- Today on Cold Email Tear Downs, I want to talk about
a problem that some of us are having,
especially when it comes to personalization of the emails.
And I'm not talking about personalization at scale,
I'm talking early in the campaign
how to personalize the emails.
So here's the question that we got.
"Hey, Alex, I have a small fine art printing business
"for photographers and need to drum up new customers.
"I took your advice on personalizing the subject,
"researched all the stuff.
"The problem is, I have a ton of info I would like
"to communicate about our service.
"Believe it or not, this is brief."
Believe it or not, this is brief.
This is not brief, come on.
Let's do a cold email tear down on this.
Let's put it over into Google doc, and let's see
how we can personalize this email,
and actually make it brief.
Congrats, Patrick, on the 25th frame exhibit.
That's a fine subject line.
Very specific.
So if you wanted to scale this,
I would say make it less specific.
But right now this is fine.
Hey, Patrick, exclamation point.
If you were that type of person, I would say run with that.
So let's jump into the actual body of the email.
Congrats on your 25th frame exhibit.
Artist's Corner is a very nice gallery.
I will check it out in September.
That is where I stopped reading.
This is a great line.
This is a fine, but pretty generic, line.
And then I will check it out makes me think like,
oh, he hasn't even been to the gallery.
Why is he saying it's nice?
Is he trying to manipulate me?
Is this a sales email?
I'm done.
That was my thought process anyway.
Will this be your more vintage, cinematic images?
Automotive photos?
I've been following your work on Instagram and really like
your color pallette.
So as writers, a lot of people get in the habit
of writing warm-up lines.
These lines are ones that should be removed,
and yet they don't get removed.
They get us to the line that's good.
So, for instance, congrats on your 25th frame exhibit.
Artist's Corner is a very nice gallery.
I'll check it out in September.
Like these are all warm-up lines to get to this good line
which is, I've been following your work on Instagram,
and really like your color pallette.
That's specific.
That's great.
And that's better than, you have a really nice gallery.
I will visit it at some point in the future.
So let's do the same editing for these other paragraphs,
and we can really shorten this email.
I'm also a photographer.
Primarily through travel, going back to Havana for the
fourth time shortly.
If you haven't been to Cuba, you'd love it.
This person is just ranting about everything he and
this photographer have in common,
before they've even really started a dialogue,
to the point where it kind of sounds stalkerish
or even crazy.
I'm sure you have a printer you use.
If you are actually sure he has a printer he uses,
then you don't have to tell them anything about printing.
If he's running a photo company and this target has
a printing supplier already,
this is a different sort of email.
This email's very easy.
I'm just going to the last sentence of each
of these paragraphs and that's where the gold's been so far.
I'm a master printer with 20 plus years in digital printing,
and I've been a wet darkroom printer since
being a kid in Miami.
What we specialize in is custom, handmade prints
on the best archival papers out there,
just like the difference in taking amazing photograph
has just--
Yeah, it's just too much.
Anytime you're reading an email and it feels like
you're just being bombarded with words,
that means that you either need to remove that sentence
'cause it's irrelevant, or you need to re-write that
in the way that a human would say it.
I am very passionate about printing.
I say I treat every print as if I was
printing it for myself.
That's how I feel right now reading this email.
Okay, hang on.
Anyone can get to 95% of the max quality.
I work to get that last 5%.
So all this stuff could be on your website.
It can be in about section.
The cold email is to get their attention,
get them interested in booking a meeting,
and booking the meeting.
Those are the three things you need to accomplish here.
I really enjoy your work and I would love to print for you,
even if not this go around,
perhaps a future personal project.
So this email has a lot of expecting a no,
which is a mindset that people get in sometimes
where they're sending an email to somebody and saying
things like, oh, I assume you have another printer already,
but we also offer printing services.
Or even if you decide this isn't a good fit right now,
I'd love to potentially work with you in the future.
You wouldn't be emailing them if you didn't think
you were a perfect fit, so assume you're going to
work with them over anybody else.
The other thing I hit is, it's "I am", "I have",
and the last one is "we", which makes it sound too salesy.
Are you a person, or are you a group of people?
And if you use "I", it's better to stick with I.
And if you use "we", it's better to stick with we,
but it's never better to use we.
I'll give you that much.
In a cold email, it's one person to one person,
not a team to a group of people.
And very rarely a team to one person.
Let's see how that reads.
Subject: congratulations, Patrick,
on the 25th frame exhibit.
Hey, Patrick, been following your work on Instagram
and really like your color pallette choices.
I'm a master printmaker with 20 plus years
in digital printing and have been a wet darkroom printer
for 30 years, including work for Bruce Weber,
and the images for Lady Gaga's Netflix doc
for Madison and Vine.
Would love for you to see the dramatically different
results you can get by custom, handmade prints on
archival papers.
I have specific ideas for your upcoming exhibition
if you're interested in a quick chat.
Mind if I send over a few times for a 10 minute call?
Thanks.
Go get some printing business.
By the way, if you need help doing this for your company,
we do consulting.
That URL is down in the description below.
And if you want to do it at scale,
let's say you run an agency of 15, 20 people already,
and you wanna scale up and have it done free of service,
we do this for any type of agency over at
Experiment 27 dot com.
If you wanna share this video with a friend,
it would mean a lot.
We're trying to hit a hundred thousand subs this year,
so basically, try to think of a person that would value
this sort of video.
And I'd love it if you would share it.
Just send 'em a link.
Send 'em a link, you know.
I'm Alex Berman, thanks.