How I Landed a $25k/mo Client with Cold Email

I LOVE emails. (And I'm sure ShoeMoney does too, otherwise he wouldn't be building this kick ass PAR program.) Never in the history of mankind has it been SOOOOO easy to connect with anyone on the planet. I remember, when I used to flip houses in Philadelphia during the real estate BOOM times, I would send out 500-700 letters to home owners asking if they wanted to sell their dilapidated houses in West Philadelphia

Sidenote #1: In case you're wondering how bad West Philly was ... Will Smith left it and never came back to it. Remember the theme song from Fresh Prince?) Sidenote #2: I DARE you not to play this fill in the blank game

In west Philadelphia born and _____
On the playground was where I spent most of my days
Chillin' out maxin' relaxin' all cool
And all shootin some b-ball outside of the school
When a couple of guys who were _________
Started making trouble in my _______
I got in one little fight and my mom got scared
She said 'You're movin' with your auntie and uncle in _____'

(Now that song is stuck in your head, huh? Muahahaha) ANYWAY... sorry, I digress. It would cost anywhere between $.90 to $1.20 for ALL costs associated with it: ink, paper, stamp, envelope, and of course, labor. Response rate? Anywhere between 0 to 2%. For a list of 500, that's 10 responses. i.e.. $50 CPL at BEST. (I didn't know any of this direct response marketing stuff back then). Of course, I'd have to "qualify" them.. and I would be lucky to get 1 do-able deal out of that. Now, if I have a targeted list, I can send emails for FREE and get back response in hours, sometimes, minutes. Of course, I'm talking about large scale, mass email. With advent of social media (particularly LinkedIn -> here's mine, feel free to add me), I can pretty much target ANYONE who has an email address. So how on earth did I get this client that pays me $25k/mo? Here's the story I normally send out probably anywhere between 20 to 50 cold emails a day. Not spam. Emails to people who I want to build a relationship with. (That's how I built relationship with Jeremy and hence, me writing here). Of course, my response rate isn't super high.. it's probably better than most cold emailers (as I've done cold emailing for a while), but still nothing compared to emailing someone you have existing relationship with or your email list. One time, I wanted to see if this one big emailer would do JV stuff for my upcoming product. Of course, I was just a blip in his radar. He had a 100k+ list, and he was getting requests ALL day every day. But I didn't give up. I emailed him every other DAY asking him if he's open to working with me. I tried sending him everything... a free sample of my product, a free t-shirt, offer to mow his lawn (ok that was stupid because he lived in a condo), offer to do his laundry... I mean, EVERYTHING. Here's TWO things I added that got his attention

I sent him a link to my LinkedIn.. and for some odd reason, he looked at it
I said, "if you're too busy, would you feel comfortable introducing me to someone else who might be interested?"

It turns out his brother is a recruiter in NYC that specializes in ad tech vertical. This emailer guy forwards my email to his brother.. then he forwards my profile to his client. And that's when I got a call from the owner of a company that specializes in brokering information product to very large advertisers throughout.. the GLOBE. Strangely enough, he saw my blog post about some interesting re-targeting applications, and I guess it intrigued him because he randomly emailed me about how I did this and that. To make the story short, he wanted me to take over some of his ad spend, as well as some of the lead generation campaigns he was running. Voila! Here''s what I learned:

1) Fill out your business social profiles

Yes, as much as I love privacy, I love getting inbound business opportunity leads. Tell the world what you did, what you know, who you know, and of course, what you can do for them. Why? Because people GOOGLE your name. And most likely, these social profiles WILL show up on the SERPs. Remember copywriting stuff you do on landing pages? Well, make sure to apply copywriting principals to your profiles and not just fill things out randomly.

2) Don't Try to Sell Over Email

People get this wrong a LOT still to this day - they STILL try to sell over email. If you are cold emailing people, don't ask them to do you a favor. You haven't built trust yet: why on earth is anyone going to give you anything when you haven't presented any value? Instead, go for the relationship. Go for the phone / skype call. Go for an in-person meeting. I know you have good intentions , but guess what? You're competing for his/her attention with every other person/company/spammer in his inbox.

3) Ask for Referrals

Marketing (and sales) is a numbers games. Not everyone you communicate with is going to BUY your stuff. So you should focus ONLY on people who are interested, right? Wrong. The "dead" leads can be made profitable by ASKING for referrals. Who do they know that might be interested? Ask and you shall receive.

4) Stand out from the crowd by Giving Stuff Away

I've written this over and over again. If you want someone's trust, give away something FIRST before you ask for something. Luckily for you and me, it's not cash. Sure cash can work, but i've noticed people usually have their guard up when you offer straight up cash. Giving stuff away is the GREATEST and surest way to build rapport with anyone. In fact, I want to give you THIS in form of a giveaway contest. You should enter... like right NOW