Nobody Replies Emails...

Maybe if you came here a bit more often you'd understand the answer you've been given.

Mark Singletary wasn't angry. He was just pointing out what was wrong with your business model and explaining the problem based on what you'd asked.

I understand if you didn't like the answer you were given, many don't.

Part of the problem with a forum like this is being selective about which 'answers' you like and which ones you don't.

Before I read this I was going to answer along the lines of;

'Clearly the people you're trying to contact are simply not interested. In sales....and in life...it's easier to speak to people who want what you offer, than it is to try persuading them.'

Cold emails offering any kind of 'improvement' stopped working back in the year dot.

You got some really good insight and I would heed it.

We all have a lot to learn and unless you realize that, right now, you are going to fail in this business and whatever you decide to do next.

Claude had a thread a few months ago that said "you never learn from a lost sale that you blame on the customer." Don't blame them, blame yourself and figure out what you did wrong and grow from your experience.

You are targeting people who don't want what you have to offer. If they wanted, valued, or thought they needed a "fashionable" website they wouldn't keep their old website. The market you targeted may be the second worst target market behind businesses that don't have a website and have been around a while.

Yes it's a little counter intuitive but it's the kind of thing you learn in business only if you are humble and willing to learn from your mistakes.

It looks like you are not willing.

Take a gym. If you opened a gym you may think to target people 300 pounds and more who don't belong to a gym. You may think "these people are really fat and need a gym" but your marketing results would be abysmal.

Obese people don't belong to gyms! The only time of year you want to advertise to fat people would be around new years and even then I would be targeting women, new moms, new movers, men who just turned 40, recently divorced, etc.

I would be willing to bet you would do better reaching out to people who already belong to a gym.

What you are doing is the equivalent of advertising your gym to the obese! And you blame them that your results suck! And worse you blame the guy who took his time to show you your error!

Look. I've had plenty, and I mean plenty, of campaigns not work out at all. It sucks.

Get over it by tomorrow and come up with something better. That is what being a man is all about.

These are two examples of a specific offer to make websites more accessible. This is a different offer (I think) than the OP was describing.

When I was offering my local online marketing service, these were two of the components I offered. They were easy to describe, and easy to sell. Nearly everyone already had a website. I learned early on, that offering to replace their website with better looking one, wasn't an offer that was easy to sell.

Very early on, I offered a better looking website, that would get listed better in Google. I got "We already have a website" as an objection...so many times, that we had to address that in the opening. "I supply sales and qualified leads to business owners that already have a website"...was my elevator talk, and my positioning statement.

If the OP's real problem is getting his e-mail opened, it's probably outside our ability to address, unless we knew far more about it.

But...as your post clearly shows, almost any offer can be sold if the reasons given are good enough, and the prospecting is done well. Perhaps the prospect list is just bad, or the approach is wrong.

Hello helisell

My answer seems like blah blah to you? I saw in one of your posts where you said you teach outreach. If you are telling your clients that cold emailing does not work then I would consider you to not know what you are talking about.

Note that I have specified cold emailing to targeted lists, not emailing to untargeted lists. I'll give an example of that so we can be clear. We are a full service Agency so we are targeting business prospects. So for example we may run a search on Lawyers/Attorneys in New York that do not have a video on their home page. Or we are more likely to niche that down to say, Divorce Lawyers/Attorneys in New York that do not have a video on their home page.

So now Re your: "Cold emails don't work well enough to be worth doing." You don't believe that US$30 million plus worth of sales (to US Business's) over a 12 year period, or US$5,325,286 for our last financial year sales to US business's is worth doing??? Come on, I doubt you would have a tiny fraction of those sales in your own business, and those are just our sales from the US market (from clients originally obtained by cold email outreach) not our sales from our main market here in the UK. Overall our sales last year for UK, US, AU and CA would amount to more than US$21 Million, with all US, AU and CA sales originating from cold email outreach.

Re your "I think you may have dodged my actual question so here goes...."

I didn't dodge your question, you just do not seem to understand how to do email marketing. You do NOT just send one email and expect to get good results. I actually told you that we would average around 87% opens from a single campaign, example the Divorce Lawyers/Attorneys in New York without a video on home page. You would certainly not get that result from sending a single email but that is not how email marketing works. You should know that.

Re your: "No problem if you don't want to answer that exact question but please don't tell people that cold email 'works well' because that is simply untrue and will give false hope to others who may invest their future in it."

I think I did answer your question and I will certainly continue to say that cold emailing still works well, our results and figures prove it, but you have to know how to do it.

Note: I am talking about B2B marketing here, like selling our Agency services to other business's. It starts with using software to build a targeted list, for example that may be building a list of business's in a certain business niche (like Lawyers. Roofers, Plumbers etc) that don't have videos, or who don't have GMB listings, or who don't have Mobile Responsive Websites, or who have Flash based websites, or who are running poor PPC campaigns, etc.

You must be mailing/marketing to a targeted list, to business's that you identify as having a specific problem that you can fix. I am not talking about scatter gun marketing here.

If you or others want to learn how to do cold email campaigns that work then read through my posts, many of them will give information on how we do things, usually in a very different way to most others. Some would mention ways we do outreach, including a post above.

Re your: "I know full well that email campaigns work 'well' I've been doing them since 2004."

I don't understand what you mean here, you are now saying you understand that they do work well, while you have been maintaining that they don't???

WE also started 15 years ago, in 2004, (started with Affiliate Marketing and then opened our Agency 3 years later. (My Dad had about 10 years of IM experience prior to that) but I think we are likely to know a fair bit more than you do, and I would say in any aspect of outreach, just going on what you seem to not understand about email marketing to cold lists..

Thought I would just come back and add this. We are subscribed to many lists so might get 100 or more incoming emails a day. (to a different email address than our Agency email) Now most of these are not cold emails to us, we have already subscribed to their lists, but I would say that perhaps 95% Plus would not get a second look from most people if they had received them as cold emails. The reasons: To get an open your email first has to stand out from the crowd, like us, many people including business's get a flood of emails every day.

So how do we make our emails stand out? First the From: is from me, we use my name rather than our Agency name, as I front our Agency. Second we use emoji's in front of and behind the email Subject. Being a Gal I like using red hearts, 3 in front and 3 behind. That really makes our email stand out from the crowd at first glance, a persons eyes go straight to those red hearts, then to our Subject line.

So we have attracted attention to our email, now we have to use our Subject line to get them to click and open it. Now really, most subject lines are boring, boring, boring, and I could add another 97 boring's if I had time. We often tease or use humour, I gave an example a few weeks ago in a thread called Marketing To a Non-Buyer List 6 Months Old. That was an example of how we would use a fairly wacky approach to activating people on that old list.

But I will give you an example of an email we have actually used. The idea came from when we were trying to sell 10 slots in a £10,000 per month service a few years ago (I have posted that story here in WF). Our most experienced sales person was unable to get a single appointment with the CEO's of the companies we were targeting. My Dad handed it to me and though I had never done any sales I used devious female ways to get to see the CEO's and signed over a million pounds worth of contracts in about 6 weeks. So this year we could handle another 10 contracts but I didn't have time to go out and do the selling, so I used a direct mailing campaign to 10 companies which resulted in 7 contracts. The direct mailing was the intro step, inviting a phone call then meeting. I actually sent the CEO's a registered package, hand addressed to them so it wouldn't be opened by PA's or other staff. Then I had a fairly flirty hand written card asking if they would like to go on a Date with me, and inviting them to call me. Then a silver framed portrait of myself plus a glossy brochure on our Agency. When they called I actually invited them on a "Date", took them to a high end London restaurant where we could talk, rather than the first meeting being at their company offices. (and yes, some did want more Dates. lol) Another funny thing that I really loved. Following the "Date", when I finally went to their office's to give my presentation on the service we were offering and to sign contracts, I found that four of them had my framed photo on display. Three of them had my photo on their desks and one in his book shelf. That was the ultimate promotional result. Every time they glanced at my photo, my name and our Agency would burn deeper into their subconscious. That's a bit like why you give out promotional items to your clients, but in this case it was much more personal.

Due to the success of that campaign we are now using a similar cold emailing campaign to get business owners to private webinars that we conduct to showcase our Agency and services. The email Subject line is "Want To Go On A Date With Me?" It features my little red hearts around that subject line. It features my photo and the copy is a little bit flirty, but that shows my personality. Then the "Date" with me is the invitation to meet me on our Webinar. The emails gets very very high opens, and usually flood our webinars each time we hold them. The overall idea is for the emails to stand out and attract attention by being so different to most.

Now I am not saying you could get these same results yourself helisell. Put you in a blonde wig with pink lippy and pink mini suit and you may get the exact opposite reaction, readers may go screaming for the doors, but my point is that if you are boring, or if your emails are boring, you will not get much attention.

Cheers
Lindy

Hello Animal

I'll have to buy you a new barn for backing me up, but us Brits have to stick together.

Sometimes I think that it might be that some Guys just don't like being told by a girl, but it is more likely they just do not know their craft very well.

If we could send out a campaign to a million cold targeted business emails it would mean we would get near 870,000 opens, a little bit better open rate then savidge gets with his 30. He is obviously mailing to untargeted consumer email lists but you would still think he should do a bit better than 30 out of a million emails.

Geez, I could buy Buckingham Palace or at least Windsor Castle just with the profits from a mailing like that. Or maybe I would buy the White House just to show savidge. lol.

Anyway, nice to see you here again, we are nearly Team Brit in here now. lol.

Cheers
Lindy