Cold Email Outreach

As of today (2/22/2025), getting leads is the hardest part. I think the easiest way of doing this is just paying for them from sources like Data Axle and such. 

However, there are other methods of getting these leads, such as scraping. Especially now with AI tools, scraping has gotten much easier. We can just parse a page, give it to GPT and say “gimme dis in csv, big dog”, and you get a nice pretty csv file. This is something I am still exploring. 

Once you have your leads, the next step is enriching them with additional data. Now, this really depends on how your leads look like. Something from Data Axle will already be pretty rich. However if all you have is an email, company name, and a contact name, then it might require a bit more investigation work to enrich these leads. Here are the minimum fields your leads should have:

- Email (duh)

Personalizing content is where these LLMs can really help us out. By providing them their social media page, or their website, we can curate a personalized subject line and email body for each individual lead. This approach of personalization increases open rates and the likelihood of the lead being interested in working with you. This personalization gives them a sense of “do I know this person?” and urges them to take the email a bit more seriously. 

This is a saying that I have heard over and over. It’s not enough to send just one email. It’s important to follow up, and follow up multiple times. Sometimes your contact will open the email, and just get busy with other things, so they don’t have a chance to reply back. Following up gives them this chance to reply back and also get more information on what you’re trying to offer. 

There should be at least 3 or 4 total contacts, starting with the initial cold out reach, and finally ending with a last out reach. If the lead is available on LinkedIn or another social platform, you should include reaching out on that platform into your sequence. 

There are different best practices for follow ups, and data can vary one which follow up practice is best. However, the most common is going to be to follow up a couple days after your last email. 

Data also shows that initiating contact towards the end of the week for your high ranking executives yields higher open rates. This is because as the week winds to a close, they are able to spend more time on less urgent work emails. 

It’s important to know that everyone likes to buy, but no one likes to be sold. Establishing a relationship is critical in this process, especially for high ticket items. No one is going to buy something for thousands of dollars from someone with no authority or someone they don’t know. 

It’s common for a lead to not be ready to buy at the moment you send the email. In this case, it’s important to nurture a long term relationship. There are many ways to do this, a newsletter is one of the most common ways to continuously provide valuable information to your leads.