Doubling Your Cold Email Reply Rate

We’ve been scaling our cold email efforts at K&J (our digital marketing agency) for new leads in Australia.

Our response rate has gone from 6% to 13%.

Here are the four changes we’ve made to our cold email outreach.

1. Stalk before you talk

The goal is to remove as much “cold” as possible from cold emails by interacting with target leads on social platforms.

- Change profile pictures to be the same across all your social profiles and email provider

Twitter

LinkedIn

Gmail

- Follow the target lead on all relevant social platforms

- Like & comment on at least one post within the last two weeks. Don’t interact with any posts older than this. It’s creepy

2. Write a subject line that is based on their social media post

Here is an example subject line from this post.

“Congrats on getting over to Amsterdam”

3. Grab a picture

Download Loom and follow the 2-minute set-up.

Go to the leads website and open Loom, but do not record.

Grab a screenshot (instructions on how to do this) so that can see your face and their website in the image.

4. Film Yourself

Record a video talking to whatever problem you can solve for them that takes less than < 60 seconds to watch.

The format of this video is:

• Talk about their social media post
  

• Point out the problem that can be solved
  

• Offer to give them a hand if they want more info

Here is an example.

Notes: This type of outreach is highly personalised and challenging to do at scale.

This approach works well if you have a high-ticket item you want to sell and B2B.

If you want to do B2C you’ll need a more automated approached.

The Disproportionate Power of You

Gallup’s annual Global Emotions Report measures people’s positive and negative experiences worldwide.

According to Gallup, 41% of adults experienced a lot of worry the previous day.

These are challenging times.

Most of us are upset.

Individuals, though, shape the world we live in.

Bill Gates started Microsoft in 1975.

By 2005, Microsoft and its ecosystem created 14.7 M jobs globally.

In 1985, Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple for 12 years.

On his return in 1997, the company was nearly bankrupt, and 14 years later, in 2011, he turned it into the most valuable company in the world.

These two companies generated $592 B in revenue last year, or 2.5% of the entire GDP of the USA.

These two individuals represent 0.0000000006 of the US population.

We as individuals are important not because we are the only ones whose work has value but rather because we can bring out the best in everybody around us.

We just have to choose to be that individual and remember that this is our power.