Cold email prospecting just. plain. works.
It doesn’t have the sex appeal that Facebook ads have, and some people are (mistakenly) worried about it being spam, but the reality is it’s one of the absolute best and most affordable way to get any new business generating revenue quickly.
Cold email outreach to prospects, partners, and the media has been a critical part of the plan for every business we’ve started, and has been THE major revenue driver for several of them.
Here’s three more big reasons why you should give it the respect it deserves:
No Paid Ads, No SEO, & No Affiliates
Learning how to do paid advertising and SEO takes time and money.
And while we love affiliates, they are expensive (50% of revenue or more…nothing to sneeze at!) and can be unreliable at best.
This lead generation method doesn’t require any technical or marketing knowledge. It’s very simple, it’s very fast, it’s very cheap, and it’s 100% compliant.
With cold email it’s possible to tap into an unlimited amount of targeted leads in places that refresh monthly (without a big budget or lots of risk). Not only is it possible to target your customers, but it’s very possible to build a “lead generation system” that creates reliable results.
That’s what I’ll be outlining in this workflow guide.
Perfect For Getting Started…But It Also Scales
If you aren’t already well-acquainted with cold email, it’s a marketing and sales strategy that’s perfect for small businesses and solopreneurs on a budget.
It’s simply the tactic of reaching out to potential customers by email. It’s not overly complicated once you understand the core tactics. It’s that simplicity that leaves it overlooked, and what keeps it “The Best Kept Secret of Silicon Valley”.
It’s also a scalable strategy capable of generating millions, even giving early traction to industry giants like as Paypal and Uber.
Salesforce.com pretty much pioneered cold email selling and it’s how they built themselves into a billion dollar company.
How To Find Targeted Prospects For Your Cold Email Prospecting Campaigns
This specific strategy comes from our good friend, Mike Hardenbrook.
Over the last few years Mike has sent millions of cold emails and generated millions in revenue for a variety of businesses, and he’s the guy we turn to for best-practices on cold email prospecting tools and strategies for our business.
The process outlined below is a crucial step in building your lead generation machine – finding targeted prospects to contact.
Step 1: Figure Out What Software Your Customers Are Using
If you are selling to other businesses, it’s almost certain a large percentage of your customers use the same or similar software.
Let’s say you are an agency selling marketing to clients. Some good software could be ones like Mailchimp, Aweber, Shopify, Optimizely, Unbounce, etc. These show an interest in marketing or at least a type of business that is currently marketing (and maybe they want someone better).
Drawing a blank? Get a list of your customers websites and pay them a visit.
Then install the Chrome extension Wappalyzer.
Now head on over to the site and click the extension to reveal all the software running on their website.
Don’t have customers yet?
Don’t let that stop you. Pick some companies that you believe would be ideal customers and analyze them instead.
Step 2: Generate A List Of Other Websites That Are Using The Same Software Your Customers Use
Now we are going to use NerdyData to locate sites in bulk from around the web using the software we are targeting.
This particular service is not free, but you can run unlimited searches a month for just 49/mo. I am talking about hundreds of thousands of returns or more.
It’s worth it’s weight in gold, trust me!
For this example, I ran a search for Mailchimp users and it returned a report of 60,954 websites running Mailchimp.
Sweet!
To mention for the advanced users. There is also another service similar to NerdyData called BuiltWith. They return a little more data, and a little more ability to sort the data by employee count, budget, etc.
However they have a high price tag. So while you’re getting your feet wet, I suggest NerdyData.
Step 3: Convert The Websites You Found Into Email Addresses!
Ok, now comes the real magic. We are going to take the domains we have and convert them into email addresses.
There are two services you can do this with – I’ve used them both. One is Anymail Finder and the other is Hunter. For this example I’ll use Anymail Finder.
The great thing is you can use the tool unlimited for free to get unverified emails.
What’s an unverified email?
That means they didn’t run a server check to see if the email is current. People change emails, etc. That doesn’t mean the data isn’t good, just higher percentage of bounces will occur when sending.
If you upgrade, you can get a higher quality of data that’s verified not to bounce.
I know what you’re saying “another paid service?” But at just $49-$99, we are getting leads for less than .01! Tell me where else you can find that? 🙂
Ok, so head on over to the bulk search and upload your data. I uploaded 30K of my Mailchimp websites. I chose to only target those in the US.
As you can see, my search returned 6,566 verified and 6,909 unverified.
So in all, I got 13,475 leads. For the two services I spent $149 combine. When you do the math, that’s just .01 a lead.
BUT remember, it’s .01 a lead on just on our first search. We can repeat what we’re doing over and over again all month for no extra cost!
So in reality, we are getting a list of targeted prospects every month for a fraction of a penny.
Now It’s Time To Start Converting These Prospects Into Sales!
Start reaching out to those prospects with your pitch and drum up some business.
It works.
We’ve used cold email prospecting for our own businesses and for clients – generating countless conversations and sales meetings, and millions of dollars in sales.
Do it!