The Cold Email Playbook
The series devoted to actionable guidance and best practices
for successful cold email
The right cold email system can generate a consistent supply of qualified conversations and outbound sales for your business.
In the past, cold email was easier to ramp up, more sustainable to do at volume, and the right email templates could generate substantial engagement (even without personalization).
Today there’s a much higher barrier-to-entry for those trying to generate results with cold email marketing.
A recent report by technology market research firm The Radicati Group expects the global number of daily emails handled by consumers and professionals to exceed 293 billion in 2019.
Compared to the number found in their 2014 Email Statistics Report, daily email volume has grown nearly 1.5x in the last 5 years.
Email users are more overwhelmed than ever.
With limited time and a growing inbox, recipients stay focused on relevant conversations and expect more from unsolicited email outreach.
If you want to stand out in the inbox, your approach needs to be targeted, personalized, and dedicated.
However, you’re limited by time, resources, and the prospects available to you.
How do you build, ramp up, and sustain a cold email campaign that can consistently drive outbound sales for your situation?
To help better understand the modern approaches and best practices for cold email out there, we interviewed 7 experts on the key elements of making outbound email successful for your business.
Course Details
Course Benefits
- Target Better Accounts and Prospects
- Save Time on Personalization
- Differentiate Your Emails in the Inbox
- Better Resonate with Qualified Buyers
- Generate More Meetings and Outbound Sales
- Make a Bigger impact using LinkedIn Social Selling
- Maximize Cold Email Deliverability
Series Overview
EPISODE #1
Outbound Sales Prospecting with Cold Email
It’s easy to find email templates and source lead lists, but it isn’t enough to generate consistent results. Learn how to get the system going and create predictable growth with cold email.
Collin Stewart
CEO of Predictable Revenue
EPISODE #2
Targeting Qualified Sales Leads with Cold Email
Who you target with cold email impacts the entire campaign. Learn how to identify qualified sales leads for your outreach.
Greyson Fullbright
Customer Success at LimeLeads
EPISODE #3
Cold Email Personalization Strategy for Outbound Sales
The time you can spend on outreach is limited by your team and market. Learn how to approach cold email personalization for your situation.
Darren Carter
Co-Founder & CRO at RevenueZen
EPISODE #4
How to Personalize Cold Email Messaging for Outbound Sales
Buyers are numb to outreach and spam filters are harder to avoid, so personalization is more important than ever. Learn how to make the most out of personalizing cold messaging for recipients.
Ian Bloembergen
Chief Pilot & Founder at PilotNow
EPISODE #5
Mastering Follow Up Emails for Outbound Sales
Buyers are busy and start at various stages of their buying process when you connect with outbound. Learn how to design the right cold email journey with follow up emails so you can stay top-of-mind for prospects and nurture future opportunities.
Jeremy Chatelaine
Founder at Quickmail.io
EPISODE #6
Using LinkedIn for Outbound Sales Prospecting
LinkedIn is evolving to reduce mass automation. Learn how to use LinkedIn social selling with your outbound prospecting efforts to build rapport and nurture relationships on social while you cold email.
Michael Moynahan
Founder at LinkedIn Conversions
EPISODE #7
Maximizing Email Deliverability and Avoiding Email Spam Filters
Even the best emails don’t matter if they can’t reach an inbox. Advancements in spam filtering have made it harder than ever to sustain a cold email campaign. Learn how to protect your sender reputation and maximize email delivery.
Don Vizcaino
Executive Director of Global Strategy
Russell Trzaska
Enterprise Success Manager
Meet Your Instructor
Marc is a serial entrepreneur, nationally-recognized sales coach, and a best-selling author with his books Game Plan Selling, Breaking All Barriers, and The High-Velocity Sales Organization.
After founding an event marketing company in the wake of the dot-com market crash, Marc spent years and tens of thousands of cold calls learning the data and science behind selling.
From his experience, he founded the Game Plan Selling System and has helped train thousands of sales teams.
Episode Details
Episode 1: Outbound Sales Prospecting with Cold Email
Marketers getting started with cold email tend to think it’s as easy as finding email templates and blasting a lead list.
However, this approach isn’t enough to bring the consistent, predictable results you need with sales prospecting.
Cold email is a system for generating outbound sales conversations, so it takes time to ramp up the campaign and see the outcomes you’ve produced in your pipeline.
With outbound sales, you connect with buyers at various stages of their buying process. Your cold emails and outbound sales process should accommodate each stage.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- The 3 pillars to driving outbound sales growth with your cold email campaigns
- How to prioritize and approach sales prospecting for your addressable markets
- Common mistakes that new cold email marketers should avoid
Episode 2: Targeting Qualified Sales Leads with Cold Email
There are more than 30 million businesses potentially available to target in the US.
Since outbound gives you the advantage of choosing who to target, you want to be able to identify the most qualified sales leads for your business.
However, there are more bad fits than good fits for your business and most prospects won’t be in-market when you connect.
To target the right people and avoid wasting time in the wrong conversations, you need to identify the attributes, behaviors, and use cases that best fit your ideal customer.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- The impact of targeting qualified sales leads v.s. unqualified sales leads with cold email
- How to think through your Ideal Client Profile (ICP)
- How to identify the right person within a target account to contact to help you win the deal
Episode 3: Cold Email Personalization Strategy for Outbound Sales
It can be hard to crack the puzzle to cold email because you have limited time to research prospects, improve your targeting capabilities, and personalize your outreach.
The more people you email every day, the less time you have to personalize each message. The more time you spend personalizing, the less emails you can send for a potential conversion.
This time balance between volume and personalization in outbound sales is unique to each company and changes as new competitors, strategies, and behaviors emerge in the market.
Many factors impact your personalization strategy for cold email that are unique to your specific situation.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- The best personalization strategy to use for your specific situation based on market size, deal values, and the complexity of your sales process
- How to find the right balance between volume, conversions, and time spent personalizing emails
- How to think through an approach for personalized outreach that can hit your target volume and sustain a cold email campaign over time
Episode 4: How to Personalize Cold Email Messaging for Outbound Sales
Buyers are rapidly evolving their behavior towards outbound outreach because they are constantly overwhelmed with information.
After your email is opened, you still have to maintain curiosity, capture mindshare for your brand, and motivate action.
What separates your emails from the thousands of others buyers receive is how well you use information about your buyers to personalize your messaging and add value.
However, it can be difficult to personalize cold email outreach at scale without spending too much time, team resources, and money to make it work.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Different types of personalization tactics and simple, creative tactics you can use with cold email
- How to personalize a cold email sequence that contains multiple touchpoints over a period of time
- How to think start on personalization for outbound sales and the process of testing to find what works
Episode 5: Mastering Follow Up Emails for Outbound Sales
Buyers receive more daily emails than they can usually process, which is why it takes so many touches to connect with outbound sales leads for the first time.
It takes differentiation to get their attention, relevance to stay on their radar, and perseverance with follow-up emails to generate opportunities at the right time.
Your cold email campaign should add value and build authority in your field of expertise, no matter where a buyer is at in their buying journey.
To maximize the conversations you generate, you need to send multiple cold emails in an organized sequence with the right timing, frequency, and duration to stay relevant.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- What the data behind millions of cold email responses reveal about follow up sales emails
- The balance between response volume and quality for a follow up email
- How to space out cold emails over time to maximize the chances you connect with qualified buyers
- Best practices for spacing out email content and using follow-up emails throughout your sequence
Episode 6: Using LinkedIn for Outbound Sales Prospecting
Cold email is not the only channel you should use to engage with qualified sales leads.
Even with precise targeting and great messaging, it’s still a tough uphill battle to win mindshare and stick out with only one outbound channel because buyers receive so many messages every day.
By combining your cold emailing with social selling on a channel like LinkedIn, you can build trust, add value, and be more memorable to prospects throughout your cold email campaign.
However, Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016 has changed the game and made it harder than ever to use automation tools on the platform.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Changes in the LinkedIn platform and community that impacts the use automation tools for social selling
- Best practices on using LinkedIn for outbound sales, cold emailing, and using LinkedIn’s ad network
- LinkedIn tactics and approaches you can use to warm up sales leads and maximize cold email conversions
Episode 7: Maximizing Email Deliverability and Avoiding Email Spam Filters
It used to be easy to maintain email deliverability and reach a huge scale with cold email, as long as you avoided obvious bad practices and warmed up your infrastructure before hitting higher volumes.
However, modern spam filters now use advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to spot spammers by analyzing billions of emails in real-time.
This level of sophistication has made it harder than ever to set up, warm-up, and sustain a modern cold email campaign for outbound sales without running into deliverability issues.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How the modern cold email environment has changed for marketers from an email delivery standpoint
- Common mistakes and bad practices that increase your risk of getting flagged as spam
- Best practices to keep your email lists healthy and avoid the triggers that modern spam filters look for
As buyers take more control over the buying process and spam filters grow more sophisticated, cold outreach will continue to become harder to make successful for outbound sales.
Every brand, market, solution, and target buyer impacts your results differently, so there is no magic bullet to cold email for any situation.
Instead, the key to success involves careful planning, continuous research, and regular testing to identify the most effective way to do cold email outreach for your organization.
With the right system for growing your sales pipeline, you’ll be able to generate better outcomes and replicate success with cold email as new situations, opportunities, and markets arise.