How to get your first 10 customers with cold email

Cold email is an insane channel for growth, especially for bootstrapped startups as it's very low cost but completely scalable.

Yet there's a huge difference between blind cold emailing and crafting personalized outreach for select individuals.

The latter is a legit channel which makes many businesses scale in short amounts of time (i.e. see Alex Hormozi’s ‘$100 Million Dollar Offer’).

My goal here is to help other founders do what I did but quicker. So you can learn faster. And then teach me something new too. These are the step-by-step lessons I've learnt as a bootstrapped founder, showing you how to use cold email to get your first customers:

1. Find your leads
2. Write engaging email copy
3. Personalize your outreach
4. Send emails
5. Scale up

Find your leads

This is a key step. Once you figure out exactly who you want to target and where to find them, you'll be printing money. There's a few different ways to go about finding valuable leads. The secret? Keep testing different approaches until you strike gold.

First, dedicate some time every day to find and organise leads. Then, keep an eye on your numbers and bounce rates. If something's not working, switch it up. Stick with what's bringing in results and ditch what's not. It's all about staying flexible and learning as you go.

Apollo.io is a great starting point as an effective lead source. Their tool allows you to specify filters including job titles, location, company size, industry, keywords, technologies, and revenue. Get specific with your searches to find your ideal customers. Once you have some results you can save and export them, you'll get a list of contact information including name, email, company, LinkedIn, ready to be verified and used.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is another good source. You can either do manual searches or use a scraper to automate the process. The scrapers I'd recommend checking out are FindyMail and Evaboot. As with Apollo, it's best to get very specific with your targeting so you know the prospect will be interested in your offer.

BuiltWith is more expensive but ideal if you're targeting competitors. With BuiltWith you can build lists based on what technologies companies are using. For example if you're selling a Shopify app, you'd want to know websites or stores using Shopify, and reach out to them.

The best lead sources will always be those that haven't been contacted a lot in the past. If you are able to find places where your target audience uniquely hangs out, and you can get their company website domains, they have the potential to be scrapped, and you have a way to personalize like "I spotted your comment on XYZ website".

Once you've got your leads, keep them organized. Set up folders for different niches, countries, company sizes, so you can review what works and what doesn't.

One more thing – before you start firing off emails, make sure those addresses are verified. Always use an email verifier to clean up your list and avoid bounces that may affect your sending reputation, and land you in the spam folder. I use Neverbounce for this but there are other tools available.

Write engaging email copy

Writing a good copy that gets replies is difficult, it changes depending on your offer/audience and nobody knows what's going to work. The best approach is to keep testing different targeting and messaging until you find what works. However, there are some key rules to stick to that I've outlined.

For the subject line, keep it short and personalized. Try to write something that sparks interest, and mention the recipients name:

• Thought you’d like this {{first name}}
• {{firstName}} - quick question

For the email body it's best to use a framework of personalization, offer, then call to action.

Personalization is an entire subject in its own right, which I've covered below. In short, a personalized email opener is the best way to grab their attention, and let them know the email is relevant to them and to keep reading.

Take it from Alex Hormozi and his $100M Offers playbook – your offer is very important to get right. Make sure your offer hits the mark for your target audience, and get as specific as possible. For example:

• I built a SaaS shopify app for small ecommerce businesses selling apparel that doubles your revenue in 60-days or your money back.
• We developed a cold email personalization tool for lead generation agencies that saves hundreds of hours, and can 3x your reply rate.

Lastly, the CTA. The goal here isn't to get sign-ups directly from your first email. It's better to ask a brief question about whether the prospect would be interested in learning more. Something very low friction, that warrants a response. Some examples might include:

• Would you be interested in learning more about this?
• Can we connect a bit more on this?
• Mind if I send over a loom I recorded for you?

Never send any links in the first email. You've reached out to this person because you have good reason to believe they'd find real value in your offer, and you want to verify if that's the case. After you get one reply, this is a great positive signal and from there you can send a link, book a call, provide a free resource, whatever makes sense based on their response.

Personalize your outreach

Personalization is one of the most important parts of the process to get right. Your recipient probably receives a multitude of emails every day, how can you make yours stand out, letting them know you've done your research, and that your email is relevant to them?

Personalizing each email ensures you get more positive replies, and avoid spam filters, as your email is unique and hasn't been copied and pasted a million times over.

The goal is to spark the recipient's interest, and let them know that you're contacting them for good reason. You might mention a recent achievement, blog post or product release that led you to reach out to the prospect specifically. For example:

• Your post on "Doing Nothing" gave me a good chuckle. Savvy marketing on Cadbury's part.
• Saw that you've been at Google for just under a year now as a new VP of sales.
• Spotted that you've got over 7 years of experience in the digital marketing space.

Ideally you'll mention something specifically about the prospect or their company that relates to your offer. The downside to personalization is that it's hard to get right, and very time consuming at scale, but totally worth it.

Full disclosure, me and my partner Igor just launched our new startup ColdClicks which uses AI to generate hyper-personalized email openers at scale. We built the tool as we were sending hundreds of emails a day, and personalizing every individual email took hours out of our day. ColdClicks automates this process, saving you time and getting you 2-3x more replies.

Send emails

At this stage you've decided on who you're targeting, you've mined some leads, and written copy. Now it's time to get sending. You can do this manually by copy and pasting each message, but one of the reasons cold email is so powerful is that it's scalable. When you build a process that gets customers, you'll want to send as many emails as you can to your target market.

To get started quickly, you can use a mail-merge gmail tool, the best I've used is Maileteor. With Maileteor you upload your lead data to Google sheets, set-up an email template and Mailmetor will send out emails every day automatically. In your template you can define variables including name, company, and personalization to ensure your email is unique for each recipient.

Alternatively, you may opt for a more comprehensive tool such as Instantly. Instantly includes unlimited email sending and accounts. There's more initial setup involved as you'll need to set-up Google workspace, buy sending domains, and warm up your email accounts, but when you become familiar with the process you can build a powerful lead generation / customer acquisition machine.

Some key points to note, it's very important to warm up any new email accounts you set up. Warmup is the process of gradually establishing a positive reputation with email service providers like Gmail or Yahoo. Make sure to set up DKIM and DMARC on those new email accounts too, to maximise your chances of landing in the inbox.

Scale up

Once you've found a process that works, good things happen, and it becomes a numbers game. As you get replies and start to see new users signing up, you'll want to scale the process and send more emails. It's straightforward to add new sending accounts in a sending tool like Instantly, and you'll want to broaden your targeting when mining to test new markets.

Unfortunately, sending more emails usually comes with a drop in reply rate as you have less time to personalize your messaging for each recipient. This is where ColdClicks shines. The tool allows you to upload thousands of leads and generate perfectly relevant email personalizations for every lead in your list, then export to your favorite sending tool. The examples I listed above in the personalization section were all generated by ColdClicks.

Wrapping it up

Cold email is an amazing way to validate your product and get new customers. The channel gets a bad rap, but there's a huge difference between blind cold emailing and crafting personalized outreach for individuals who will find value in your product. It's perfect for bootstrapped founders due to its affordability and scalability, and it's the driver of growth for many SaaS businesses. Time to get your first 10 customers!

As you start sending, make it a habit to regularly check for new leads. Always experiment with market/messaging, track every campaign so you can learn what's working and iterate, and when you do get positive responses, reply as soon as you can!

If you have any questions, or decide to give cold email a try let me know here! Or tweet me @ https://twitter.com/3Dperils I’d love to hear from you.