A step by step guide to send hyper personalised cold email to generate B2B leads at scale without simply sending copy and paste messages
Thousands of B2B companies use cold email to generate their leads.
The problem is very few dedicate the time required to personalise each individual email.
This normally results in emails getting flagged, low deliverability rates, annoyed prospects, restrictions to your ESP and most importantly a LACK OF LEADS!
Prospects can smell a sales pitch from a mile away and they don’t take kindly to a message that’s been copied and pasted to hundreds of other recipients.
But what if you could send personalised emails at scale?
Emails that engage with your ideal customer demonstrate a key understanding of their pain points and position your company as the solution to one of their biggest problems – without having to manually research prospects yourself?
This post which (brace yourself, could be a big one) is going to show you how to generate a TONNE of leads using hyper personalised email at scale.
If this seems overwhelming or you really don’t have the time to implement what we’re about to show you, simply click here to find out how many leads we could generate for your business on a pay per lead basis.
So you’re going to need the following 6 ingredients to build a winning campaign:
1. A niche
2. A burner email
3. Email warmer
4. Prospecting data
5. A VA for personalisation
6. And finally, automation software
Let’s dive right in…
Step 1, your niche!
If you already have a niche then congrats, please continue to step 2.
If you don’t then keep reading!
We do not proclaim to be internet marketing gurus but we have come across a few over the years.
One thing that remains consistent with every ‘guru’ is that you need to select a niche!
And when it comes to cold email they’re right!
You might say to me
‘But we work with so many different industries’
And my response would be…
‘That’s great but to get people interested in your services using cold email we need to select a niche’
Let’s imagine I’m a niche-less web design agency and I send you a cold email saying:
‘Hey,
We’re a website designer in your area and I think we could help to improve your website!
Would you like a free estimate?’
The likelihood of you responding positively is almost zero!
But…
If you owned a plumbing business and I reached out saying;
Hi John, I found you on Google maps but couldn’t find your website?
Over the years we’ve helped numerous plumbing companies generate up to 10 new jobs every month with an affordable website.
After checking out the local competition in Cambridge I think there’s a great opportunity to get __YourPlumbingCompany____ on the first page of Google for people searching for a new boiler in __your__city___.
Can you take on extra jobs at the moment?
Let me know if you’d like to see some examples of our work.
Josh
The chances of you now responding to my email have increased 10 fold!
Why?
Because I’ve adapted my value proposition to make it relevant to your business.
You have to select a niche with cold email!
But don’t worry you don’t have to be permanently attached to the niche…
You can move into other industries where you have other successful case studies and run these at the same time if you want!
Selecting a niche is one of the easiest ways to start seeing results with cold email but if you want to take things to a whole new level you have to add personalisation. (More on that later).
Step 2 – Get a burner email!
Next step is to acquire a burner domain.
Never run your cold email campaigns from a primary website domain!
Why?
Because if Google thinks you're spamming people they will penalise your website (you don’t want that).
The safest and most sensible way to run a cold email campaign is by purchasing a burner domain.
What’s a burner domain?
So our main website is roocru.co.uk. We do not send cold email campaigns using this domain i.e. joshua@roocru.co.uk, hello@roocru.co.uk.
Instead, we purchase a domain that is similar like roocruemail.com and then create email addresses on this domain i.e. joshua@roocruemail.com
This will ensure that the primary domain hosting our website is protected.
We also suggest using G Suite when creating your business email, it’s so much easier to setup and integrates nicely with the software we are going suggest for automation.
Obviously you can ignore everything I’ve said here and just choose to use your existing work email – but I’m pretty confident you’re going to regret doing that!
Step 3 – Warm up your burner email
What the hell does warming up my burner email mean?
Well we’ve purchased a new domain and created a new email account. We can’t just start sending thousands of emails from this new address from day 1. Google, Outlook etc. are smart! They will realise what you’re up to faster than you can say ‘why are my emails going to my prospects spam folder’.
You need to behave like a real person!
How do you do that? By warming up your new email!
You can do this the manual way (not advised and extremely tiresome) by sending emails back and forth to your new account.
Or you can hire someone on UpWork who will do this for you. Just head over to UpWork and type in ‘email warm-up services’ and you’ll find someone willing to take this task off your hands for about $100 (it’s worth it).
Step 4 – Find your email data!
The next step is finding the email data for your campaign.
If you already have the data you want to use then feel free to skip ahead to the next step.
If you don’t have any data then let’s find you some!
There are 2 different methods we use to find our clients data. One is relatively straight forward; the other is a pain in the ass.
Let’s start with the easier one shall we?
1. The easy way - LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Snov.io
LinkedIn is probably the biggest data source for finding decision makers in B2B companies.
The problem is how do you find a list of the correct companies for your services and how do you find the relevant decision maker?
Well, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium tool available for all users (there is a 30 day free trial if you’ve never used it before then it’s about $70 per month) and it enables members to create an audience based on parameters including industry, company size, job title, employee count etc. etc.
I’m not going to go in-depth with Sales Navigator – there are plenty of YouTube videos that demonstrate its capabilities.
So how do you get the emails from LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
This is where Snov.io comes in. It integrates with LinkedIn and is capable of finding the work emails for any LinkedIn Sales Navigator searches.
Snov.io costs about $250 per month but that includes 50,000 credits and it’s also the software we use for the automation – more on that later.
Again, I’m not going to cover an entire tutorial on how to set this up. This info is already available on YouTube.
2. The hard way to find data
This is the pain in the ass way but it’s also the most effective way to find data that might be in-market for your services.
For example one of our clients only wanted to target companies selling outdoor products. They also needed to have a minimum of 6 blog posts on their website.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is not capable of creating a look-up with this type of criteria. The audience needs to be manually sourced (told you it’s a pain in the ass).
Thankfully this task can be outsourced to a VA.
If you have a list of criteria that needs to be met in order to build a relevant audience then the easiest and most cost effective method we’ve used is UpWork.
If you simply search for ‘data entry freelancers’ you will find plenty of capable VA’s that will build a list with your specific requirements. (They should be able to source most data parameters e.g. email, first name, monthly web visitors, their tech stack, etc.).
Step 5: Here’s how you personalise at scale
Ok at this point you should have a spread sheet containing the prospects you want to target.
So how are you going to send each of these prospects a highly personalised message?
First you create a messaging template to build the customisation around.
Let’s use the same website designer template for plumbers that we used earlier.
Hi First Name,
I found you on ___Enter_Personalisation_1__ but couldn’t find your website?
Over the years we’ve helped numerous plumbing companies generate up to 10 new jobs every month with an affordable website.
After checking out the local competition in __Enter_Personalisation_2_ I think there’s a great opportunity to get __Enter Personalisation__3__ on the first page of Google for people searching for ____Enter_Personalisation_4_.
Can you take on extra jobs at the moment?
Let me know if you’d like to see some examples of our work.
Tim
So how do we enter the personalisation fields?
We are going to hire another VA to create additional columns on your audience spread sheet and they are going to input the personalisation in the appropriate row.
Just like this example here:
Once the spread sheets completed they’re going to send back the document and you are going to upload it inside the automation software and match the custom field with the relevant column and row.
Where do you get the VA to implement such a task?
Again, we use UpWork (I know, starting to sound like an advert for UpWork, if they had an affiliate program I’d be making decent commissions right now!)
You can use the search term ‘data entry’ to find relevant VA’s.
Normally the cost per record is around $0.25 but it will depend on how much personalisation you require.
Expect the completed spread sheet to take up to 20 working days for 1,000 records.
Step 6: Automating software
It hasn’t been easy folks but now it’s time launch this baby!
You now have a spread sheet that is filled with your ideal prospects, in a niche you have selected and you’ve completed personalisation for each individual record.
Now you just need to hook it up with Snov.io
Again Snov.io is our preferred software but feel free to shop around.
Inside the campaign builder you’re going to have the option to upload a CSV file.
Once uploaded you simply need to;
- Match the custom fields you want to use for the campaign
- Create a new campaign
- Insert your template and match the personalisation with the relevant custom field
I am not going to fully explain how to do this as there are numerous articles on the Snov.io website (they’re also pretty active on YouTube for those who prefer video).
Now you’re ready to go live!
Warning: We don’t suggest sending more than 50 emails per day to begin with.
After a week, review the open rates and decide whether to increase the volume. If your open rates are above 40% you’re on the right track!
And that’s basically how you scale cold email without spamming your target market (or as much as I could fit into the longest blog post in the world).
Now just wait for those leads to come in.
If you like the idea behind this strategy but you don’t have the time to set this up then we do offer a managed service for clients.
We will do everything mentioned above for you… And GUARANTEE results.
To find out how many leads and appointments we could generate for your business simply complete the 60 second calculator below.
Thanks for staying till the end.
It’s been emotional!
Want to find out how many leads we could generate for your business on a cost per lead basis using this strategy? Simply use the calculator below to get an instant estimate!
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