The guide on cold email outreach I wish I had when I started

Everybody tells you to do cold outreach if you’re in B2B. However, most resources on email marketing focus on newsletters, not on cold sales emails. That’s why I created this small guide that teaches you how to get off the ground and which tools to use.

Why I’m writing this

I haven’t mastered cold emails. In fact, signups for my SaaS are still miserable. Nevertheless, I think I have a good setup for cold email outreach. It took me some time to figure it out and it surely will help me succeed. But I could have saved myself many headaches if I had a resource on how to set up a system for sending cold emails when I started. This is why I’m writing this article. I just hope it helps someone who is just starting out!

What I use this setup for

I use this setup to generate customers for my SaaS Feedbeggar. It’s a visual bug reporting tool for agencies that allows their clients to submit bug reports without leaving their websites. The cool thing is that it forwards bug reports automatically into the agency’s project management tool and thereby eliminates a lot of manual work.

The general advice is to only do cold emails for high ticket items like service contracts. My $25 SaaS definitely does not fall into this category, but since I neither have an audience nor money to spend on ads, cold emails are my best option.

Before you start: Prevent landing in the spam folder

When sending cold sales emails, one of the biggest fears is ending up in the spam folder. Because if you do, the chance of conversion is zero and all your efforts are worthless. Plus, it’s really hard to recover a domain's reputation once it’s ruined. So do the following before sending your first cold email:

Consider using a different domain name

This is something I took from Alex Bermans book The cold email manifesto. Maintaining your domain's reputation is a top priority, so you should consider not using it at all for cold emails, especially when you’re a beginner. Instead, consider using a different but similar domain. For example, if you main domain is my-domain.com, use my-domain.co or my-domain-mail.com

Add SPF and DKIM records

Make sure you add these records with your email provider. If you don't, the likelihood of being marked as spam is much higher. Adding them doesn’t require much technical knowledge but differs from provider to provider. So just google how to do it with your provider.

Use an email warmup service

Email service providers have built strong spam detection mechanisms over time, which is why you need to build trust in your domain. One way to do this is to have actual email conversations, meaning you send a mail, get a reply, then respond yourself and so on and so forth.

This can be very time consuming. This is where email warmup services come into play. They automate the whole process and thereby increase your domain's reputation without you having to manually engage.

There are many warmup services available. I personally use mailflow.io because they are the only ones I could find that have a free tier.

Lead generation

No leads means no cold emails. But generating leads can be a cumbersome process, especially if you want them to be highly targeted.
“[email protected]” is not enough
Trust me, I learned this the hard way. Writing a cold sales email to the company's public email address will get you nowhere. You need the contact data of an executive or at least someone who manages a budget.

There are three options how to generate leads:

Do the research yourself

Google your way through it. I did this for some time, but it was very time consuming. Plus, I was never really able to get a better email address than “contact@” or “info@”.

Subscribe to a lead generation service

There are several services out there you can subscribe to and they will then send you a fixed number of leads every month. I can’t say too much about this kind of service because I never used it.

Hire a freelancer

This is the route I ended up choosing. I hired someone on fiver.com who gave me one high quality lead for 0.2€, which is super affordable, I think. Each of the leads was a member of a highly targeted niche and included the name and email address of an executive. I could have never done it in the same quality.

Use a dedicated cold emailing tool

When I started, I sent cold emails using Apple Mail. This of course didn’t scale because I could only send one email at a time and couldn’t track the performance.
After some time, I tried to use tools like ConvertKit or SendInBlue. But they’re focused on newsletters and are just not made to do cold outreach.
After some research, I finally found lemlist, which is focused on sending cold emails. It's not free, but absolutely worth the money, in my opinion.

Use sequences

When doing cold outreach, don’t send just one mail and hope the recipient converts. Instead, build a sequence of emails depending on the recipient's behavior. I usually create a sequence of three emails with three days in between them. Only if the recipient clicks on the call to action I stop their sequence.

Use A/B-Testing

Try different headlines, intros and call to actions and see how the numbers change. Have a low opening rate? Try a different headline. Don’t get enough clicks? Try a different call to action.

But only test one thing at a time. For example, test two different headlines but keep the rest of the content the same. If you try multiple things at once, you lose the comparability and cannot attribute the success or failure of your emails to any change.

Improve your copy

Duh. I know. But notice the headline says “improve your copy” instead of “write good copy”. I am only getting started with this and consider myself a pretty bad copywriter. Does that mean I shouldn’t write cold emails? No. But it means I must continuously search for ways to improve my copy. And you should, too, no matter which lever you’re on. There’s always room for improvement.

Wrap-Up

Writing cold emails is no rocket science, but there are a lot of things to consider when starting out. Here are the key points:

• Make sure to not land in the spam folder.
• Consider buying leads instead researching them yourself
• Use a tool specialized in cold outreach. I use lemlist
• Check your analytics and iteratively improve your copy.