- I'm Alex Berman from Experiment 27,
and this is my 2018 presentation,
the most up-to-date content,
The 14 Most Common Cold Email Mistakes
and How to Solve Them.
There's gonna be a lot of email scripts in here,
a lot of value, and I'm excited to share it with you,
so let's jump into it.
First, a little bit of info on me.
I'm Alex Berman,
I've generated over $100 million
in new business-to-business customers.
I'm the former director of marketing at a three-times,
now four-times Inc. 5000 fastest growing company,
it was an agency in New York City.
I am also the founder of Experiment 27,
where we help agencies,
so anyone in the digital services businesses,
whether they're graphic designers or they make mobile apps
or they do social media or video production,
we help all of those customers
get in touch with enterprise clients.
That's people like Qdoba, Morgan Stanley,
Paramount Pictures, Netflix.
If they're a billion-dollar brand,
we've probably emailed them,
and more likely than not we've secured a meeting with them
for one of our clients.
That's who I am, that's who we are at Experiment 27.
So here we are,
the most common mistakes people make in cold emails.
Number one is lousy subject lines.
Instead of using a lousy, uncustomized subject line,
most people, what they'll do
is they will write a very long subject line like,
I would love to provide
social media services for your business,
or I would love to work for free,
and that just doesn't work.
So instead, here are a few subject lines you can use.
Hi from name, question about company, about company.
And then here are some of the top-performing ones
for our company currently at Experiment 27.
The top one is an emoji about whatever you're emailing.
We were emailing breweries recently
to match them with a design client,
and this beer emoji had about an 80% open rate,
so a relevant emoji to the client.
The second one is, I was born to work with company.
This one's also huge.
And meeting next week, and then finally,
Experiment 27, a bunch of dashes,
and then this kinda caret, and then company.
These subject lines come from a lot of testing,
and if your campaigns aren't working,
it's best to look at the open rate first
because boosting open rate
is as simple as testing a new subject line
per 10 sends until you get 60%.
So I would go back to these and write a bunch of 'em.
There are videos we have on this channel also
about writing subject lines
that I'll link down in the description below.
But write a bunch of these
and test each one with just 10 emails
and see which ones get the highest open rates.
If your emails aren't being responded to,
this is the biggest issue.
Number two is no customization.
Write an email specific to the niche
and you have to customize the first line.
I spend up to six minutes per email,
and I've found that if you spend six minutes
customizing and making sure
that the person you're emailing is the right person,
the email is talking about something
that's relevant to that person, the pitch is typo-free,
like check everything six minutes per email,
you can get about a 10-times open rate and response rate.
Typically if you're blasting out an email,
I've seen response rates around .05%, which is super low,
and we're able to get around a 14% response rate
at our highest.
And using this customization approach,
we're able to get a typical meeting book rate
around four to 6%,
sometimes as high as 14 and even 20% meeting book,
which means every 100 emails
we're getting 14 meetings on the calendar.
That's through these customizations,
and I'm gonna go through the script that we use
in a second as well.
And the second has arrived, here we are.
So this is for our company Lorelia Pictures,
we sell video production services.
Basically we're trying to reinvent the way
that corporate content is made,
and these documentaries cost about 100K.
Here is an email that we were sending to Tiffany Haddish,
wrote a book called Black Unicorn,
she's also an amazing actress in a bunch of movies,
but anyway here's the email we sent to her agent.
Hey Danny, just finished reading The Last Black Unicorn
and it's incredible,
especially love how Tiffany is able
to capture her comedic voice
even through her narration.
I make documentaries for a living and would love to discuss
turning the ideas in your book into a film.
Mind if I sent over a few times for a call?
Thanks.
It's that simple, this email had
about a 14% meeting book rate,
so I wasn't joking around before.
I think we sent a hundred of these and got 14 meetings.
And then Danny got back the same day a couple hours later,
please call me at my office.
We called him and it went right to proposal phase.
Here's another one we were using to book collaborations.
My little brother is a DJ
and he's got a pretty good SoundCloud following,
but here's the email we were using
for those collaborations with top musicians.
Notice this first line's super customized as well.
Hey Lynn, big fan of Ingrid Michaelson for a while,
and just found the track Old Days,
especially love how deep the lyrics are,
we've all lost someone and this speaks to it.
Very interesting vocal choices in here as well.
I was talking to Handsalmon and he loves the song too.
He's an up-and-coming DJ
who just did a release on a Sony imprint.
Do you happen have the vocal track?
We'd love to do a remix.
Thanks, Alex.
Happy to do it for free, love your songs.
This email did get a response I think same day
if not a day or two later from her team.
Number three is super formal email salutations.
In most cases, all you gotta do is say hi name.
You don't have to say dear Mark, or greetings, this guy.
It's just hi.
You gotta think about what you'd write
in your actual emails.
It's not a letter, it's an email,
it's one person to another person,
So don't just say hello with no first name,
you need a first name in there.
You don't need to say dear, you don't need regards
or anything like that.
Number four is starting your email with an I.
Using an I in the first line or too much in the email
makes it very me-centric,
and it makes it more about yourself than the client.
The fix to this is to run through it,
get in the mindset of a client,
think, hey, I have no idea who's sending me this email,
why do I care about this guy?
And then rewrite the email based on that,
and you'll use a lot less Is and a lot more you.
Number five is typos.
Use Grammarly or hire a proofreader
if you're English-as-a-second-language,
especially if you're coming from a country
that speaks English
but speaks it differently than Americans.
Like this is a problem that a lot of people
in India and South America and even Eastern Europe have,
where they'll write emails
that they think are in perfect English
and they just don't sound right to Americans.
Number six is offering a menu of services.
Instead of sending multiple bullet points
that won't ever be read,
just think of one or two great ideas
and share them in your email.
Here's an example.
Hey name, I just got off the phone
with the CEO of a 65-person SaaS company in New York City
and he's dealing with these issues.
Do either of these look familiar?
One, customers not understanding
the concept of the business.
Two, conversions and signups are lower than they should be.
And then the call to action,
we made a video for that CEO
and his signups went up almost immediately.
Would love to do similar for company name.
Mind if I send over a few times
for a quick brainstorming call?
Thanks.
Simple two ideas that are very specific to this guy's niche.
He can send these to anybody that matches SaaS companies
that are of this size.
Number seven is asking for too much.
Your cold email is only meant to get a meeting booked,
so if you send a proposal or a pricing sheet
or images of what you do,
in most cases that's gonna kill open rates and responses.
Number eight is writing irrelevant nonsense.
The prospect doesn't wanna hear anything they already know,
they don't wanna hear fluffy compliments
that are based on nothing.
Customize your emails based on
what you think their problems are.
Be specific, be direct, and you'll get responses.
Here's an example of an email that's doing this right.
This email's offering technical writing services
to large companies.
Hey first name,
read the paper you put out about systems growth,
love how detailed you were especially around widgets.
As a professional writer
for the last 30 years in the tech industry,
I've written dozens of white papers,
and your team is on the right track.
I also know how much work goes into creating a great one
that connects with the C-suite in major corporations.
I have a couple ideas for new white papers
that will work for company,
and can create them at a professional level.
Mind hopping on a quick call to talk about your goals?
Thanks.
And that's a good example
of what we were talking about a second ago,
where you're asking them if they wanna see examples
before you're attaching or linking to examples.
Number nine is random bolding or capitalization.
Don't capitalize the company name
and never use the full company name in your emails.
This comes from not having clean data,
and the solution here is to double and triple check
whatever that Excel sheet is that you're pulling data from.
Number 10 is sending the same email
to multiple company types.
Every mention in your email
should be specific to that niche.
If you're selling to coaches,
mention only coaches that you've worked with in the email,
don't mention the big corporations.
If you're selling to beverage companies,
only mention the other beverage companies
you've worked with.
Here's an email example about how to go super niche.
Hey first name, and then that first line
that we were talking about before.
I love your food and would love to help you
get more customers, for free at first.
I've worked with a couple other Japanese restaurants
in the area.
I just ran a promotional campaign with,
and then it's a name of a local restaurant,
where they spent $15 on food giving out miso soup
and ended up with $3,000 in revenue
and a couple dozen new five-star Yelp reviews.
Mind if I send some more info?
The reason why this ends with
mind if I send some more info
is because he's selling to local restaurants
and this email is basically just what he references
when he walks in the door.
It's almost impossible to book meetings in bulk
with small restaurants over email.
Number 11 is emailing a business and not a specific person.
You are one person emailing another,
we are not interested in helping your business.
That's not how the email's written.
The positioning instead should be
I am interested in helping you.
Number 12 is sending crazy long emails.
If you want a good enough response rate,
you need to make sure to keep your emails short enough
that they can be read on a phone,
not more than five sentences,
and sometimes even shorter.
If you look at that documentary email,
that's two or three sentences
and the response rate was higher
than anything we've seen on other emails.
Here's an email I wrote during a review I did for Mailshake,
it's a cold email sending tool.
This is pitching video editing to YouTubers.
Hey name, been following your videos for a few months now,
especially the cold email content.
I edit videos for YouTubers like Sujan Patel, Will Baron,
and other channels that get millions of views.
A four-minute business video like you post
can be done for about $60.
Want to talk further?
Thanks.
So simple, and if you actually wanna see that video,
search Alex Berman Mailshake on YouTube.
We'll also link to it down in the description below.
Number 13 is BCC-ing your cold email campaign
to the entire list.
And the solution is to get a proper email sending tool.
Mailshake's a good one.
Number 14, the final point, AA.
Notice how you don't know what that means,
or maybe you because it's written on the screen.
Avoid acronyms.
Before using any acronyms in your emails,
make sure that your prospect uses it every day
or at least knows what it means.
An example that we did
in a recent cold email teardown was CRO,
which stands for conversion rate optimization services,
but that's not a common thing.
So you read the subject line here,
it says question about CRO.
This is what he sent.
Hi name, your X client project
is one of the best marketing projects I've seen.
If so, would you be interested in knowing
how CRO can increase agency revenue?
Is CRO the name of a company, is that an acronym,
like what is that?
So I fixed the email here.
Question about company.
Hi name, love the work you did
for X client project, impressive.
This again is a custom first line.
There were some case studies however that stood out,
especially the website designs.
I've helped two dozen agencies,
and then a couple examples of the clients,
in the last year
with conversion rate optimization for their clients
and would love to do the same for your company.
We do a two-day on-site workshop
that will give you sales materials and training
to make more revenue selling conversion rate optimization
as an add-on service.
Is that something you'd be interested in?
Would love to run through the details on a quick call
and see if it's a fit.
Notice how much more understandable this email is
than question about CRO.
In summary here, the 14,
lousy subject lines, no customization,
super formal salutations,
starting your email with an I, typos,
offering a menu of services, asking for too much,
writing irrelevant nonsense,
random bolding or capitalization,
sending the same email to multiple company types,
emailing a business, not a specific person,
sending crazy long emails,
BCC-ing your cold email campaign,
and AA, avoid acronyms.
If you wanna send me an email,
it's Alex@Experiment27.com,
if you wanna work with us, it's Experiment27.com.
That's if you run an agency,
you want more enterprise clients, we would love to help,
we do that all day.
If you want free stuff, we've got the client contract
that we actually use to close business.
This cost us about a thousand bucks to put together,
that's Experiment27.com/contract.
It's not written here, but the actual proposal
that we use at Lorelia, the video production service,
that is Experiment27.com/proposal.
The discovery call script
and the questions we use on call one,
that's Experiment27.com/discovery.
If you want a bunch of valuable sales videos,
go over to B2BSalesTraining.org,
that's a playlist of our most valuable content.
If you wanna hire Experiment 27, that's over there,
I think I already mentioned that.
If you wanna follow me on Instagram,
it's a bunch of random nonsense over there. (laughs)
Go over to AlexBerman1 and check me out there.
Would love if you could identify someone
and share this video with them,
that'd be super helpful, and thanks for watching.
I'm Alex Berman.