- Would you like to boost your open rates,
reply rates, and sales with cold email?
In this video,
I'm gonna teach you exactly why 99% of cold emails
are total trash.
Because over the last year I've sent
over 30,000 cold emails, some of them did really well,
some of them failed hard,
and in this video I'm gonna teach you exactly
what I learnt,
the biggest mistakes I see most people make when it comes
to cold email and how to avoid them.
Just make sure you watch all the way to the end 'cause
we have some actionable ways to improve your cold email
results and drive more sales with outreach,
so let's jump into it.
So if there's one thing that I've learned from cold email,
it's the paprika effect.
So, let me give you an example.
Let's say you have a pie, you're baking a pie,
it's an apple pie, it's gonna be incredible,
and you've got the pastry,
you've got the perfect ingredients,
you've set the oven at the perfect temperature,
you've cooked it for the perfect time,
and you follow this recipe to perfection,
apart from one tiny thing, which is,
that you've dropped a tablespoon of paprika into the pie.
And that just ruins it.
So even though you stuck to the recipe, you've done
99.9% of everything right
apart from this one little teaspoon of paprika,
it's messed up the whole thing.
And it's exactly the same with cold email.
So you can perfect all the elements of a great cold email,
but if you mess up one tiny element,
it can ruin the whole campaign.
So for example,
let's say you choose the wrong subject line,
that will ruin your campaign,
or if you include a spelling mistake in the first line,
chances are people aren't gonna read it after that point.
Or even if you send the campaign from the wrong email
address, let's say you send it from an email address
that has a very poor sending reputation,
that will mean you land in the spam inbox,
99 times out of 100.
And that's part of truth about cold email,
and most people won't tell you.
So when it comes to outreach,
you can't really half-arse it.
But if you learn that now it will save you a lot of time,
money and energy in the future,
especially if you're hiring a team,
spending hours copywriting, doing lots of prospecting,
all of these activities will become wasted if you get
one ingredient of the full recipe wrong.
So you know,
you can't really apply the 80/20 rule to emails.
Now, a big mistake that I see in pretty much every single
cold email, that I've ever read,
is the fact that they're just so damn boring.
So when I read it, you know,
picture me as Gary, I'm walking into the office,
it's a midweek round, I hate my job,
my wife's cheating on me,
and then I log onto my laptop and I see your boring email.
All I'm gonna do is delete it or hit the spam button.
And that's a big problem for you if you wanna get
a response, especially because you wanna get like some
sort of, emotional reaction from the cold email to make
sure that they engage with it.
And I know what you're talking about probably isn't
the sexiest thing in the world.
Usually it's quite a boring topic,
but that doesn't mean you can't spice it up with a joke
or a pun, or even a poem if you're feeling adventurous.
But whatever you do,
make sure it's not boring and that it stands
out from every single other email in that inbox,
especially if you wanna get the results that you need.
And a number one mistake I see most people making
when it comes to cold email,
is just writing too much damn content when they send
the outreach email.
So for example,
when you send an email to someone, you have about three
seconds when they open the email, and they read it,
to grab their attention.
So when they scan through the email
and they see there's loads of text,
there's too many paragraphs,
all they're gonna do is either hit the spam button
and send it to the junk inbox,
or they're gonna scan through,
delete it and not look at it,
simply because it's too much effort,
and there's too much work involved in replying to someone
they don't even know.
So that's why you have to keep your copywriting short,
simple, straight to the point and as concise as possible.
This will make a huge difference when people look
at your emails.
I also see a lot of people using templates.
So they can't go over to writing a template themselves,
they just grab one off the internet,
copy and paste it into the email and then hope
that it works.
But the problem with email templates is,
there's a million other people that have sent
that before, and if you use blogs, or you use like templates
of really popular resources to send yourself,
the thing is, that's been spammed by so many people,
it doesn't even work any more.
And that's why I recommend just taking a bit of extra time
to create your own original template.
Now sure ,you can use others for inspiration,
but the trick is to personalize it yourself and add
your own unique touch to it,
so that no one else can copy it.
And the more unique you are,
the more you're gonna stand out.
Another thing I see, all the time,
and this pretty much kills me,
is the fact that when I read a cold email,
it's so self-promotional, it's so,
self-focused on the person who's sending it,
that they don't really care what the benefits are
to the person reading it.
And so when you read this email and you scan for it,
you're like, well, what's in it for me?
Why should I help this person when they don't even care
about my needs?
And the truth is if you're sending a cold email,
you need to give value and you need to be focused
on the other person, rather than yourself.
So for example,
if you're sending a cold outreach email
about guest blogging, then you need to be really focused
on why is that beneficial for the person reading it?
How can you help them?
How can you serve them?
And if you focus on that instead of okay,
this guy's blog is all about me and I'm gonna
write the content,
then you can see a much better result.
So you have to think about how can you make it win win,
and how can you make it value-driven too.
Another mistake that I see so many people make is spelling
and grammatical errors in the email copy.
And the biggest problem is that in 2020 we have so many
tools to help us.
You have Grammarly, you've got Spellcheckers, you got all
these tools that make us the laziest spellers
in the world,
but we literally have no excuses not to get this right.
And if you're sending an email to hundreds
or even thousands of people,
you can spend a little bit of time,
making sure there's no mistakes in the copywriting.
So, that's something that blows my mind
people still do this,
but if you're making that mistake, or you're trying to rush
email, then try and take those extra minutes to proofread
it and make sure there's no grammatical
or spelling errors.
Something super basic that most people
overlook is formatting.
So when you format a new email,
you wanna keep it plain text because that will
improve your deliverability.
If you use loads of HTML elements and images
in your document, then when you're sending this email,
loads of servers are gonna pick it up
as either promotional, or they may block the images too,
which means that the time you spent creating those images
is kind of wasted, and no one's gonna see it anyway.
It also makes an email look kind of funny
when you can't see images, and it kind of skews the message
of the email too.
So let me give you an example.
Another big problem that I see
is people like adding like extra
spaces where you don't need in am email.
And it's kinda like going back to that apple pie, right>
You don't want two pastries on your apple pie,
you want one.
And it's the same with emails.
You don't want two spaces between your paragraphs,
you want one,
and even though this is basic, and it may seem simple,
most people overlook it, and it's something that makes
a slight difference.
Now something else
that takes the biscuit and will destroy
your deliverability race is bombing loads of links
into your email copy.
So if you spam your email copywriting, with loads of links,
all the way through your email,
it's gonna look super spammy.
But also if you have loads of links, then email service
will pick that up too, and they will usually block it.
So, if you wanna chuck in loads of links,
feel free, but don't expect anyone to read it.
And that's why you have to be careful about how many
links you include.
Usually if I send the cold email,
I'm gonna include maximum three,
but usually I try to keep it minimal
and even lower than that.
And the more you practice this,
the better you get at making sure your email copy's more
concise, but also that it has less links in it too.
The other thing as well that you know,
it's kind of annoying,
like if you keep bombing loads of links into your email,
and someone reads it, then they're gonna think,
What the hell?
Why are you sending me so many links?
I got the URL the first time.
So that's something else you should think about.
So that's it from me,
and the reasons why 99% of outreach emails
are total trash.
So next time you're writing your email campaign,
think about that apple pie,
don't chuck any paprika in it, and you'll probably see,
much better results.
So thanks for watching,
please smash like on the video if it helped you.
But if it didn't,
please smash like on this video for this hairstyle
I had in 2008.