Scalable email templates that feel like personalized one-on-one messages

Why You Should Never Send Sales Emails With Marketo

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I still can’t believe how many times people ask me why they shouldn’t send “outbound emails” (or cold emails) with Marketo, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Pardot or some other email marketing automation software.

This shouldn’t even be a question or a discussion for experienced sales and marketing professionals at this point.

Marketing automation software was created for the sole purpose of nurturing inbound leads to become qualified opportunities; not to send unsolicited cold emails.

I love leveraging marketing automation software to warm up and nurture my leads to grow a loyal and highly engaged audience. We use Mailchimp to send our audience thoughtful and actionable content they can actually use, and usually see about a 58% open rate with 12-18% click rates. At the same time, I’ve created highly successful outbound email campaigns to scale my customer base and also help my SaaS clients 3x their sales revenue by increasing their responses from qualified leads. I do think that sales and marketing should better align their messaging and efforts to be more effective, but I would never try to use marketing automation software over mail merges to run my own or my clients’ outbound campaigns.

otrash your email server's deliverability

How to Trash Your Email Reputation & Deliverability

Marketo, Hubspot, Act-On and Pardot were all created for you to nurture your inbound email list with targeted content. Their mail servers were not made to handle their users blasting out untargeted email campaigns to an unsolicited large list.

Your email’s ability to get inside someone’s inbox depends on the continued good reputation of your mail server IPs. Just like a drunk uncle won’t get invited to more weddings if he makes a big mess at one party, your mail server won’t be able to get into the inbox if it sends spammy or untargeted emails that people mark as spam. Every new mail server starts out with a neutral reputation of zero. That reputation increases over time with continued good behavior. However, events like bounces, or getting your emails marked as spam, can quickly decrease that reputation. If this happens frequently and repeatedly with enough severity, you’ll get your IP blacklisted.

Email services like MailChimp are careful to protect their IPs and will quickly shut your account down if they catch you spamming. They even scan your emails for keywords that may indicate you’re doing outbound, and will flag those emails for review and then decide whether they will shut you down or not.

Why Marketo’s Mail Server’s IPs Are Dirty & Not Trustworthy

Unlike Marketo, MailChimp is strict with their usage because they want to protect the trust of their mail server IPs. They don’t want spam complaints and deliverability issues to make their IPs dirty.  MailChimp has some of the most trusted IPs and best deliverability because they always crack down hard on abuse.

Mail servers are a lot like a public park. When someone is littering in that park, it’s ruined for everyone. Similarly, if you’re not running your own dedicated mail servers, and you’re sending with Marketo, you’re sending your emails on the same IP as everyone else who’s using Marketo. Even if you’re not spamming, you can be penalized for other people’s spam. All it takes is one really aggressive to kill the reputation of the IP you and many others are using.

Because Marketo does not have the same kind of strict policies to curb and deter spamming like MailChimp, their IPs are frequently abused by spammers. This is why Marketo’s mail servers have some of the lowest reputation, which means sending through their IPs increases your odds of ending up in spam instead of the inbox.

How to Get More of Your Emails into the Inbox

So how do you get more emails to go into the inbox and not spam?

Just switching from Marketo or other marketing automation tools and sending through Gmail with some kind of mail merge is a big step in the right direction. The mail server IPs of Gmail have much higher trust than anything you’ll get from Marketo or even SendGrid.

One of my SaaS clients was sending through Marketo and had an average open rate of about 8%. When we started our engagement I insisted that they switch to sending their emails through a software that enabled them to do mail merges. After working with them to improve their targeting and messaging, their open rates ranged from 53-66%. Part of that was because of better targeting and improving list quality, but we could not have achieved the same results if they kept using Marketo to send their emails.

It’s definitely better to have your own dedicated IP than sharing with others who could destroy your reputation by spamming, but acquiring a new IP with zero reputation will still have lower deliverability than Gmail.

You can send mail merges through Google Apps or one of the many tools that help you automate outbound emails campaigns for sales prospecting.

You might be worried that this could jeopardize your Gmail account, but if you’re not willing to take outbound prospecting seriously and create relevant messaging for a targeted list, you shouldn’t be sending outbound emails at all.

I’ll be writing more posts to explain email servers, deliverability, and ways to increase deliverability and open rates soon.  

In the meanwhile, for more tips on creating laser-focused cold email campaigns that scale and generate millions of dollars in sales revenue, check out the Human’s Guide to Cold Email.  If you need extra help with your cold emails, drop us a line and we’ll audit your existing email templates.

The Cost of Personalizing Your Sales Emails

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How much should you personalize your sales emails?

Sending mass generic emails with zero personalization won’t get you many responses, but writing every email one at a time isn’t very scalable or cost-effective either.

So how much personalization is enough?

The truth is, there’s no magic one-size-fits-all answer.

It’s different for every business, and it depends on a number of factors, including who you’re targeting, how saturated your industry is with cold email, and how strong your product-market fit is.
hidden cost to email personalization

Why You Need A Baseline of Your Email Metrics Before You Ever Think About Personalizing

While it’s generally true that more personalization in your sales emails will increase your response rate from qualified leads, adding more complex custom inserts beyond “first name” and “company” has its opportunity cost. Appending data like “competitor,” “blog post,” and custom sentences or phrases doesn’t just happen for free. Whether you’re purchasing that data, scraping, or using cheap outsourced labor/interns to gather information, it costs you time and money.

There is no guarantee the data you append will significantly increase your response rate either.

In some cases, adding additional custom inserts has no direct impact on response, and on rare occasions it can even have a negative effect, especially when data is appended haphazardly or carelessly.

Nor are all custom inserts are created equal. It’s true that in most cases adding the name of your prospects’ competitor will usually increase your response rate more than other inserts, but not always.

That’s why you should always send a basic email campaign with minimal personalization before you go crazy with trying to add more merge fields to your email templates. Once you have an idea of your baseline numbers for open rates, response rates, and appointments set, you can A/B test adding more customization to the same email templates. Then you can see just how much lift various personalization may or may not bring you.

If for example you have a 10% response rate with basic personalization, but you aren’t satisfied with those numbers, you can try adding various custom inserts to see how many more responses you get. When trying to assess if your increased response rate is worth your personalization efforts or not, you should multiply the increase in positive responses by how much you value a response or sales appointment with a qualified lead. After backing out those numbers, you can calculate if the cost of appending that data is greater than or equal to the increased appointments. If it’s not, then it’s not really worth your time.

A simpler way to assess this is to see if the increase in response rates (if there is one) is minor or incremental. If it’s marginal, then you might want to do the math to decide whether personalization makes sense for your sales efforts, but if it’s large, then keep adding customization and start testing other custom inserts to see what else works.

Even if you don’t have luck with the first few kinds of custom inserts you try, that doesn’t mean that all extra personalization absolutely won’t work. Maybe you just haven’t found the right information to append yet.

When You Should Consider Personalizing Your Emails More

So when should you experiment with adding personalization versus just being content with your existing response rates?

It depends on your product, industry, and sales goals, but generally you want to add more personalization when:

  1. You’re trying to reach out to “difficult contacts,” that don’t easily respond to email, like C-suite executives in large enterprise companies, especially CIOs and CISOs.
  2. You’re in a crowded and competitive space where your audience is getting bombarded with emails.
  3. Your product is commoditized and not very exciting to prospects.
  4. Your company doesn’t have a lot of traction yet, and perhaps your audience needs to be educated more about your product.

Another good indicator to consider additional personalization is if your response rate is below 10%. However, that doesn’t mean personalization, or even cold emails for that matter, can solve all your sales problems.

Low response rates can also be signs that you:

  • may not have a strong product-market-fit
  • be reaching out to the wrong audience
  • have entirely the wrong message and are focusing on the wrong benefits and pain points

Basic Tips to Personalize Your Emails Without Adding More Custom Inserts

Before you start investing time and resources into adding extra personalization, you should try some basic cold email copywriting tips to see how much lift they can get you. Implementing the following tactics can often help you 2-3x your open and response rates:

  1. Use more casual language to make your emails sound more like a conversation than a letter to the Queen of England. (Unless you’re trying to cold email the Queen herself!) Cut out formal language like, “Dear Mrs Morgan, I’m inquiring about…,” because it sounds impersonal and distant.
  2. Cut out everything that screams “salesy.” Stop addressing yourself as a sales employee at company X. That’s a dead giveaway you’re sales prospecting, and it’s a waste of your email’s prime real eastate. Instead, you should assume familiarity and dive right in with an introductory sentence that commands attention and/or engages them with a thoughtful question.
  3. Use first and second person throughout your email. Avoid using third person because it feels distant and does not evoke as strong of a connection or emotional response with your prospects. Instead, use words like, “I,” “we,” and “you.” (And try to use “you” more than “I” so you don’t sound too self-focused!)
  4. Define your ideal customer persona before you even start writing. Try to use the keywords, language, and tone that appeals to the audience you’re writing for, and your email will instantly sound more personal, without even adding more custom inserts.

Check out our copywriting guide for additional tips to help you personalize your cold emails at scale. If you need extra help, just drop us a line.

How to Use Cold Email to Get Inside Any Organization

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Would you like to send a cold email to any CEO or celebrity and get a warm response?

New relationships begin every day through cold contacts, whether through Twitter, Linkedin, cold calling, or cold emails.

No matter who you’re trying to get ahold of, the best cold emails start with thoughtful conversations that evoke emotions and deliver value to the recipients. On the other hand, lazy and self-focused bad cold emails get laughs instead of responses.

I’ve used cold email to get coffee with my favorite authors, land interviews with CEOs from top companies, and sell millions of dollars in software.

Here are some of my strategies that I’ve used, broken down into 25 actionable and entertaining slides:

For more tips on cold email, check out these posts and resources:

  1. How to conduct better prospecting research
  2. Top cold email mistakes to avoid
  3. 11 common questions about cold emails and inside sales

Where Bad Cold Emails Go to Die

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How many new cold emails did you get this morning?

If you’re like most people, you probably have dozens, if not hundreds, of cold emails sitting around in your inbox. Unfortunately most of these cold emails aren’t very good, and are a general waste of everyone’s time. You waste time reading them, deleting them, and some are just downright painful to read.

Until now, there’s been zero purpose for these crummy cold emails, but that’s changing now.

Finally, there’s a place for all the worst cold emails, and that’s Salesfolk’s “Cold Email Hall of Shame.”

recycle cold emails

I created the Hall of Shame because:

  1. I’m tired of people tarnishing inside sales and cold email with thoughtless, lazy, poorly crafted emails.
  2. People keep spamming this garbage because no one calls them out on it.
  3. Everyone can improve their cold emails by learning what NOT to do.
  4. I honestly find terrible cold emails extremely humorous.

So if you have any terrible cold emails sitting around in your inbox, please send them to [email protected].  (All submissions will be published anonymously!)

Not sure what qualifies as a bad email for the Hall of Shame?

Here’s some criteria for bad cold email nominations:

  • Vain and self-focused (sounds a lot like a monologue or bad dating profile)

vain and self focused cold emails

  • Absurd and ridiculous claims that cannot possibly be true 

incredible and unbelievable sales pitch

  • Corny sales tactics from the 90’s (or later) that make you cringe as you read them

bad corny sales tactics

  • Overly aggressive or obnoxious

geoffry overly aggressive sales

  • Extremely impersonal (you can’t tell if a robot wrote this)

impersonal cold email like a robot

  • Strange and confusing (what’s the point of this email?!)

strange and confusing cold email

  • Adds absolutely NO value

useless-fliers-2

…I can’t wait to see your submissions! Happy cold emailing!

3 Things That Get Cold Emails Deleted By Prospects

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Do your prospects grab your prospects’ attention and make them excited, or do they just press delete before they even get to the second line?

Would you reply to an email that feels salesy or pushy?

Probably not. So why should prospects respond either?  

Most cold emails fail because they don’t connect with their audience because they feel disingenuous or impersonal. If you want to catch your prospects’ attention you need to address their needs and speak to them on a more human level.

Fixing these three common cold email mistakes can get you 3x more responses from your prospects.

Cold Email Mistake #1: Your message is too self-focused and impersonal

No one wants to hear you drone on about how awesome you think you are. Your prospects don’t care about how many awards your company has won or that your new product is your fastest or coolest ever. They only want to know how you can solve their problems.

How can you speak to your prospects needs if you don’t understand their needs? Before you craft any cold emails you need to develop a clear buyer persona and research your prospects’ industry and role to understand their pain points and priorities.

Canned and generic messages won’t get responses in 2015. Everyone has become immune to gimmicky emails that feel mass. Your prospects want to feel special, and know that you took the time to understand them and their business. If you send the same message to a CEO as a VP of Engineering you will either alienate one of those parties with an untargeted message that doesn’t make sense, or bore both of them with vague language.  Instead you need to create thoughtful emails that are specific to each of your buyer persona’s needs.

Cold Email Mistake #2: You’re boring your prospects with long-winded pitches

Your prospects are busy people. They don’t have time to read through bloated paragraphs that resemble small novels, and they aren’t going to go out of their way to read a white paper that explains your value proposition either.  You only have a few seconds to entice someone with your message before they click delete, so don’t waste words on useless fluff.

The only goal of a cold email is to get your prospects talking to you. Don’t get too overwhelmed trying to say everything in the first email; you can always explain more when you have them on the phone or in following emails. Keep every email simple, and focus on one main benefit or idea per email. Because people have short attention spans, you should try to keep your cold emails to 2-5 sentences. The most persuasive cold emails eliminate anything that does not support the email’s main idea.

Cold Email Mistake #3: Weak Calls to Action lose your prospects’ attention

Even if you write the best introduction to your cold email, a weak or missing Call to Action will kill your chances of getting a response. Spending your time talking to a stranger is a risk, so you need to give prospects assurance that talking to you won’t waste their time. Great calls to action offer prospects value or gives a sense of “fear of loss,” and incentivize them to promptly respond.

How can you  make it worth their while?

Make sure your prospects clearly understand how they’ll benefit by talking to you. Incentive your CTAs by offering a piece of actionable advice or sharing a quick idea that can help improve their business.  

What To Think About Next Time You Start A Cold Email

Here are a few quick takeaways you can use for crafting your next cold email based on the mistakes mentioned above.

  1. Start your first sentence as a question that is focused on your prospect, ideally one that makes them think about an existing pain point or a potential benefit you can offer.
  2. Keep your cold emails short and conversational. Try to use the word “you” more than “I.”
  3. Try to keep your Call to Action in one short and clear sentence. Questions like “When do you have time for a short call so I can share an idea that could double {!Company}’s revenue?” tend to work well.

…That way your emails will get responses like these:

excited for webinar

Instead of ending up here with all the other SPAM:

goats and trash- why your cold emails suck

Be a goat, not a sheep!

We always strive to create captivating copy that is unique, actionable and adds value to prospects’ lives.

Want help with your cold emails? Request a call: