So the next bit is what do I actually say or what do we put in our messages to get open rates of 90%, to get reply rates of 30% to 60%? The principle behind writing great copy especially for cold emails (applies to warm emails, as well) is I look at it as three main areas.
So the first one is value. So, how we can actually help them, right? Not value to us because value to us is a new client, it’s pretty easy, but no one cares. Everyone cares about themselves, which is actually awesome, because we can talk about the value we can provide to them, so value.
The second bit is social proof. So if you’re experienced in the market, you know, if you’ve done stuff in the industry before, it’s really powerful to talk about what you’ve actually done and reference case studies, reference other clients, things like that.
Obviously, make sure that the clients you’re referencing are okay with you doing that. You don’t want to annoy your existing clients trying to chase new leads. But if you can, or you have case studies, it’s extremely powerful.
And the third bit is you know, coming back to person-to-person marketing. Understand that the person reading your emails isn’t a computer. They’re not corporate, right? They’re another human being at the end of the email. So, make it human. Just because you’re sending emails to businesses doesn’t mean you come and be like, Do you surf/in Madden, right? Like it’s another person, make it human. You don’t have to put a lot of humor into it. I like to in mine, but that’s just me. I’ve got clients who don’t like humor. But there’s still a way to humanize it and make it less formal.
The other thing that we’ve got to look at, too, is sequences. So, I stole this idea from a blog, from AnyMailFinder, it’s like a service to find emails. And what you want to do is, if we get the right copy, we also want to make sure that we’re sending them more than one email.
The principle of it, obviously, at every stage, you expected replies, but that’s the reason why we kind of go through to people more than one time. Obviously, every single time, we’re using a different message or a different angle. And we’re actually getting them to opt themselves out, if it’s not relevant.
So remember, this Venn diagram here – values, social proof, humor. Most important, too – value and social proof. If you can get these two right, you’re probably, I mean, in our business and for our clients, if you only have value and social proof, you’ll probably get open rates of about 50% to 70% and reply rates of about 10% to 15%. You add on humor, and it takes it to the next level with 79% open rates, 15% to 40% reply rate. So humor isn’t necessary, but it can be a massive, massive advantage, because everyone else is trying to use the same kind of messaging, and humor just cuts through the noise.
When you run emails, one of the things that people always try and do is convince people. Like, Oh, here’s our services, can I convince you to have a chat with us? Can I convince you or get you to come on board? It’s actually not about that. Because the way that we position it, right? No is actually not a bad thing at all. Because there’s a certain percentage of the market who’ll never do business with you, regardless of what you do or say. And our job as marketers is to get in front of the people that actually are interested and can get value from what we do.
So no is not a bad thing. It’s what we actually try to get. And the way that we position it is hey, we get good results for our clients over here. You look fairly similar to them. I reckon we can get pretty cool results for you, as well. Is it worth having a chat? If no, completely fine. I won’t send you another email. Cool. If it is, hey, why not just go for it and just have a chat and see if we’re right for each other, right? See if we’re the right fit. So that’s what we do. Again, we’re not trying to convince, we’re just filtering.
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