How To Convert Customers With Cold Emails | Startup School

[Music] hi I'm aarin Epstein group partner at YC and in this video I'm going to talk all about how to write cold emails that

convert so first I'm going to give you the all-time best email Outreach hack you ready get a warm intro this is the most effective way to get people to

respond to emails that you're sending to them and you're going to have a conversion rate two to three times what you would get if you were just sending a regular cold email and so there's a lot

of different ways to get warm intros to people that you're trying to get in touch with mostly you want to use your network and go through Linkedin all of your contacts look up your friends your

friends of friends current or former co-workers your uh School alumni networks that you're a part of and even employer um alumni networks at past

companies that you've worked at and you basically want to turn over every Rock in stone to try to find people that might be able to get you a warm connection to the person that you're trying to get in touch with it's not

always possible to get a warm intro though and many times you got to go in cold so that's going to be a big focus of what we're talking about in this video whether it's for sales recruiting

Partnerships or whether you're just trying to get some of your users to talk to you or even reach out to other uh founders as mentors to be able to give you advice all of the tips in this video

should be useful for you and the good news is that most cold emails are actually terrible so the bar is really low for you to stand out and get somebody to pay attention and respond to

you so the first thing that I'm going to talk about here is mapping out your funnel and to do this you want to start with your goal and for many of you if this is a sales context your goal is

going to be I want to get new customers so your goal is to get one new customer let's say and then what you want to do is you want to work backwards from that goal to build your funnel which I'll

walk you through now so we're going to take a look at what a typical conversion funnel might look like if you're a B2B software company I'll give some sample conversion rates as we go through this

example here um but it's important to note that yours may differ and you're going to need to figure that out through trial and error yourselves so let's say your goal is to get that one customer and then let's say you have a a funnel

where you actually need to give product demos to convert people to a customer and so let's say you know that your demo to customer conversion rate is 10% well

in order to get one customer that means you're going to have to give 10 demos to get that one customer now in order to get 10 demos let's say you know that you have a

25% conversion rate from people that respond to your email to people that actually sign up and show up for a demo so that means that you need 40 responses

from the emails that you send in order to get 10 demos now in order to get 40 responses you need 400 people to open your email if you have a 10% conversion

rate from opens to responses and then in order to get 400 people to open your email if you have a 50% conversion rate from emails sent to

emails opened that means that you need to have you need to send 800 emails to get those 400 opens so when you look at this all in aggregate basically what

that means is you need to send 800 emails in order to get one customer conversion so if you're expecting to just send a handful of emails every day

every week every month and see results that's not going to cut it you're going to need to send dozens of emails per day possibly even 50 per day in order to see

meaningful results with conversion rates similar to those that I showed and you should plan to start this writing these emails manually and personalized doing

it yourself not starting with automation you have to do it manually first so that you can learn and figure out what works so that you can then start to scale the process more and it's important to

remember that the goal is not to make the sale right away in the first email your goal should be actually to get to the next step in the funnel that's all you should be focused on here and as

you're optimizing your funnel you want to make sure that you're tracking and measuring your conversion rates so you can figure out what they are for your specific situation and this is really important because it helps you

understand where to focus your efforts if you have an especially low conversion rate at one step in the funnel it might mean that there's a lot of room for improvement that you can do to bring

those numbers up which will help improve your conversion rates across the entire funnel and I wish I could give you industry standard conversion rates for each of these steps but the truth is

they're all different it really depends on your industry your brand your product and even the customer type that you're going after but one thing that's important to note is that conversion

rates will decrease as you scale so if you're starting out in the early days and you're writing these emails manually and you're not getting good conversion rates then that's something you should

fix before you start to scale because they're only going to get worse as you grow in scale because by definition you're going to be going after potential customers that are not your most ideal

Target as you are starting to grow all right now let's talk about how you can increase open rates the most effective way to increase your open rates is going to come through better targeting we talk

a lot at YC about making something people want and targeting is really all about finding the people that want it and this is the highest leverage thing that you can do to improve your open

rates and your responses because it's better to send send 100 targeted emails that are going to have a much higher open rate much higher likelihood to respond rather than a thousand

untargeted emails that are mostly going to be deleted and the thing is you should get better at this over time as you learn to qualify your leads better so this is an iterative process this is

effectively the screen that your recipients are going to see when they're trying to decide if they should open your email or delete it it's an email client you basically see the name of the

sender and you see the subject line and maybe a tiny preview of that first sentence in the email so the from in your email should just be your personal

name it's better because it feels like it's coming from a human rather than a company and the subject should be something that's short relevant interesting hey quick question can I get

your advice help a fellow founder hello from your company name these are all great examples that are just really simple don't feel over ly salesy and feels like you know your friend could

have written it and when reaching out to people I found that the ideal channels to contact our email is usually better

LinkedIn is usually worse and if you're text messaging somebody it can be even more personal but only do that if you have their explicit permission otherwise if you get a text from somebody and you

don't know them it can almost feel like an invasion of privacy sometimes now this isn't always true for all Industries there's some people where you know they get LinkedIn messages all the

time and it feels overwhelming for them and they're feel like it's filled with Spam and so you don't want to fall in that category there's some people that never get LinkedIn messages and it feels special to them when somebody reaches

out so you're going to have to adapt this for your own specific industry and use case when it comes to finding strangers emails there's a few different ways that you can go about that first is

you can ask someone who knows them uh if they have their email address that they can sh with you although an intro from that person would obviously be better you can uh try to connect with them on

LinkedIn um or look up their blog or the website if they have one oftentimes people will put their own personal email address there you can use the LinkedIn sales Navigator tool which is a great

way to find relevant people to reach out to and also contact and then sometimes you can even guess based on the company format if you know that everyone at the company has first name. last name at

companyname tocom then you can probably guess just about anybody who's working there and be able to reach them and then there are even really great tools that can help make this pretty simple too

like apollo.io hunter.io clear bid and many others so it's worth checking those out to be able to find the right email address to find somebody building your brand is really important when you're

reaching out it's important because your company brand when you're really small actually isn't going to help you it's not going to open doors nobody knows who you are are but it will help you as you

scale if you do things right and so what's important to remember in the early days is that you are the brand the words that you use the way that you reach out the level of personalization

and the effort and work that you've shown in reaching out to somebody will really stand out to people you basically are trying to get users customers Partners to not just make a bet on your

company but to make a bet on you personally in order to work with you it's risky working with a startup and so if you can put your personal cell phone number in there and tell them to reach

out to you at any hour of the night if there's anything that they need that's going to feel like you really care and you're going above and beyond to make them successful but it's important to

remember that the highest Roi when it comes to increasing open rates is really going to come from better targeting now let's talk about ways to get more responses once people have opened your

email it all comes down to what you write and what you say in that email whether they're going to respond or take the action that you want and so in order to guide you through this I've come up

with seven principles of effective email copy that are going to help you write emails that stand out the first is to have a focus specific goal your goal can

be getting to the next step in the funnel and starting a conversation with them and you want to keep it focused on a single outcome you want them to respond to click to intro you to

somebody whatever the action is that that you want them to take and you want to focus just on that one outcome and moving them towards that action if you have multiple asks or multiple things

that you want them to do in the email it can create a paradox of choice and then this feels hard and overwhelming for the recipient if they have too many things they want to do or it's not clear which

is important and they're just going to either delete your email or shelf it and archive it and forget about it and move on so that's why it's really important

that you have this one Focus goal and all the copy in your email should drive towards that single goal and every word counts if there's anything that doesn't

move the recipient towards that goal you should delete it the second principle for writing effective emails is to be human this really helps to talk about

emotions things like I'd love to it would mean a lot I'd really appreciate thanks you have no idea how much this helped because humans talk about emot

and Bots or llms or whatever else you're using to try to automate this process is not good at this type of thing and it helps to be informal instead of hello or

sometimes I get emails hello Mr Epstein and I don't take those very seriously versus if somebody says hey or hey Aaron and you can even have no capitalization

typos can be okay these are all things that make me think that a human has written this email rather than a robot and you can even get creative with gifts or videos or other types of custom

content to get people's attention and the more personalized it is the better I remember one time somebody sent me an email and in it they had an animated gift of them holding a little whiteboard

and it said Aaron it had my name on it it said hi Aon and she's waving to me and so that got my attention I clicked through I wanted to see what this was about because it felt like they had done something that was very personalized

that probably took time to create and that made me think that they actually cared about building a connection with me rather than just spamming thousands of people of which I was one of them and

I think the main point to emphasize here is that you really want to write how you talk to a friend this is super important a lot of times people will go and they'll open up a Google doc and they'll

start writing out a generic email with sequences and placeholder variables for company name and recipient name and all these things and that's not a good way

to do it instead you want to open up your email editor just like you're composing an actual email to a single person put the specific person's name or

email address in the two field and then write the email with that specific person in mind and I know it's tempting to use llms and other techniques to try to automate a lot of this but they often

struggle with a lot of this personal connection here and then final trick here once you've written that personalized email to one specific person read it out loud either to your

co-found founder if you have one or to yourself and see if it feels awkward anything that you're saying if there's something that you've written that you wouldn't feel comfortable saying out

loud to somebody that's probably an indication that you should change it to be a little more human the third principle here is to personalize everyone's used to getting

tons of spam and people can smell spam from a mile away so that's why personalization and making it feel targeted is super important to avoid the delete button everyone loves their name

so the difference between hi there which feels generic versus hey Aaron feels like it was written for me very simple to do very simple bar across and it

helps to be specific in the personalization that you're writing a lot of times I see Founders say things like hey love what you're doing at creative Market which was my startup

which feels kind of generic it feels like there was a a placeholder variable for company name and they just swapped my company name in instead if somebody writes to me and they say

something like I'm a huge creative Market fan ever since you launched the photos category it's now my go-to resource that shows me that the very

least they've done some research on my product and the history of of what we've built and how it's evolved and at the highest level maybe they're actually a

user of my product in which case I would be super excited to respond to them and get to know them so the key takeaway here is that if you're just swapping out a few words it's probably not specific

enough and one really important Point here to help with personalization is you want to try to find the uncommon commonalities with the people that you're reaching out to now uncommon

commonalities are things that you have uniquely in common with somebody else things that are not obvious to have in common with other people so for example

if I'm reaching out to somebody and I say hey I see that you are a man I also am a man we should do business this together then they're going to be like okay that's a little weird it's a lot of

people that are like that versus if somebody reaches out to me and they say hey we went to the same college and went to class in the same buildings instantly I'm starting to build a connection with

them or I feel like we have something in common and I want to get to know them better and I want to help support them because I know what it's like to be in their shoes as well and it's not easy to figure out what these uncommon

commonalities are and so that means that you have to do the work you have to put in the work to research the company find the right contact look them up on

LinkedIn use their product so you understand at a deep level how it works and then reach out to the person and that's how you're going to be able to build the deepest connections and get

the most responses all right the next principle is to keep it short if you've got a wall of text that's just going to be an instant delete for most recipients and really what you want to focus on on

here is you want it to be short because your email will then be easy to read and respond to right away most people are pulling up emails on their phone and if

you can make it so simple that they can just hit reply fire off a quick response quick a link whatever the thing is that you want they're going to do it right there in the moment if it's something

that has more cognitive overhead longer to read then it means that people are going to put it on archive maybe flag it to try to resp respond later or else just delete it all together and your

email will be lost the fifth principle for effective cold emails is to establish credibility if you're in YC often that can be credibility enough to

open doors but if you're not in YC this can be through former schools that you've attended companies that you've worked at or other impressive things that you've done you can include all of

this in your email to get people to take you seriously right out of the gate also if your company is live and you have customers you can share some well-known customer names as social proof in the

email too if people see that either they're competitors or other well-known customer names that they know are using your product then that can provide a lot of credibility for them to get excited

to use you too and if you have any interesting or useful data or Trends or anything that's industry specific that your customers might find interesting or relevant you can publish that too to

help establish your yourself as an expert in the space and if you have any shared connections people that you know in Comm and that sort of thing it can be great to mention that too because

that'll create a baseline of trust the sixth principle here is that it's all about the reader not about you and so this means as you're writing your copy

you want to reframe all the eyes as you and yours and really the trick here is to tell your story as the quest to solve

the problems for your users and this works especially well if you are solving a problem that you have felt yourself so for example if you know at your past

company you ran into this problem it was a huge headache for you and now you're building this company to solve it you should tell the user that and tell them

that you're dedicating the next 10 years of your life to build this company to solve this problem that you felt so deeply that you know that they feel too people are really going to connect if

they know that you understand their problem too and they're going to want to share everything with you so that you can hopefully fix it for them it's also important that you use the language that

your users use to describe you not necessarily how you think about how you describe your company a good trick for this is to ask your users say how would

you describe my company and they'll typically tell you in a short phrase how they would describe it and and you want to take that exact phrase and use that as the language when reaching out to

other customers and I would even recommend putting that exact phrase right as the header on your website because the language that your users use to describe you is almost certainly the

same language that's going to resonate with other people just like them and then it's important to remember you shouldn't make demands in these emails respond to me by this date or whatever

you're on their time you're in their inbox and it's not their responsibility to get back to you finally the last principle number seven here is to have a

clear call to action you want to end with a concrete Next Step reply to let me know click here to get started Can You intro me to Aaron Or whoever you're

trying to get in touch with this makes it really clear what action you want the user to take and then it's really important to make this its own paragraph make it its own Standalone sentence

right before you sign off at the end often times people will scan an email get down to the end and try to figure out what is it they're asking me to do is this something that I could take care

of right now in just a few seconds or is this something that's going to take more time and effort in which case I'm going to have to think about it and process it some more so by ending with a clear call to action you're more likely to get

somebody to take that next step all right so these are the seven principles of effective email copy have a focus

specific goal be human human personalize keep it short establish credibility make sure it's all about the reader not about you and have a clear

call to action and if you do all of these things the good news is you'll be the top 5% of all emails that are sent and it's going to be hard for your

recipients to ignore them but one email is often not enough people are busy they're out on vacation they get distracted and so you should plan to manually

follow up two three four times as needed and now there's a fine line between being persistent and being annoying so you want to give it a few days between emails and also you can get creative

with each follow-up I've done this in the past I was emailing somebody they weren't responding send an email subject line free donuts they opened that one and I went and brought some donuts to

their office to get them to talk to me so sometimes you just got to get creative and then if somebody doesn't respond don't get angry don't get frustrated nobody owes you anything here

just move on you can check back in in a couple months maybe it's not a problem for them right now maybe it will be in the future all right so let's see some examples so first we're going to take a

look at a couple emails that are not effective and need some work and we'll critique those and then we're going to take a look at a few emails that are actually really effective and point out some of the good parts of them and it's

worth noting these are actually real email emails that I have received and I'm going to be reading them out of my inbox but I'll be anonymizing some of the details to protect the innocent here

all right so the first one says hi Aaron hope all is well wanted to follow up because I noticed your order processing time could be faster our company plugs into your e-commerce platform to pull

orders in real time and guarantees all orders are fulfilled and on their way to your customer within one day or your money back all right the problem with this is that my company sold digital

design assets that were downloadable from the internet we did not ship physical products so clearly this is a company that's trying to sell me a

shipment service and because this is not targeted we are never going to be their customer this could have been the most amazingly written most personalized email and nothing that they could do

would make me their Customer because the targeting is not right so this illustrates the importance of having really strong targeting with your emails and why that will help you see much

better conversion rates all right this next one hey there hope you are doing great I've just checked your website and your audience and content look interesting to us so here's a quick

question do you partner with companies or collaborate somehow to make extra bucks best in waiting for your reply PS if you don't want to hear from me anymore just let me know okay a lot of

problems with this one first they didn't even have my name it just says hey there so they couldn't be bo bothered to personalize with my own name so not a great start there's nothing personalized

in here checked out your website your audience looks interesting to us and then I think this is their ask do you collaborate somehow to make extra bucks I don't even know what they're

specifically asking for here and then finally nobody actually signed their name to this email and the PS says if you don't want to hear from me anymore just let me know which is basically

telling me that this is Spam they've added me to some list and now it's my responsibility to get off that list so this is an an example of an email that I

could not delete fast enough okay here's the last one which I almost instantly deleted hi Aaron my name is so and so from the Philippines I saw your LinkedIn

profile and took an educated guess and sending this email you don't need to tell somebody um how you found their contact information that's relevant to you not relevant to them I'm a freelancer that offers

contractual work to Executives all around the globe I have been helping companies since 2014 during my past jobs I was able to facilitate good business relationships I can help assist you in

your sales team I hope to share my skills and expertise with you you can see that this is all about the person who's sending it not about the recipient

at all basically everything about this email is I I I it's it's all focused on the person who sent it not on me the recipient and why I should reach back

out to this person to work with them so this is an example of not focusing on the recipient make sure it's all focused on how you can help their problems

that's all they care about all right now let's take a look at some good ones that actually worked well on me and converted first one subject line go turps this was a LinkedIn message of which I respond to

very few of them hope you don't mind the cold reach out but saw you also spent time in Van munching Hall so I went to the University of Maryland the Maryland

terapin which we call the TPS um and I actually had a number of classes in Van munching Hall on campus so right away this is somebody that it says to me um has context when I went to school likely

went there themselves um we have some uncommon commonalities uh together here as a quick intro my co-founder and I are both exg googlers working together on a meeting driven task manager so this

tells me they're building some credibility they've worked at Google in the past makes me think maybe they're uh solid Engineers I was hoping you might help

out a fellow TP and review my YC app I've already had a few friends review so it's been cleaned up significantly and this is really helpful because it tells me that they've done the work to get it

to a point where they're not going to be wasting my time and that I'm going to be able to help them with the high value things not the obvious loow hanging fruit if you have a few moments let me

know the best email to send you the doc and thanks in advance so this is a very clear call to action share your email with me and they'll follow up with a doc that I can just leave some feedback in

so this was super effective I responded to this person um when that's something that I very rarely do okay now this next example is one that I actually wrote myself uh back when we were launching

creative Market Marketplace for graphic design assets and we were recruiting some designers to be our first sellers on the marketplace when we open the doors want to be one of the first creative Market Sellers and start adding

your stuff we're just starting to open the doors for sellers to come in and add their content to be ready on day one of launch here's a special link to start setting up your shop it's still super

early in the rollout process for us so I'd love any thoughts or feedback you have on how things are working right now we're working hard to improve things every day but definitely let me know if you run into any bugs weirdness or

anything else you think we should know your feedback is super important to us oh and please don't share any info or screenshots about the new site and the seller terms with anyone else just yet

we're inviting handpick sellers only at this point so trying to keep it super exclusive for now welcome to the club look forward to hearing your thoughts so what's interesting about this email is

this is entirely a templated email except for the person's first name and the special URL that they need to come and sign up early but I use use a lot of

tricks throughout in order to make it feel very special and personalized so for one it's bunch of smiley faces you know makes it feel a little more

informal um I write how I talk you know it's like oh and please don't share any info that sort of thing I also use the word special and make it feel exclusive

a lot here's a special link it's super early for us i' love your feedback we're working hard to make it better um don't share anything because you know we're

inviting handpick people only at this point it's exclusive welcome to the club so it makes it feel very special for the recipient rather than something that I'm spamming out to everybody and hoping

anyone responds to me okay and this last email is going to be a little bit different we're going to do a before and after with a company that I worked with in the batch a few years back now they

were uh company that sell uh in-office smoothie machines and pre-made smoothies that they were trying to get startups and other companies bu subscriptions with them and so they had this email

they were sending out hey we're in the current YC batch hustling to achieve our demo day goal can you forward me to your office manager to chat about trying our delicious smoothies in the office for

free in exchange for feedback to improve our product we got Uber Fitbit GoPro and others using us and thought your team would enjoy them too so there's some good stuff in here they've got the

social proof that Uber Fitbit GoPro those are logos that we recognize so it makes it seem like they're more legit but you know it's all about them trying to get their demo day goal and um you

know it doesn't seem as enticing for somebody to want to try to help them out it's less clear what's in it for the recipient so after brainstorming a bit and iterating on it here's what we came up with working with the founders the

subject was smoothie party current YC company hey first name I'm Oliver the founder of snack Blends from the current YC badge and I'd love to throw free

Smoothie party for the whole company team at your office it's like happy hour but smoothies and free are you interested all we ask in return is for

some feedback on the smoothies is there an afternoon I can come by to treat your team thanks and so when they started doing this one it almost seemed like a no-brainer for their recipients yeah

free Smoothie party somebody's going to come and give smoothies to my team sounds great and so that helped get them in the door to be able to then sell those um as long term deals all right so

I'm going to leave you with some final advice here the first you should be doing this manually to learn and focus on scaling later if you're trying to

automate right out of the gate you're doing it wrong instead if closing customers by sending cold emails is an important part of your growth strategy

you should be blocking off hours per day to do this and do it incredibly well it's worth it for the return once you've got it working really well with you

doing it personally then you can try to figure out how to automate and scale the process more in order to do that you've got to be tracking and measuring remember that funnel you got to figure

out at each step of the funnel what's the conversion rate how can I improve it figure out where you're dropping off and focus on those areas you the founders should be sending these people are going

to take them way more seriously when it comes from the founders or the CEO much more so than if it comes from some account executive or some intern or some

other automated process that you set up here and you should be sending dozens of emails per day block off the time and do the work to get it right and you will

see the results so you may be small but that is your advantage because you can give your personalized attention to making these dedicated emails feel

special to the recipient so personalize be human be persistent and do the work so thanks for watching and I hope this video helps you turn more of your cold

emails into customers thanks

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