The Dos and Don’ts of Cold Emailing

Today, we’re diving into the world of cold emails. I’ll share how I’ve successfully used them to secure podcast guests, agency clients and even forge joint ventures. We’ll also clear up the confusion between cold emailing and spamming, ensuring your strategy stays on the right side of effective communication. Join us to learn how to make cold emails work for your business.

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I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is the List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. if you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best selling book, the List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

1:13  

I have utilized cold emails and cold emails as a strategy has a place to be, it exists in my marketing universe for sure, and usually I use it to get guests for podcasts. I use it for getting agency clients. So many of our members in the Email a Day Business program, we teach them how to do it. So if you’re hunting for clients like an agency or service provider, cold emails are great. Same for joint ventures. Actually, just a couple of weeks ago, a cold email hit us from a customer. Actually, his name is Vladim. He’s from New York, and we’re now collaborating on a joint venture. He’s an expert at passive income with decentralized finance, which means he teaches how to invest small amounts of money into cryptocurrency and for it to produce sounds like 15% or 20% a year, like it’s pretty high yield. So to answer your question, have I used GMass? Yes, I definitely use GMass. 

2:00

I use it especially to communicate with all of my joint venture partners, because there’s many of them. Now there’s over 300 of them, and sometimes it’s hard to email them all by hand. So that’s pretty useful, but I haven’t used GMass for the purpose of mass like cold mass mailing, like that, I’ve never done. I don’t think GMass is a great tool for that, because they do require, you know, for you to include the unsubscribe link. And I’d say cold email is good in small doses. There’s only a few people I know who can do cold email effectively and really have the right systems for it, because it gets really technical. As long as you go into big numbers. 

3:01

These people are my friends over at ChatFlow, who I will be bringing on, actually, in a couple of weeks. To show you a really cool automation that they’ve built where you can cold email people through all the networks all at the same time, and you can build a flow in a way where it just does all the follow up automatically saves hours on every engagement and interaction. And these would probably also be Brian Anderson and my buddy Jeff Smith. So these probably would be the people who specialize in cold email that I can recommend. GMass as a tool has amazing features, great segmentation, automatic follow up. But I wouldn’t just get a bunch of random records from the internet and just start blasting them through GMass. That’s not going to end well for you. 

4:03

I think it’s best to engage people one by one, and once they become a little bit warmer, you know, those who are responsive at some point, those should get into your GMass list, cold list. Okay. Now, those of you who don’t know what cold email is, there’s really two types to email, two types of ways. Two ways to do email. One is to email people without an invite, without any kind of permission. This is what we call cold email. Can sometimes be confused with spamming, but it’s not. I’ll explain the difference. And also, there’s the other type of emailing, which is the kind of emailing we do here in the list building lifestyle, and that is opt in based or permission based email, where people first need to opt in and then we send them emails. 

5:00

So cold email, like I said, works best for personal reach out. So if I see somebody who might be a good fit for my agency, I’ll reach out to them and send them an email, but it’s going to be me emailing them directly, but they did not give me permission to. So it’s almost like me sending them a letter in the mail. There’s no law that prevents me from doing that. Right? If I wanted to email you a physical letter, I would email you a physical letter. No problem. Now, not to be confused with spam. Spam is when you just grab random email addresses from the internet and just blast all of them all at once, trying to pitch them something like right away, and just massive amounts of it.

6:01  

So that’s not, not something you should be doing. Also part of the definition of what makes Spam. Spam is unsolicited and unwanted. Specifically for the US, by the way, you can actually cold email people like in the US, you’re allowed to send somebody an email without them giving you permission. However, if they ask you to not email them anymore, or if they ask you to unsubscribe from that point forward, you cannot send them any more emails. That’s going to be trouble for you. Now, the other part of the definition of spam, I remember because I actually had to go through like a certification on that stuff. At some point, I was at risk of having one of my mailing accounts shut down, and they made me go through like a mini course and certification I did, and they shut me down anyway two days later, but at least I got to, you know, to learn new things. So anyway, they said that spam is anything that your email recipient considers to be spam. So technically, speaking, you can get permission from somebody to mail them. 

7:32

You can even get double opt-in permission, which is when they’ve opted in. They got an email from your system saying, Hey, we received a request to opt in. Can you confirm this request by clicking on this link? And they click on the link that’s called double opt in, which is the best kind of opt in on paper that you can hope to get, because they’ve double confirmed they want to hear from you. But the truth of the matter is they can hit the spam button just the same, even if they’ve double confirmed and you can’t do anything about it, and you will be punished just the same. So the best scenario is to basically have really interesting content going out to people who are interested in that content, or, should I say, offers and make sure that they’ve actually opted in, and if they forgot they’ve opted in, always have a reminder of some sort. You know that they did. But again, they’ll still hit the spam. Some of them will. And what you need to make sure is that the ratio of total emails sent versus subscribers who hit the spam button is no bigger than one to 1 to 1000 so let’s say I’ve emailed 10,000 people on my email list with something if I up to Nine spam complaints from that campaign for two to 10,000 people, that’s okay. It’s fine.

8:46  

I’m within a reasonable spam complaint rate. But if I get 10, I’m pushing it. If I get more than 10, it’s very bad, and the bigger number is the worst. So you’re looking at basically getting less than one spam complaint per 1000 emails sent, which is why when your list is only growing, it’s so crucial to mail that list right away, even when it’s only five people, or 10 people, or 15 people, 25 people, you need to be emailing your list from day one, because if you don’t, they stay on your list, but they forget about who you are and why they got on your list in the first place. And what happens is, when you finally email them, and let’s say your list is 500 or 1000 people now, but you haven’t been emailing that list, all of a sudden, three of them will hit the spam button so you send out 1000 emails, but you had three spam complaints, your ratio is triple what it’s supposed to be. And guess what’s going to happen? By deliverability, by your email sending account, by your profits. So you want to make sure that you grow on your list constantly, and that you’re mailing that list constantly, and that your spam complaint rate is below one per 1000, or at least, doesn’t exceed one complaint per 1000 emails sent. 

Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle.  Get access to the previous episodes, transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my best selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch, plus I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.