How to use cold email automation to land clients for your digital marketing agency – Full Tutorial
Overview
Build it and they will come, right? WRONG! If you are reading this you may or may not already be building any (or multiple) of the following: have a product or service you are trying to sell (physical product, software Software as a Service (SaaS), offering a service like digital marketing/seo/web development/web design, lead generation agency, cold email agency, etc). It doesn't matter what you are offering, we can find a use case almost each and every time to implement cold email campaigns. If you don't know a single thing about cold emailing fear not because I will hold your hand while I walk you through this.
Too many times I encounter people who build websites or launch products and have literally no idea how to obtain customers. "I thought if I have a website people will find me" – this is completely inaccurate. If you are serious about generating revenue and finding clients you absolutely need to be doing outreach/cold emailing and contrary to what most people believe, you can actually do this all yourself by investing just several hours to kick off the campaign. You DO NOT need to hire someone to do this full-time (until you are generating insane sales that is). "Gurus" sell this shit in an e-book for hundreds of dollars, but I am going to teach you all of this for free.
Why am I doing this? These tactics have helped out my multiple businesses tremendously and I believe these methods should be common knowledge, not sold as an e-book so some fake Guru that's never launched a successful business in their life can rake in $10k/month. I'm doing a complete series on similar methods that range from growth hacking social media accounts to gain followers, using social media channels to drive traffic, building mailing lists, doing lead-generation for your own business, SEO masterclass, etc. The list is long, but combining all these things together will allow a 1 or 2 person startup to be able to do things that would generally take 4-5 people -saving massive amounts of capital. Why pay someone a base salary of 20-30k a year to do some of these things that you can do even better (while being way more efficient).
Lets. f*cking. Go.
The Process
This is going to be a long post, so hopefully you've made yourself a cup of coffee and are ready to learn. You might also be wondering what it is exactly you are getting into. The gist of it is this. You will learn how to obtain thousands of emails. Upload these emails to an automated campaign manager that will automatically email all of these leads for you. You will also learn how to decrease the amount of emails that get sent to the "spam" folder, how to increase email open rates, and how to "semi-customize" email templates so that each and every email you send looks unique while maintaining extremely high levels of automation.
How much will this cost?
This method WILL require some sort of investment. Anywhere in the $50-200 range, but if you are serious about your business or your product then this should be an investment you are willing to make. I will also note I have zero affiliation with any product I ever mention in my courses and I will never provide any sort of affiliate link. I'll break down the costs for this cold email campaign.
Pre-requisites (you may or may not already have these):
-A domain/website: $10/year
-An email linked to that website (john@your-domain.com)
-A professional-looking landing page or e-commerce store that offers your product. If you don't have this I will have a post on using Webflow or Squarespace to create beautiful websites for cheap. I haven't written this post yet, but I will get to it in 1 or 2 weeks.
If you have all those things, then you will need the following additions:
#1. D7LeadFinder.com – Base plan: $25/month
#2. LemList – Email Warm Up: $25 one time fee
#3. LemList – Email sender: $60/month (2-week free trial you can also use or rotate emails a few times)
#4. Virtual Assistant (VA) for email collection: anywhere from $25-$100 dollars
Keep in mind #1 D7LeadFinder is only necessary if you plan on reaching out to small businesses to sell your product, service, or Software as a Service (SaaS). I am going to get to building out the email lists in the next part.
What are some services you can sell to small businesses? Here's a few just off the top of my head.
-Facebook/Google ads manager
-Email marketing and cold email outreach (what this course is about)
-SEO from technical to backlink building and outreach (I will write about this in the future)
-Copywriting for sales leads, copywriting for ads, copyrighting for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
-Social media management (I wrote instagram growth masterclass earlier and will be writing more about social media growth later on).
-Web development (you can use website builders like Webflow and Squarespace or just outsource through Fiverr)
-Funnel creation (creating lead magnet landing pages to create leads/affiliate marketing/etc)
The list is endless.
Email Warm Up (while we prepare our email lists)
For those of you that don't know what email warm-up is, it's when your email account or provider is too new so you need to build up the reputation. Email warm up is an automated system that sends emails to various receiving users. The receiving users (usually also automated), then open and move your email from spam to inbox, thus telling the server and provider that this email is not spam. This step is ONLY needed for new email accounts (if you literally just made the domain + email and have never sent an email with the account). If you've been running your business for a while and sending emails already, then skip this step. There are various providers that do email warm up, but I use LemList just to keep everything in the same ecosystem. Again I have no affiliation with them, feel free to search "email warm up service" in Google and find your own. The email warm up process takes about 1-2 weeks and only needs to be done once, during this time we are going to move to the next step -building the email lists.
Building The Email List – Overview
Depending on what you/your company is selling there are two ways to do this email list building. If you are reaching out to blogs, review sites, or other e-commerce sites for reviews, product features, affiliates, or repackage and white-labeling of your product then you are mostly going to be using the email list building #1 of blogs and review sites. You may also be able to implement #2 and reaching out to other small businesses. Read both and see what is a good fit for you.
Building The Email List #1 – Blogs/Review (affiliate, products, etc)
For this segment of email list building you can do it yourself if you have the time. It takes about 20-40 hours so honestly I prefer hiring and teaching a Virtual Assistant (VA) to do this for me for about $5/hour. My own 40 hours is going to be spent doing way more productive things so hiring a VA for this part is way more efficient. To get a VA go to r/slavelabour or r/forhire and make a post. You should get many applications and then just filter by whoever you think might be capable to do this task. Here is the exact process you will teach them (or do yourself).
#1. Finding keywords for your niche: For this I use a variety of tools. ANY keyword tool will do, but KWFinder.com has a free version you can use for keyword ideas. Alternatively I use SEMrush free version (paid when I need to do SEO work) to find keywords. Lastly you can even use keywordshitter.com to find a list of keywords related to any niche.
What we are going to do is find a list of the BEST keywords related to your niche. Create a text file with about 100 keywords starting with most relevant (and maybe best converting), to least relevant (but might still be useful). We are going to hand this list over to our Virtual Assistant (VA) along with an empty excel document. Here are the columns we are going to add to the excel document: keyword, blog URL, First Name, Last Name, email, contact page URL.
#2: Building out your list: This is the extremely tiresome task and you will soon find out why it's better to pay a VA to do this for you. The VA will take your keywords list and do a manual Google search for EACH (all 100) keywords. For each and every keyword they will then visit EACH blog URL from EACH results page (10 blog URLs per page and 5-10 results pages per keyword). What do they do when visiting the website? If the website is a blog or review or article site they will do a quick visual scan for a contact page or contact info on the blog post. When they find a contact page they go to it. If the contact page is strictly a contact form and not an email address then they will paste the contact page URL into the excel document under the "contact page URL" column.
They will also store the keyword they searched in the "keyword" column of the excel, and the search result's URL into the "blog URL". If there is an email address on the contact page they will see if there is a first name linked to it (ie: john@ScentedCandleReviews.com). If there is a name then store the First Name (and last name if available) in the excel column, then store the email address in the "email" column. There will be one entry per email address. They will do this for each and every URL on the results page.
If you were able to find 50 keywords let's see how many potential emails/leads you will be able to get from this method.
50 keywords * 5-10 results pages * 10 URLs per page = 2,500-5,000 websites.
About 10% of the websites won't have contact info. About 20% will only have contact forms. And the remaining 70% should have email addresses on the page. So you should have just about 1.5-2k emails and 250-500 contact forms. A 100 keywords with a VA should cost about $5 per 1 to 2 keyword so this whole thing will cost you about $250-500 for the full list. You will most likely start 10 keywords at a time, so each batch will cost you $10-20 per group and if after investing $50 you see no results, you can stop… But if you do things right you will see results and the amount invested will be returned to your business and then some.
We will be using this email list in our email blaster (LemList), and I will get to what you can do with those additional contact forms a bit further on.
Building The Email List #2 – Small businesses (selling digital marketing services, or collaboration on a product you have, etc)
If you are selling services to small businesses (selling digital marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), etc) then we are going to be using this small business finder tool called D7LeadFinder.com. If you don't have a product or service you can offer yet then pick something from the list I gave at the top and learn it. Get good at it then even offer the service for free or for $500 a month to get some testimonials. Even better is if you get good at a particular INDUSTRY first. For example, if you are looking to do marketing for a coffee shop, do cheap work for 1-2 coffee shops first. Get them results and then get their testimonials. Use this as leverage in your cold emails. I will get more on this later on.
Moving on to using d7 lead finder. Once you've logged on you input your keywords and location and they will automatically find business details for you. I'm pretty sure they scrape Google Business results so create your search terms around how you would search Google Businesses. IE: "coffee shops Miami", "restaurants Nashville", "plumbers Austin". You get 10 searches per day on the base plan so make sure you use all 10 searches every day. You will export all the data into a CSV and download it. Store them all in the same folders under identifiable keywords (ie: leads-coffee-shops-miami).
Start local and then niche down to any possible city. Remember if a lot of the work you are doing can be done remotely it doesn't matter which city you search. You are doing digital marketing/seo/whatever so you can offer it from anywhere. The leads you will be able to get from this tool will keep you busy for YEARS.
Once you've got enough CSV files we are going to be starting the custom email process on LemList. Let's head on to the next section.
Using LemList to create "custom" automated email campaigns
I know many of you are rolling your eyes right now thinking about the automated emails and how quickly you delete them when you see them, but we are going to be doing things completely differently and at an expert level.
This is how your competition sends emails:
"Hello dear sirs, I have digital marketing team ready for you. Please connect with me ASAP"
This is what our emails are going to look like:
"Hi Mark, I came across your coffee shop and noticed your website was missing X. My digital marketing company offers X, as well as Y, and we've proven our methods with other coffee shops in the Austin area. Recently, we were able to grow one of our clients website's from 100 daily traffic and 75 newsletter subscriptions to over 250 daily traffic and built out their mailing list + newsletter to an audience of over 500 subscribers. Would love to chat more about this with you and see if it's something your business would be interested in adding."
Our version looks very legit and sincere, right? Guess what, it was still an automated email and will increase your open rates from 1-3% to about 25-30%. Let's move on.
Creating the LemList campaign
After we've signed up there are a few steps you need to do to finish setting up your account. This includes adding your business email and setting up the email server (very simple and they offer a tutorial). We are going to be jumping into creating the campaign.
Adding your scraped leads
Remember the CSV/Excel files you downloaded either from your Virtual Assistant (VA) or D7LeadFinder. This is where we will be uploading them. The upload process can be somewhat confusing for people using Lemlist for the first time, so I'll explain a bit here. How this works is each column name in your excel/csv file will be imported into Lemlist under a similar variable name. The below will describe exactly how to import from EXCEL variable to → Lemlist variable name
What are all these variables? Lemlist automatically plugs in those variable names into specific placements of your email template. Example: "Hi {first name}, I saw your blog post at {company name} and it was interesting." You see?
First name → first name
Blog URL → company name
Email → email
That's really all we need because we are going to be keeping these emails short and sweet.
After you've loaded all your emails and contact info into the "leads" section. We are going to be going through the next steps of the process. I'll describe them briefly until we get to "review" because that is the section that will require a bit more work.
Sequences: Here we will create TWO sequences. The first email will be something similar to what I wrote above. "Hi {first name}, I came across your website/restaurant/business and noticed you were missing X. My company does X, but we also do Y as we've proved our methods with other businesses…" The important thing is to add the first name after "Hi/Hello".
Email Customization DO's:
-Keep it short and sweet.
-Show them you can provide the service and have proof of your methods.
-Contact people you can actually help, you are not trying to scam anyone. You are trying to HELP them get more leads or improve their business.
Email Customization DON'Ts:
-Don't put ANY links whatsoever in your email. Links usually (not always) get flagged as spam if it's coming from a new sender.
-Don't use scammy headlines or scammy words like: FREE, ACT FAST, LIMITED TIME ONLY. These keywords are automatically flagged as SPAM by most providers.
Create your email as if you were creating one to help your friend with their business.
Adding A Sequence: We are going to be adding a sequence. This means we will reach out to a contact a second time if they don't open or respond to the first email. Click on "Add new step" and "wait 3 days". When adding an email template you are going to use the same template from the previous sequence, but we are going to slightly modify it. Instead of "Hi {first name}…" we are going to write "Hi there, I sent you an email a few days ago, but I wanted to follow up in case my email might have slipped the cracks on what I'm sure is a busy time for you. -Insert previous template here so the same email continues."
Don't use these templates word for word, be creative and make something unique that fits your business or whatever your product is that you are offering.
Schedules: Too many people try to blast out infinite emails without realizing what the consequences are. Generally speaking you want to keep your emails under 500 per day to stay under the "spam" radar, but personally I only do 50 per day because if your email is good you will get some responses and it takes times to schedule calls and close those clients. This also lets you use your 2,500 email contacts over the period of months instead of just a couple weeks. Schedule it from 8am-6pm on weekdays every 10 mins or so or whatever interval to hit the email quota you are after.
Options: This is pretty straightforward.
Review: Here is where we are going to take an additional 30 seconds per email to review it and make sure the email looks like a human is sending it and not a robot. The most important part is going to be the "Hi {first name}, …" this is because we DON'T HAVE the first name for everyone. Sometimes JUST the email was scraped. What do we do here? We add the "domain name" from the email. If you are sending the email to info@candlescents.com and you don't have the first name, the email will look like this: "Hi -, …". Instead we will add the domain name to the intro so it looks like this: "Hi people of candlescents.com, …". It still looks nice and professional even though you don't have anyone's first name.
Additional Pro Tip: If you never want to use the first name in the email and always the business name instead, then upload the "Business name" from D7LeadFinder or tell your VA to add another column into the excel sheet for "Root Domain URL" that only contains the domain name of the website. This will save you time on the review process.
What about those contact forms you scraped?
We should have a good amount of contact forms as well. Send these off to your Virtual Assistant (VA) again. Send the VA your business email address, a "subject" placeholder and the same email from the template above, except for slightly more generic. Use "Hi there" instead of "Hi {first name}", so we can send through these contact forms faster. What's great about the excel or CSV is that as soon as you click the contact page URL in the document it will open the website in the browser. Copy and paste the selected fields and move to the next contact page. Easy as pie.
Final Thoughts
Now start the campaign and just like that you have filled the role of the "sales team" for your startup. Obviously this will not be the same as having someone dedicated to sales (they will probably use tools like this anyways), but it will work wonders for you. This is different than the grimy emails you receive in your inbox because
• we are trying to work together with the business you are contacting and
• each email looks legit and is non-spammy. Our conversion rate will be much higher than fully automating these tasks. Modify the process until you can hit about 30% open rate and then a 10-15% response rate. Those stats would be considered quite good in my opinion.
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