#39 The Correct Way To Scale And Convert Email Campaigns

#39: The Correct Way To Scale And Convert Email Campaigns

Read time - 4 min

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Today I’m going to discuss how to send and scale high converting email drip campaigns.

This is one of the biggest black boxes for early stage founding teams. Rarely do I come across a team who is doing it correctly.

When building out a sales playbook you need the repetitions to understand where you need to improve, iterate and optimize.

Without the reps you’re learning theory, not application. When you marry the two together (process and reps) you’ll identify who your ICP (ideal customer profile) is, and be able to ramp fast.

Today, I’ll show you how to stack your pipeline with leads using cold email; why cold email is essential to filling your TOFU (top of funnel), and what you need to know to have the highest converting cold emails possible.

Eighty cents out of every dollar should be spent on your subject line.

~David Ogilvy

There are many advantages to cold email, but none more crucial than these three.

1. Reach
   Almost everyone has an email, so everyone can be reached. It is the fastest way to get in front of someone.
   

2. Economical

   It’s the most cost effective way to find, reach and test your messaging. In most use cases, email is free. Buying additional domains to warm up is relatively cheap.
   

3. Data

   Cold email campaigns give you the opportunity to test different ICP’s and messaging. By analyzing open and response rates it allows you to optimize your strategy over time, and start to narrow down on the the right ICP to target with the right value propositions.

Typically, founders struggle to produce results with cold emails due to these five common mistakes:

1. Use standard lead-sourcing tools and put them into a cold email tool.

2. Salesy / corporate emails that produce a low open & response rate.

3. Not testing subject lines and body copy, via single variant testing.

4. Too complex and too long. No book reports

5. Low volume. You need a lot of volume. Your TAM (total addressable market) is critical.

Let’s look at what best practices are when it comes to achieving the results you desire.

1. The success of your campaign is directly proportional to the amount of effort you put into sourcing the correct contact information.
   

2. The more you personalize an email, the higher the chance it lands in the inbox and the more likely it gets a response. You only need to personalize the first sentence of your email, then rest can be templated. Here’s a made up example:
   
   “{Name,} I love what you guys are building at {company}. I was a PM at {previous company} in charge of building out {whatever it was}. I have a deep appreciation for companies solving interesting problems.
   
   I was reaching out today because we eliminate the number one cause of customer churn by addressing problems in real time, before they become catastrophic.
   
   Is higher customer retention on your radar? If so, I think it would be worth a quick chat to share how we increase CLTV.
   
   Darren

3. The subject line is ten times more important than the body copy. Spend time creating a simple subject line. For ex: We sent out an email campaign to the most recent YC cohort. The subject line was “demo day.” Our open rate was almost 100% I believe. Insane!
   

4. Make your email short, sweet, and direct, with a clear CTA at the end.

The breakdown of a successful cold emails usually looks like this:

• A 1-3 word subject line (it should be enticing and authentic).

• A 3-sentence email with personalization (no fluff).

• One clear CTA (your readers should know where they’re going when they click it — if your CTA and landing page are misaligned, you’ll lose the lead every time).

• 3-4 total emails in the campaign. (2-3 follow-ups plus the original).

• The whole campaign cycle is 2-3 weeks (if you haven’t closed by then, move on).

Once you nail down an initial campaign, you’ll want to build off it by keeping what works but also striving for better results. Use single variant testing to improve your cold emails continuously.

When your messaging has been perfected, you’ll find that the more you send, the more people get back to you. After pumping out high volume, eventually you will get the cold email open rate, response rate, and close rates you desire.

Key Takeaways:
- Simple scales, fancy fails.
- Write like you would to a friend.
- Spend 10x more time on your subject line.
- Always send follow ups. At least 3-4 emails in total.
- You have to pump out volume to get the desired results.

Client Spotlight (Parade DB - YC S23):
ParadeDB is an open-source real-time search & analytics PostgreSQL database. Companies use ParadeDB to build live dashboards, fraud detection, observability and security monitoring, targeted ads, AI search, and more.

We work with small and medium technology startups, e-commerce platforms, and financial institutions.

Star our GitHub repository: https://github.com/paradedb/paradedb to get started, and contact our team at [email protected] when you’re looking to scale up!

That’s it for today folks.

See you all next week!

Darren


P.S. If you’re interested in learning more you can book a call with me here.