“The world’s best email to the prospect that needs your product always works” – Jason M. Lemkin
Why Cold Email?
- Predictable channel to grow your MRR
- The lowest risk & lowest Investment
- No risking money on ads
- No need to risk spending 10s of thousands of $ to hire & train new SDRs
- Much faster feedback loop compared to SEO, content, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter cold outreach.
This process consists of 7 parts:
- Research
- Offer
- Awareness Bridge
- List Building & Cleaning
- Setting up the email system for scalability
- Crafting & validating email campaigns
- Scaling
Section 1: Conducting In-Depth Customer and Competitor Research
If you’ve already achieved a product-market fit and have had success in cold traffic channels, you can skip this section. However, for those who haven’t, understanding your market, positioning your product, and crafting a compelling offer are essential first steps.
Why Research is Essential
Before you can uniquely position yourself with a winning offer, you need to understand the pain points and desired outcomes of your Ideal Customers. You also need to grasp your competitive landscape thoroughly to position yourself as the best solution.
How to Research Your Competitors
- Go through competitor websites and, if possible, participate in their demo calls. This will give you an in-depth understanding of what they offer.
- Ad Strategy Analysis: Utilize transparency tools like Google’s and Facebook’s Ad Library to see what kinds of ads your competitors are running.
- Review Mining: Look for both positive and negative reviews. Pay particular attention to common criticisms that you could turn into advantages for your product.
How to Research Your Customers
- Social Listening: Browse forums like LinkedIn, Facebook groups, Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter to understand their pains and the words your customers use to describe their pain points.
- Customer Interviews: Conduct one-on-one interviews to explore questions like:
- Where do they see the ROI of your offer?
- What motivates them in their role?
- Why did they choose your solution over others?
Section 2. Optimizing Your Offer & Positioning
Assessing Market Awareness
- If the Market is Aware: You need a stronger offer to stand out.
- If the Market is Unaware: You have the opportunity to educate them and introduce your solution as the game-changer.
Hormozi’s Value Equation
Use Hormozi’s value equation to make your offer irresistibly compelling. This involves increasing the perceived value and likelihood of achieving the desired outcome while reducing the effort and time needed from the customer’s end. Utilize case studies to increase the perceived likelihood of success and offer guarantees or free trials to decrease risk. Use specific
Niche Focus to Beat the Competition
If you’re starting out in an established market, and your competitors cater to broader markets, consider niching down. For example, Basecamp initially served only small teams, which allowed them to stand out.
Positioning
From your customer research, you should know what your market is dissatisfied with in the existing solutions so you can position your product/service as a solution to that dissatisfaction. Here’s an email example of that:
Hi {{firstName}}, I noticed you’re using a Shopify upsell app XYZ. Most of our clients that used XYZ noticed that it decreased their website speed by 15% and conversion rate by 10%.
Last year we created a lightweight app that fixed this. On average our clients found a 20% increase in conversion rate without any decrease in website loading speed.
Section 3: The Awareness Bridge Assets: Irreplaceable part of High-Converting B2B SaaS Customer Acquisition
1. About Awareness bridge asset
This part is a must-have for customer acquisition. The awareness bridge can be a video, a pdf, or a Google doc designed to seamlessly guide your prospects from initial contact to a sales call or demo. (I personally prefer video because you can connect better with prospects and show a piece of your software).
2. The main goal of awareness bridge assets: Sell them by scheduling a call with you.
3. Positive effects:
- Inform your prospects about your solution and your offer.
- Builds credibility.
- Doubles our email response rate when you ask to watch a video compared to when you ask to book a call.
- Competitive Edge: Sets you apart from competitors who go for a hard sell.
- Cost-Effectiveness: High ROI as assets can be reused to warm up new leads.
All this trickles down to faster sales cycles and increased closing rates because educated prospects are more likely to buy.
4. Examples of demo videos for SaaS:
5. A proven script template you can use in your video:
1. Introduction:
[Target Audience]. Are you looking to [Primary Benefit, e.g., increase efficiency, boost sales, etc.]? My name is [Your Name], and over the last [X] Years, we’ve been building [Your Product], a tool that has helped [Number of Customers] companies achieve [benefit] without [what they think the major point of friction is] within [average time to value].
Just like it helped [ Company 1] to get from [Previous situation] to [Desired situation] or [ Company 2] to get from [Previous situation] to [Desired situation].
2. Hype it up a bit.
This could be the most impactful few minutes you spend all year. In today’s extremely competitive market, [Briefly describe the challenge your product solves]. And that’s where [Your Product] comes in.
3. Short story why this product was created.
With [X years] in the industry and [X amount] in generated revenue, we’ve developed [Your Product] to be an effective and reliable solution.
4. What Your Product Does:
Our system uses [Key Features/Strategies] to [Key Benefits, e.g., generate leads, streamline operations, etc.], all while ensuring [Any other selling points, e.g., cost-efficiency, reputation management, etc.].
5. Leverage your competitor’s dissatisfaction points to your advantage if obviously your product has those.
And it does all of that without [dissatisfaction point with your competitors 1], without [dissatisfaction point with your competitors 2 ] and [dissatisfaction point with your competitors 3].
6. How your product works in a nutshell.
[Your Product] resonates with your ideal customers by [Brief explanation of how it addresses a customer pain point]. We also use [Types of Proof, e.g., testimonials, case studies] to build trust
and validate our solution.
7. What happens when you don’t use our solution and solve the problem the other way.
You could spend time and money trying to solve this issue yourself, but with [Your Product], you’ll see results in as little as [Time Frame].
9. Your pricing/ Free trial/ guarantee
While others might charge you [their way to charge ] we operate on a [Pricing Model] and offer a free trial
10. Call to Action:
If you’re serious about [Benefit], click below to schedule a [Type of meeting, e.g., discovery session] with us.
11. Sign-Off:
Thank you for watching. We look forward to helping you [Primary Benefit] with [Your Product].
Section 4: Step-By-Step Guide to List Building and Cleaning
Why List Building and Cleaning Are Non-Negotiable
A well-curated list ensures you’re reaching out to potential clients who are most likely to find value in your offer. List cleaning helps you maintain a good reputation and avoid getting your emails into the spam folder.
Step 1: Identifying the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Before you even start gathering names and emails, you must know who you’re targeting. This is where your ICP comes in. Define parameters like:
- Job Titles: Are you targeting CMOs, Sales Managers, or perhaps, IT Directors?
- Industry: Is your focus on tech, healthcare, or maybe retail?
- Number of employees: Are you looking at SMBs or enterprise-level organizations?
- Technology they use
Step 2: Building a list:
- Budget-Friendly Options:
- D7Leadfinder
- Best for: local business leads.
- Apollo.io
- The best value option for non-local business leads.
- Why use it: Has more filters than LinkedIn sales navigators and you get the data faster.
- Bonus: Get 70% off (nonaffiliated link) on Apollo if you use this service to extract data from Apollo:
- https://www.exportapollo.io
- You can also use these Fiverr alternatives
- Store leads.app
- Best For: E-commerce leads.
- Cons: You’d often have to enrich the leads because they provide generic emails using tools like Extractthedata.com.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator + Extractthedata.com
- Subscribe to the LinkedIn sales navigator and download the Extractthedata Chrome plugin. It has some cons because the scraping from the sales navigator takes a lot of time and it’s limited to 250 emails/day.
- Why use it: has more filtering options than Apollo.io, especially if you use Boolean Search.
- D7Leadfinder
- Premium Options:
- Crunchbase.com
- Best for SaaS leads.
- Builtwith.com
- Best For: Targeting leads based on the technology they use.
- Seamless.ai
- Best For: Comprehensive B2B lead generation with AI
- Ocean.io
- Also a good expensive lead option with quality data.
- 6sense.com
- Best For: Expanding a targeted list using lookalike audiences
- Crunchbase.com
Step 3: The List Cleaning Process:
Once you have a list, you need to verify it and clean from emails that no longer exist using an email verifying tool.
- Premium Options:
- Neverbounce.com
- Best if you have only a small list and you need the highest accuracy
- Neverbounce.com
- Affordable options:
- Reeon verifier LTD. – IMO, it’s the best value option if you have a sizable list.
- After you verify your emails, I would only use Safe, Role, Catch all and Unknown emails. It’s a bit risky to use Catch-all and Unknown but so far I have never had any issues.
- Email-list-validation. I haven’t tried it but I heard mixed reviews about this one.
- Reeon verifier LTD. – IMO, it’s the best value option if you have a sizable list.
Section 5: Setting Up Your Email System for Scalability
The number of emails you can send per day largely depends on your market size. For instance, if your target market in the U.S. consists of 50,000 companies, you could realistically aim to send around 1,000 emails per day.
Step 1: Buying domains for 1k emails/day
- To stay on the safe side, plan to send around 50 emails per day for each email account.
- Each domain should ideally host 3 email accounts.
- So, for sending 1,000 emails per day, you would need:
- 1000×50×3=7 domains.
Where to Buy Domains:
- Google Domains (I prefer this option)
- GoDaddy
- Namecheap
Note: Opt for .com domains and consider variations of your primary domain (e.g., if your domain is saas.com, try getsaas.com, trysaas.com, saasly.com).
Pro Tip: Google Domains allows you to create a business email for $7.20/month. You can create different email addresses using variations of your name for each domain.
Step 2: Signing up for Instantly.io
We going to be using Instantly.io to warm up and send emails at scale.
Create an Instantly.io account with the $97/mo plan so you can split-test your emails.
Step 3: Setting up MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC & Forwarding
For this system to function without issues we need to set these things up.
If you bought a Google domain follow these guides:
If you bought a Godaddy domain you can follow this guide.
Step 4: Connecting your email accounts to Instantly.io
Once you set up your email accounts, you can connect them to Instantly.
Just go to the Email Accounts section/ Add new and follow the instructions.
Once you connect your email accounts you can verify if MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC are set-up properly by clicking on the “test domain setup” button:
Step 5: Enabling warm-up. – 14 days
The warmup process takes 14 days and it’s basically sending emails between different accounts back & forth and mimicking human behavior. It will ensure Google will not flag your email accounts as SPAM.
To enable your email warmup, click on the Enable Warmup button and wait until it turns green
After 14 days you should be able to start sending emails.
Section 6: Crafting and validating your email sequences
Data You Would Need
From your research, you should have a detailed understanding of:
- Your ideal customer’s job titles, pain points, desires, company size, and industry.
- The unique benefits and problems your solution addresses.
- How you differentiate from competitors.
- Risk mitigation strategies, like money-back guarantees or free trials.
- Time to value—how long it takes a customer to achieve their first “win” with your product.
Structuring Your Initial Testing
The main focus of your initial tests should be the core benefits or problems your product solves. Pick 2-5 main pain points. create an email sequence tailored to each pain point. If you target different industries, consider creating industry-specific campaigns.
Pro Tip: Keep initial campaigns consistent; the only variable should be the pain point you’re testing but you can still test headlines/email copy structure across all campaigns.
Your 30-day objective should be:
- Ensuring the funnel converts and the system operates as expected; troubleshooting if necessary.
- Understanding which pain point or benefit resonates most with your audience.
- Preparing to scale once you’ve validated your approach and found the highest-performing pain point.
Example of an Email Sequence Structure
- Email 1: A short, concise conversation opener with 3 to 4 sentences. Soft CTA like, “Mind if I send over a short video?”
- Email 2: Bump up the email thread with a one-liner. “Wanted to follow up because I feel like this can be valuable to {{companyName}}.
- Email 3: Send an email with a link to the video with an incentive. Hey{{firstname}}, you can watch a video here. [Your time-based incentive + call to action]
Incentive examples:
- You can lock in the current price forever and save $[X amount] if you book a demo within 3 days from now.
- I can offer you a 60-day free trial and 10,000 free credits if you sign up in the next 7 days.
- Email 4: The “parting email” to gauge final interest.
Some resources to get email copy ideas:
Best Email #1 conversation opener
Cold Email Template Hub (600+ Templates)
Section 7: Scaling
Scaling is the next step once you’ve found which email sequence is the most effective in converting leads.
Here you can either ramp up your email volume, expand to different channels like LinkedIn or Twitter, or even incorporate paid advertising, tailored to the channel where your audience primarily engages.
Scaling is about amplifying what already works, maximizing your reach, and by extension, your revenue.
Bonus growth hack: Engage your ideal customer with Facebook ads
- Use enrichment tools like clay.com find personal emails
- Create a Facebook ads Campaign with a custom audience from the email addresses of your ideal customer. Use personal email addresses if available because it’s most likely they used them to create their FB accounts.
- Also, create a FB campaign retargeting everyone who visited your Awareness Bridge video page