Include a price in cold emails?

Please take time to consider the following before you do this.

1. Why should they do business with you?

You mention that you don't speak their language. So your customer service level would naturally suffer. You also may be and likely are in a different time zone. Both of these mean that Customer Service is not the reason to choose your company.

You mention price so will you be the cheapest solution? If so is that enough of a reason for them to choose you over other low priced providers who can offer better Customer Service since they speak the language? How would you explain that to someone.

You have to have a very compelling reason to do business with you. Even if you speak the language and live in the same city with 24/7 customer service and the lowest price people may choose provider B because they do "________". In your situation you will be at a disadvantage over native speaking service providers so you have to craft an amazing offer.

2. Is spending 30+ mins per email the best solution?

Email has a low conversion rate when it is cold. It is the reason we get so much spam. They have to send out mass numbers to make it worth their time.

So if you need to spend that amount of time personalizing it to close deals does it make sense to use email? Should you mail a letter instead? Or should you create one great letter with some mail merge personalization and simply send it out in mass.

I do not believe that spending 30 mins on each will increase your conversions enough to justify the time. Email simply converts too low. No matter how personalized it is if they never read it does it make a difference?

3. Is this plan the best use of your time?

You mention you have extra time after business hours. And it is great you want to use that time in pursuit of business. Though depending on how much you work I would tell you to enjoy the money you are currently earning and focus more on making more money per hour not working more hours.

But is this the best use of those hours. if you are going to work more those hours should be earning more than your normal hours. Even hourly people get overtime afterall.

So if you truly want to use those hours why not pick something that will have the maximum impact on your business. And if you didn't figure it out from my first two points I'm pretty sure going after international business using translated emails (or even letters) isn't the way.

4. Why do you want to go international?

On here I even ask people why they want to go national. Have you saturated your local market? Have you saturated your national market? Of course not because if either of those were true you could high native language sales professionals to enter this new market.

So why go after people that will be harder to close when you are sitting on a gold mine locally? I think too often people want to think big when they need to think small and deep. You have mines locally that you haven't even fully tapped. You need to go deeper and extract all that local gold first. Then you can use that local gold to go after international markets properly.

You must remember that when skill is equal (aka great salesperson, marketer, and copywriter) that the following is true.

"In Person" will convert better than "On The Phone" which will convert better than "Direct Mail" which will convert better than "Email".

Of course you can email or direct mail a lot more people after so depending on the offer it may be smarter to use those even with lower conversions.

When you are local you can pick and choose from all 4. Even nationally you can pick from 3. And internationally you can pick from 3 if you target nations that speak the same language as you. But in your case you would be limited to 2 and maybe even 1 depending on the cost of international mail.

Why limit yourself in that way?

Like Aaron, I would not spend so much time on each email. Send something short and catchy out, and put your effort into those who respond.

I would not put price in a blind email like that. You don't know anything about their situation, their problems...and they can take your price & service and shop it around. Budget is important, and you do want to qualify fairly early on, but price is something that should arrive very near the end of the sales process.

If sending emails, my experience is that it is in fact better to spend time sending less emails that are personalized.

In testing, I've found that sending 500-1000 emails with nothing personalized will bring less return than sending 100 emails that are personalized.

But it does take more time, and if you are afforded the ability, you would outsource this and it would be a regular business expense.

I too would opt for the more generic email being sent out in larger quantities as opposed to the far smaller amount being personalised. Just purely from the point of view of scaling, as long as you're generic email is well put together, you will get more than enough leads from it as you increase the amount that you send.