Lead Generation Tip of The Week: Cold Email Marketing

Alright, alright, I’m taking the easy way out today during the 31 days of blogging, but can you blame me? It’s Friday night and since I did some good ole fashion procrastinating today, I’m left in a rush to finish the daily blog post.

I’m half kidding. This is something that should be a lead generation tip of the week. Many of you already know how I feel about it, and how much of a role it has played in my own success.

It’s something you can easily integrate into your marketing strategy.

Cold Email Marketing To Generate Leads

I’ve talked about this subject a lot. I did a webinar on cold emailing and I released a premium course called, “Ice Cold Email Gold“.

It’s something I’ve been able to do very well, but also something a lot of people struggle with.

Since I wrote the book on cold email marketing… I can’t share all my secrets here publicly, or else everyone who bought would want my head, but I can give you a few tips.

Mass E-Mail vs. Manually Sending

Here’s the debate…

Some people think that sending manual emails results in better conversions, and they’re probably right, for the most part. They think that automated, mass emailing is spam and against the law (which they’re wrong, usually) and they think no one will respond to mass, automated emails… which they’re wrong again.

Sending manually, is not bad. It’s just not something that can be effectively scaled. If you’re hiring an outsourcer, you probably won’t find good results since if they’ve done this sort of thing before, their IP address will get blacklisted.

There’s just no way to scale manual emails. One of the readers of this blog, Andrea, has a great strategy where he manually emails and does a video breakdown of what he can do to improve the website or SEO of a business. It works great for him, but eventually he will plateau and not be able to scale it any further without continuing to hire people. One side note though, is he generates the lead first via phone before sending the video.

Manual sending is a good way to begin, and try to generate a lead or two in your spare time. It’s not an activity that is efficient if you’re manually sending all day long.

If you read my post about turning your business into a machine, you know that you should be replacing yourself, and automating what you can. When you implement cold email marketing into your overall strategy, it’s something that can be automated pretty well, and get great results.

Email marketing owns an overall low response rate. You have to view it in terms of efficiency. Is it efficient to block off hours of your day to manually email different companies, hoping you can generate some interest? No. Not with the average response rates. The majority of your emails will go unopened, whether you send manually or automatically.

Building Your Email List

How you build your email list is really key when it comes to cold email marketing. You probably don’t want to spend a year or more building an opt in list, you want to make sales RIGHT NOW, right? Why waste precious time… okay, it’s not a waste because you should be building an opt in list from your content marketing efforts but you should also be doing some cold emailing to generate leads and sales.

You can do this manually or automatically… manually, well it’s going to take you a while. Scouring through yellowbook, yellowpages, manta and others, just to build a very small list.

Then you have to clean the FBL emails (don’t know what that is? Then get this) and make sure you clean your list before using your main platform, but more on that later.

My favorite way to get emails though… Mobile Renegade will allow you to scrape emails while you work in the background. Or is it the other way around, you do some more important work while Mobile Renegade scrapes emails in the background. You can watch the demonstration here.

There are other scrapers out there, but none have done well in the test of time. You may need proxies to scrape with Mobile Renegade (except with SuperPages) but it’s the best scraper I’ve tried on the market… If you have suggestions or want me to do a trial on an alternative scraper, let me know, I’d gladly do it!

Clean Your Emails

Before sending emails, you should clean your scraped list.

The reason for cleaning is because if you send to a scraped list, of say, 5,000 emails, you don’t want to ruin your main platform, along with your main domains. When an email bounces, this hurts your overall sender reputation, you want to keep a low amount of bounces. If you have a high amount of bounces you get filtered as spam pretty quickly.

This happens, because a lot of emails that are no longer active, get turned into spam traps. A bounce that is actually a spam trap is the worst kind of bounce you can encounter. Most bounces though, you have a little leeway, you just remove them.

You can search gigs on fiverr, you can use putty and a bunch of manual commands to verify the existence of an email address, or you can do it the fun and automated way, using Email Verifier.

There are a few Fiverr gigs that have worked pretty well in the past, but nothing close to perfect.

Another alternative way to clean your emails, is setup an SMTP service like AmazonSES or Mandrill. It’s cheap, easy, but deliverability generally sucks. It’s a perfect platform for cleaning those annoying bounces, before they’re ever bounces in your main platform! Just make sure you use a burner domain for cleaning.

Get Your Messaging Right

Now that you know SOME of the basics, here is the important part. You don’t want to send the basic spammy, outsourced looking emails.

Even though you’re sending unsolicited email, you want people to look forward to the emails you send.

Offer value.

You don’t go in with a hard sales pitch… you want them to choose you before you ever ask them to.

Provide value, educate them, get your leads or prospects to start thinking about what you’re talking about and with a soft call to action you get highly motivated leads that want to talk business!

Summary

Cold emailing is a great way to generate leads but, it can be quite tricky at times getting the right deliverability.

These tips outlined are just a tiny part of email marketing, however, if you follow these guidelines you will see much better results.

Did you find this useful? This only scratches the surface when it comes to what I’ve talked about and outlined in my “Ice Cold Email Gold” book. Learn how to get around limitations imposed by providers, get around blacklists, get delivered IN the inbox and make a LOT of sales, and revenue doing it! CLICK HERE TO GET ICE COLD EMAIL GOLD.