Steli Efti is the CEO of Close.io,
and one of the greatest at cold emailing
salespeople there is, especially around the realm
of software as a service.
I did a video breaking down Steli Efti's
best tips before, and in this video,
I wanna talk about the cold email evolution.
Recently me and him talked on the Digital Agency Marketing
podcast, which is worth checking out on iTunes,
and he had some very interesting things to say
about where cold email is headed,
so let's check it out.
- [Steli] Content, a lot more knowledge is out there,
which is also a good thing.
The bad thing about it is that,
I think too many people didn't really learn
how to think about selling and writing cold emails,
and they've only learned to kind of copy
and paste the best subject line, or
to copy and paste this follow up template,
because when you write high tactical stuff,
people, they love it because, like, 100 subject lines
that work in cold emails, they just go
and pick one or two of them and use them,
get results, and they like it,
so there's beauty in that.
But the downside of that is that they
never have learned why they work
and then, because everybody else has read
what they have read, things start to stop working.
Here's the basic truth, anything that works,
word by word in a cold email,
will eventually stop working, 'cause more
and more people will see it, will copy it,
will use it, and eventually it's overused.
And if you don't understand the logic
and the philosophy and the strategy behind why it worked,
you're gonna get into trouble,
because it's gonna stop working
and you're not gonna have the resources,
the resourcefulness, to know how to adapt or change
or how to reinvent what you're doing
to get good results again.
- There are no magic words in
the email templates that we write.
Steli's templates, my templates, Scott Britton,
any of these cold emails that you're reading,
it's very important that you put them
into your own words and think about the framework,
and that's what Steli is going on
about in this clip.
- [Steli] Today I think, what I teach much more
when I talk about cold emailing, is to try to avoid
going into super tactical stuff,
and I teach the basic fundamentals.
Here's the journey of a cold email.
First, you need to worry about quality of emails.
You need to make sure that these people
are the right type of people, right?
So you don't send emails to people
that should never receive the email.
Then, you need to worry about them opening it.
That's your number one problem, right?
If I don't open it, the email never existed.
The subject line needs to be good enough
for me to wanna open it.
You need to pique my curiosity,
but without tricking me, right?
So you need to think about it like step by step first,
you need to receive it, then you need to open it.
Once you open it, every sentence needs to be a pitch
to continuing reading.
Lost of people write these huge cold emails,
and then they bury the lead.
They put the most important thing at the end,
assuming everybody will surely read the entire thing
sequentially and carefully.
They won't, right?
So you need to start with the strongest thing,
you need to sell me on why I should keep reading,
you need to answer some of the objections people think.
Who is this?
What do they want to sell to me?
This is not for me.
Why is this credible?
Okay, you're telling me that sounds interesting,
but I don't trust you, why are you trustworthy?
You need to be able to address some
of these basic things in the email
and then give me one call to action.
- You need a framework in your mind, right.
There is a general framework that works for all cold emails.
It's not about the exact words,
and the way that you find the framework
is to get inside the mind of the person
that you're sending a cold email to.
What do they wanna see in a cold email, right?
What would actually make them respond to it,
and then putting that stuff into your cold email.
But Steli and other cold emailing masters
can show you what's goin' on, right,
but nothing's gonna be a substitute for this next point.
- [Steli] So I think what's missing,
I think what always should be asking yourself is,
do I have the context and the knowledge
to be able to translate into my world?
I think that, whenever you read tactical advice,
I think it's important and there's no short cut
to making mistakes.
There's no way around making mistakes.
You're gonna have to make some mistakes,
and you're gonna translate some of the strategies
that you read in books or see in talks,
you're gonna translate some of that
in a way that's not gonna be successful,
and that's normal, we've all done that.
If people have a healthy understanding
of where they are, and healthy self awareness,
"hey, I don't have a lot of experience in cold emailing.
"I wanna learn some stuff."
And if I'm reading some blog posts and trying things,
I need to understand that I'm still
probably gonna be a beginner, and what I need
to do is just keep testing, iterating, and improving.
Keep reading and studying,
but also just keep looking at the results
I'm getting, and trying to see,
"how can I get better?"
If you take that kind of a learner's approach
and an iterative approach,
you're gonna get really good at it eventually.
- These clips were all part of an interview
me and Steli did on the Digital Agency Marketing podcast.
It was like a 15 minute interview.
These are like the top three minutes that I've done.
So check out that podcast if you wanna learn more,
and there's a bunch of other episodes
that are worth checking out.
If you need marketing support for your digital agency,
check out experiment27.com.
Like this video to encourage this type of content on YouTube
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I'm Alex Berman from Experiment 27.
Thanks.