This is going to help us write better copy. Most people don't really think about these things, but getting deeper into these things with your prospects and understanding them is going to help you write more relevant copy.
And then in terms of writing angles for your emails, I like to get everybody to think about micro-niching your copy as much as possible, okay? So think about micro-niching your copy. If you just think of your company, so if I just think of Upticks or Lead Engine, the core theme, you know, we try to help people with is increasing sales. So you can think of the main topic of your company as like a country, okay? But we want to go deeper. We don't want to just talk about increasing sales because it's very generic, all right? So we want to then think about a subtopic within that. So might be outbound sales. Then we want to niche that into maybe cold email. And then we're going to niche cold email into maybe deliverability. So the further we get down, the more we're going to stand out, and the more likely we can focus on getting 10% of your list to reply 100% of the time, instead of 100% of your list to reply 3% of the time. So if you do this, this, this is going to be generic, barely anybody's going to reply to you. If you do this, you're more likely to surface a problem that they're experiencing and trigger an emotion or a desire that they have.
All right, now I want to show you a tool. This is a new tool to help you build campaigns. So I'm going to give you, hop into our new platform, Lead Engine, and I'll show everybody how you can get access to this. So inside of our, our new platform, Lead Engine, we have a pretty robust campaign builder, outside of the system, optimizing for conversions automatically using AI and machine learning to do it, and validating on three different levels, and then having a reply co-pilot. We have this campaign builder that can help you write copy very, very easily. So what you do inside of the platform, and AI can build this, you build what are avatars. So this is information about your company doing the outreach, the problems you solve, your solution, your competitive advantage, any results that you get, okay? I'll show you an example here. So just some quick statements in here, it's nothing, it's nothing crazy. And then you have information about your persona, okay? So a description about your persona, the employee range that you might be servicing, any industries you might be servicing, and then those deepest desires for the persona, the problems and frustrations, the implications of problems, and the failures and missteps. This is going to help the AI write better copy, all right? And I do have inside of this workbook, okay? So I have some tools and resources, I have some AI agents, all right? So you can, you can write some of these with some of these AI agents inside of the workbooks to get deeper into your copywriting, all right? This platform, new platform, Lead Engine, here is going to help do it for you.
Then you can map out an angle, okay? So an angle, it's just a simple statement of, you know, a particular angle you want to take. You can pick a copywriting framework, like, you know, this one for instance, is a offering a lead magnet, then it's going to surface a problem, a solution, and then a call to action. But you've got other frameworks like problem solution call to action, and then proof for the guarantee. You've got things like attention, interest, desire, action. You got things like problem solution called action. Any framework that, that you want to have. And if you have your own personal framework, you can create your own framework in here, and the AI will follow that, okay? You can pick a tone of voice or create one. You can pick word limits. And then you've got certain, because AI doesn't always come out with great copy right away, you might want to add certain attributes to the subject line, like no capitalization, you want to insert a company, maybe you want to do five words max in in the subject line. Maybe in the email body, you want to make sure you add certain things. And then what's really powerful with this, if you're using this to write copy, we have quality assurance prompts. So you can do things like excluding common LLM words, write buzz-free copy, can make it concise and clear, things of that nature.
I'm going to just generate this and show everybody how, how simple it is to, to generate after you have these written. And you can do this for your whole campaign. And it, it has, it comes out with really, really good copy because I've structured in the way that I think and I've helped hundreds of clients and thousands of users structure their copy. And, you know, just to kind of show you, this isn't one example. I'll show you some of these like, you know, there's even abbreviations to make it right, s human, you know, this will take a little bit longer to write, but now it's going to start perfecting the copy even further and and making it sound more human, okay? So pretty cool, pretty cool resource. I will have a sign-up for people to get access to this for free. And, you know, you can create all these frameworks. We'll have pre-built frameworks for you, so you don't need to worry about this a whole lot. But I did want to show you that.
So now it's time to bring Eric on the stage here and get into a lot of his expertise. He's got a ton, a ton of industry experience. So stick around for that. Let me just see if I can find him inside of the attendee list here.