Our first customer with personalized cold email!

Me and my Co-founder launched our bootstrapped startup ColdClicks last week and within a week we have our first subscriber!

The product

ColdClicks is an AI based cold email personalization tool so naturally it made sense to use the tool to market itself. The way it works is, you upload your leads, the tool researches each lead then uses AI to write the first line of your email.

This makes each email you send hyper-personalized, and relevant to the recipient, which significantly improves your reply rates. It also saves so much time compared to doing it manually.

We've been bullish on the idea of cold email being an incredible growth channel for bootstrapped startups for a while - it's very low cost yet highly scalable, so we decided to put our idea to the test!

How we did it

First we identified our target market. There's a lot of ways we could've gone with this, but we started with lead generation agencies as these are the guys sending the most email, and an increasing reply rate will directly increase their bottom line.

We built a small, lead list targeting small lead gen agency owners based in the US. The contents of the email were very brief:

Hey {{firstName}},

{{personalization}}

Reaching out because I noticed you're doing a lot of lead generation.

We've built an AI tool that generates highly-personalized emails at scale to improve your reply rate.

Would you be open to learning a bit more about this?

Of course, we used ColdClicks to personalize each lead based on their company website! Overall we got over a 21% reply rate, 6 trial sign-ups, and 1 paid conversion.

Wrapping it up

As the internet is pushing against spray & pray models of outreach, with more platforms putting restrictions on high volume campaigns, it's important to make each email count. Personalized openers help significantly with this, they're the best way to grab the prospect's attention, and let them know the email is relevant to them and to keep reading.

We've now set the goal to acquire 1 new customer every week for the next few weeks. Will keep you posted with the results!

If you have any questions, or decide to give cold email a try yourself let me know! I’d love to hear from you.