Converting cold email into sales

It really depends on the list and the message. If you send a message about facial hair products to a list consisting of women not interested in facial hair products, you probably won't get much of a result.

Too many people get distracted by the big number instead of asking how the list was built, how active it is and who the target market of the list is.

If you want conversions and sales, ask these questions first.

I would do my research on Google and read up on the horror stories and the massive fines that come with it

Then consider your options

Jason

I've been doing cold email B2C for 17+ years promoting PPL offers. I've generated more commissions (net profits) than anyone would ever believe. However, it's just not as simple as buying data and sending it.

I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.

Some of the verticals (niches) I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

The bulk of the PPL offers that I promote pay $20-$40 per lead, but I also promote offers that pay more and less. You don't want to get too caught up on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same or possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.

I have also done just as good with dating website sign-ups and pretty good with free trial + S/H offers. I also promote a very limited number of offers that straight sales. For them, mass appeal is still the number one thing I look for and I also look for one of the following...

1) The product is new and/or novel-unique and you can't purchase it locally or even something similar. I don't waste my time with it once something similar shows up in Walmart.

2) The buyer can truly get what is being offered at a decent discount.

3) Solves a house is on fire type problem.

However, I mainly promote non-PPL offers on the backend.

Bottom line, it's far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.

As far as data goes...

There's fresh / targeted 3rd party data, which is data that the users have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record for each user and it's 100% can-spam compliant.

You can get aged 3rd party data but it is more involved and requires special tools to do successfully.

There is also rev-share data, which is basically 3rd party data (typically fresh / targeted) that you get for $0 upfront costs and you split the revenue generated from sending it with the data provider. Those that provide rev-share are typically just aggregating the data and aren't marketers and provide it to those that know how to monetize. One thing to think about is that rev-share data wouldn't exist if monetizing data didn't work.

You can also generate real-time, co-reg leads, which is basically 1st party opt-in. You place an ad on the co-reg network and it is displayed by their publishers and users request more info if they are interested. You pay on a per lead basis for the leads generated.

Last but not least, once you have experience you can find companies that have opt-in / buyer lists that do little with them or nothing at all via email marketing...mainly they call all the users and or don't know anything about promoting affiliate / CPA offers to fully monetize their data. This requires more work because you have to find the companies, where the other options above are easy to get access to. This is what would be considered 2nd party data, as you manage the companies data and monetize it for a percentage of the net profits generated.

They all have their pluses and minuses.

Outside of managing data, when you start out it's all about building opens / clicker data. Once you do this it is much easier / quicker to scale and build huge lists.

When mailing, you want to skim off the top any fast-track conversions and then for long-term success, you want to always be collecting your opens / clickers, segmenting and removing unresponsive users...converting the leads from quantity to quality and into responsive lists. Which you can then also cross-promote other offers on the back-end.

So basically I promote PPL offers because they provide the path of least resistance to generating conversions/$$$ and converting the data into cash producing assets.

There's more to it than it sounds, but done right it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that's a huge range, much comes down to one's ability to scale and effectively build / manage the infrastructure needed to scale.

Hope that helps.

I have bought leads in the past and tried the bulk emailing before. It doesn't really work. I mean this is email spamming 101. I would not recommend wasting any money or time doing this.

Just from my experiences in the past.

Like it or not, there's both an art and science to writing cold emails that convert into sales. You want to land a high-value client but knowing who is your target is a must. People who convert cold email into sales use many counter-intuitive tactics and value-driven outreach strategies, you know.
Here are some essentials.

1. Identify the right clients.
2. Find your decision-maker.
3. Get their email address.
4. Formulate your outreach strategy & send your email.

What you typically do when sending an email to a prospective client is investing a little time to deliver value first before asking for anything in return.

It's best to just follow what works. Point black find a starving niche, offer solution, automate, then replicate. Don't do cold email marketing. At the end of the day it will be more work (and more money loss) than you ever wanted to happen.

Hi Simone,

The core issue with this strategy; you connect with so few human beings highly interested in your offering. Shot in the dark approach, dinosaur of an internet marketing method.

Imagine selling donuts outside of a Weight Watchers convention. Even the odd attendee who craves donuts won't buy out of shame or embarrassment, with other folks watching. Such a rare occurrence, selling a donut to someone who wants nothing to do with eating donuts.

Like any approach; a way exists, but it makes sense to target human beings by growing lists organically. More intelligent, effective and enjoyable for virtually all bloggers.

Ryan

There's a big difference between cold emails and spam.

If you follow anayb's ideas and target who you are emailing and at least trying to get a message match, cold emails can be a good way to start the process. Or, as Diablo says, getting people to request more information by filling out a form. Which still requires some targeting.

Spam, on the other hand - even legal spam - sends your offers to people whose only attribute is having an email address at some point in their lives. I think the OP's conversion estimate is probably wildly optimistic. It might have worked back when those Arizona lawyers sent their green card spam, but back then people weren't getting 150 emails a day, and spam filters were still on the horizon.

The only people consistently making money are the email services sending this load of crap. And they only make money because there is a seemingly endless supply os suckers who rely on the sucker math the OP is asking about.


Legitimate point if you are cleaning your lists to be mailing to American emails. CAN-SPAM doesn't apply outside the USA. Many countries (like the UK) have much more stringent requirements.

So your point is good, but I would reword to "the potential for fines oly exists if you're not compliant with the laws of the country you are sending email into."

SEOclerks?

That would be a pile of shit list for sure.

This isn't the best place to ask. Most everyone here does mainstream marketing and will tell you it doesn't work because that is what they have been told and they then preach it as if it is the truth. Or they tried it and didn't know what they were doing and failed and condemned it as not viable.

By no means am I saying that it is for everyone because for many they will simply be better off building their own opt-in list.

B2B is much easier because targeting potential businesses is far simpler than targeting an individual for B2C. While I don't do a lot of B2B, when I do, I never send a pitch in the message. I always start out by asking a question (which I'm fairly sure I already know the answer to) and try and build engagement / get them to message me back.

B2C is a completely different animal and it all comes down to the data and knowing how to do things correctly. You can get fresh / targeted data, aged data, domain targeted, opens and clickers, buyers / partials, etc, etc... Most that do this, it's a business model rather than a traffic / advertising strategy. In that, the data comes first and then based on the data you mail what is relevant for it / using the best strategy for it.

Most B2C data includes the source URL for each record and you want to track everything at the source level. Data that you get could have many sources in it, so by tracking it you know which are the sources to drop and those to keep getting data for.

When you buy data, just buy a sample to test / don't spend a lot of money. This way you will know what it's really worth to you and how quickly it is likely to take to get to break-even. With that info, you can try and negotiate the price if it doesn't meet your standards or move on.

If you're getting rev-share data or doing list management then there aren't any upfront costs. Just does it work for you with the backend split you have?

Additionally, for the most part, I almost always promote PPL on the frontend and any straight sales or trials on the backend of the opens/clickers. It does depend on the data, but PPL is just much easier to get conversions because they only need to fill out a form instead of making a purchase.

I could go on and on, but the point is that in the long-run it does work if you know what you are doing.

Just my thought, YES cold email will give you a certain percentage on closes/sales but you can always see options of incorporating the same with other channels and touchpoints to reach and target your market in all avenues.

It's depends what's the offer, the email funnel, etc. For a "raw" email list, we cannot say about conversion rate, we should consider the bounce rate and open rate.

Ive been setting up cold email campaigns for clients and success comes down to having a good product that priced over 1k, a good website and relevant email copy. Certain industries work much better than others in B2B such as web dev, software, design, social media, e commerce and SAAS.
We recently generated 4 qualified appointments for an agency selling facebook ads in less than 3 week and havnt started the follow up campaign yet, 2 months ago we set up a licensing deal for a healthcare app which they werent expecting so were super happy. We have also had our fair share of fails and generally know what campaign will be hard from day 1.. Big data, SEO, cheap SAAS products and startups with a sub standard website and unpolished sales collateral dont work out great.
Also getting great results sending out Linkedin campaigns and super cheap to run.

As Diablo mentioned the fun stuff happens on the back end such as spam, deliverability, finding a good ISP etc and is getting harder to figure out but the process definately works for certain markets and products

It is probably best to avoid spam campaigns, but those who know what they are doing probably make some pretty good money. Otherwise, they wouldn't keep doing spam campaigns.

Sending outbound or cold email is an effective lead generation tactic.

The reason it's called outbound is because this method requires that you actively reach out to non-subscribing people directly through email. The slow process of organic list building will push new leads into the funnel, but not at the rate you'd hope.

By sending emails to cold contacts on a targeted industry-specific list, you have an opportunity to reach new leads that have not yet heard of your business. Those that choose to respond to your message can either opt-in to your marketing automation for nurturing or move directly to sales.

The fastest and most convenient way to acquire a cold contact list is to purchase one from a reputable data provider. This way, you can be sure that the list is of high quality and is targeted towards your specific industry.

I haven't tried buying lists. My logic is the people on the list.. they don't know me. Why should they listen to me or look at my offer? They will be very very cold leads.. very unlikely to convert.

However, we have to ask ourselves what sort of emails are we receiving? Will they be useful for us and for our niche?