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“How do I scale my business to a respectable size in a short amount of time?”
Everyone wants to experience tremendous growth (and the revenue that comes with it), but not everyone has the budget to go from 0 to 60.
Content marketing can work wonders in the long run, but it’s difficult to spend the time and the opportunity cost (e.g., working a 9-to-5 or doing freelance work) while waiting for it to really take off.
That’s why many new owners—especially of B2B businesses—turn to cold email marketing. That’s the same realization Austin Houser (CEO of Base Coat Marketing and Coldlytics client) came to.
Most people do cold email marketing dead wrong, and that’s why it has a bad reputation among many marketers. In fact, go ahead and Google “Should I buy email lists?” and most of the answers come back with a resounding “No!”
Then how do so many business owners—including Austin and many of our other clients—experience so much success using it?
Before I started Coldlytics, I worked in the M&A space and primarily used cold email marketing to find clients.
I sent over 3 million cold emails, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in pipeline value. I started Coldlytics based on my experience working with bad data. Most purchased email lists are poor in quality, with outdated information and emails that don’t actually go to decision-makers.
So, while cold email can seem like a bad strategy, there’s definitely a way to do it without being spammy or ruining your email reputation.
I recently chatted with Austin to see how he markets the cold emails he purchases from Coldlytics.
Here’s the process that Austin uses:
When it comes to email marketing, volume is usually the name of the game. Some marketers have success by sending hyper-personalized one-on-one emails, but that’s not something everyone has the time (or skills) for.
Austin recommends starting with 10,000 contacts in order to make his brand awareness campaigns work. This can be a lot at the start, but in a B2B business, you don’t need many clients to make up for the initial investment.
You can find companies for this in Voyager DB in Coldlytics, and also browse millions of companies by technology or location in our directory.
The most important part of emailing a cold list is ensuring you keep your deliverability high.
People who don’t know you are likely to mark an email as spam. Also, sending from new email accounts can raise red flags with inbox providers.
With those inherent challenges, you only raise the degree of difficulty if you send to dead emails or spam traps. That’ll land you on blacklists and ruin your deliverability right away.
Coldlytics partners with ZeroBounce to validate every email ensuring the highest degree of deliverability for your lists. If there are any emails that bounce, you’ll get refunded a credit for each one.
Austin’s strategy here deviates from the norm. Most cold email marketers try to get you on a call or initiate a back-and-forth.
However, Austin gets his subscribers to reach out and inquire about his services by:
In other words, he provides so much free value to the list that they come to think of him as a trusted resource rather than a pitchy salesman
Services designed for cold email (such as Instantly) will automatically warm up your email accounts for you. This means that over a few weeks, your software will send emails to other email accounts in their network and auto-reply back.
This is essential as new accounts emailing many people are giant red flags to Gmail, Yahoo, and other inbox providers. Warming up your accounts makes it more likely you’ll keep your deliverability high.
Because sending cold emails can be higher risk than regular email marketing, don’t use your primary domain. If your email account gets put on a blacklist, that’s going to affect your regular email marketing efforts.
Pro Tip: Most of these issues with deliverability can be easily avoided without extra steps.
All the problems I’ve mentioned, including the ones below, are resolved for you inside Woodpecker. This is a cold email platform that offers email accounts, domains and sending all under one roof for less than $100/ month. It’s the top platform I suggest to people getting startedf.
For example, I wouldn’t send cold emails from an @coldlytics.com email account. I’d purchase several other domains, such as:
gocoldlytics.com
trycoldlytics.com
usecoldlytics.com
Then, I’d set up two email accounts for each one, like:
matt@gocoldlytics.com
john@gocoldlytics.com
In addition to protecting your primary domain, you can also send out a higher volume of emails this way. We recommend sending no more than 30 emails per day from each email account to help avoid deliverability issues.
If you want to send 300 emails per day, you’ll need five domains and 10 email accounts. A good cold email software will allow you to set limits per account and auto-rotate which accounts send emails throughout the day.
These recommendations are for cold email, that said, Austin strategy falls almost into the Email Marketing category - in which case it’s acceptable to send high volumes of emails at once from one account.
I recommend following the suggestions for cold email, but through your own testing you can decide for yourself which approach works for you.
Since the purpose of your strategy is to be purely helpful, don’t overwhelm them with emails. Your goal is to show up occasionally (but consistently) and be incredibly useful.
As Austin says:
“Send no more than once a week and no less than once a month.”
Austin gives two main benchmarks to shoot for:
If you’re not hitting those numbers, you likely need to improve the quality of the emails you send.
Over time, your list is going to naturally shrink because of unsubscribes. Keep your list around 10k in size by purchasing more leads from Coldlytics. Rinse & repeat!
The key to cold email success lies in reaching the right people. Even the best cold email software can’t deliver results if you’re working with outdated lists and poor targeting.
At Coldlytics, we take pride in offering the most accurate, up-to-date, and hyper-targeted leads in the industry. No other lead provider matches our precision—and we work closely with you to ensure you get the exact leads you need to drive real business growth.
Ready to take the next step? Schedule a quick chat—we’d love to help you grow!
Quality data for cold email, phone, or direct mail. Researched on demand.
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