Mastering Cold Email Outreach

Who this is for

If your customer lifetime value (LTV) is below $10,000 and you’re selling to consumers instead of businesses, this isn’t for you. With a low LTV it won’t be profitable, and if it’s not B2B you’re going to get into legal trouble. We don’t want that.

If you don’t know your LTV yet, figure it out. The simple equation is your average monthly revenue per client, times the average stay in months, minus the cost of delivering your service. An average is enough. In software your margins will be high, and if you sell to other businesses you’ll probably land well above $10K. Often it’s 10 times higher.

You also need $1,000 to $3,000 per month to invest in getting qualified sales calls. Spend less than that and you won’t get enough volume to split test and find winners. A lot of cold email is trial and error. That’s also why it works so well: you can send thousands of emails every day and test multiple offers, scripts and angles until you find what works for your business. We call this message-market fit. It’s like product-market fit, you just need to find out what people respond to.

If you have all of that in check, here’s what we do to book sales calls predictably for almost any product or service. It’s the same every time.

1. Cold traffic offers

The first thing is making your outreach and your offer cold traffic adjusted. Cold traffic means strangers. They’ve never heard of you, they don’t care about you, what you do or what you charge. This is the first time they’re seeing you, so you need to grab their attention.

I put this first because it’s probably the most important part of everything. The more of the variables below you have, the higher your response and booking rates. Your show-up and close rates go up too, because the offer is positioned better. You’re not changing the product or the problem you solve. You’re positioning it so a stranger actually takes action.

1. A specific claim that solves a specific problem. This one matters most. Nice-to-haves don’t sell well, which is why optimizing things that already exist is hard to sell to cold traffic. Solve a specific problem.

2. Done for you. Not strictly needed, but the easier it is for people to get the solution, the more of them will take it. This ties into what we call logistical intensity: one problem you solve is usually connected to 2 or 3 more, and those connect to even deeper problems. The more of that chain you take care of, the better.

Take us. We do lead generation via cold email. We could just send the emails and leave the replies to you. That solves one problem: you don’t have enough volume to reach your whole market. But then you have the next one. You’re getting all these leads and don’t know how to respond to get them on a call. So we also give you SDRs who handle the responses, call everyone, follow up and nurture them. That removes the huge time and money investment it takes to turn leads into qualified sales calls. A pile of leads is worthless if none of them talk to you. We solve the whole thing until a person shows up to the call, which is as done-for-you as we can make it.

3. Risk reversal. You don’t need it if you have a lot of case studies, but it helps a lot either way. Case studies and guarantees have an inverse relationship: the more results you can show, the less you need a guarantee. It still increases conversion by a lot, and if your product is actually good you rarely have to refund anyone. You can do a full or partial money-back guarantee, pay-on-results or usage-based pricing, depending on what you sell. Free trials work amazingly well for software. Or something like: if we don’t get you X in this time, we’ll implement all of this for you in our platform, or you get all your money back and keep all the data.

4. A new opportunity. Something they don’t already have. Like I said, optimization is hard to sell. It needs to be something new that either makes or saves money.

5. Case studies. Social proof drastically improves response rates. Add detailed, written-out case studies to the same email and your response rate can triple. A few rules:

• Big names beat unknown ones, and that beats everything else. If you say you did branding for Apple, you don’t need any numbers. More people will act on that than on you making some no-name client $50 million in 2 months, because nobody knows them and everyone knows Apple. I get that it’s not always possible.
• Recent proof beats old proof. Something from the last few months beats something from 5 years ago.
• Specific beats broad. Use actual numbers, and big numbers beat small ones.

6. Social presence. This is authority, being visible online so people can tell you’re not some random internet scammer. The hard fact is that nobody knows you. Unless you’re a huge company, chances are nobody has heard of you. You might think you’re well-known in your market, but you’re probably not, because it takes an immense amount of advertising before people start knowing you.

Social presence helps when people look you up. They see the domain or the sender name, which should be yours or the founder’s, and want to know who this is. If that person has a LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube (those three matter most for B2B) with a following and useful content for their market posted regularly, like I do, it helps. There’s a face behind the company, you’re trustworthy, and you’ve been helping people along the way.

This is why huge companies can send AI slop to everyone and still outperform you. Everyone knows them. If Apple messaged you saying they have an opportunity and asked if you want to hop on a 15-minute call, you’d probably take it without even knowing what it is.

The more of these you have, the better. You can get results with only the first one, a specific claim that solves a specific problem. It depends on how saturated your market is, who you’re selling to and how big the problem is. If the problem is huge and relevant, you might not need anything else. Same if your offer is new or your buyers aren’t used to being sold to. Physical products work amazingly well because that market isn’t nearly as tapped as, say, agencies reaching people who get 50 emails every day.

Get this part wrong and the rest doesn’t matter, so get it right.

2. Deliverability

If your perfect email and offer don’t reach anyone, all that effort goes to waste. We currently send around half a million emails per month across our clients, so we have to get deliverability right. This is the checklist that gets us into the primary inbox pretty much every time. Go through it and check off what you already do.

• Buy high-quality domains and inboxes from specialized providers. This is super important. A lot of people who apply to work with us already have a setup or tried cold email before, and they used the domains Instantly or Smartlead hand out. Those aren’t high quality. If you can buy domains for 2 cents, question the quality. Spending 10 times more is what makes sure your emails actually reach people. Saving money there gets you no results long term, so it’s money burnt.
• Use private infrastructure and servers if you can. We use EmailBison. It costs about 6 times more than the average sequencer, but you get a private server. They don’t let just anyone in, so you’re not sharing servers with gambling sites and other senders that hurt your deliverability, which is what happens with the mainstream tools. If you want to send a lot of volume predictably without losing your mind, you need this. It’s why we set it up for all of our clients.
• Verify every email before you send. Use any email verifier and only send to addresses that come back valid, maybe catch-all too. High bounce rates are terrible for your infrastructure. This is probably the most important item on the list.
• Opt out everyone who’s not interested. Don’t send another email asking why. They’ll get pissed off and mark you as spam, which is one of the worst things that can happen to you. Anyone who’s even close to not interested should never get another email unless they opt back in.
• Don’t use currency symbols in your emails. Email providers don’t like them. "Hey, I can save you $100,000 in 2 months" will probably land in spam.
• Send a maximum of 20 emails per Google inbox per day. Outlook inboxes are much more expensive and you don’t need diversification. We tested it and it doesn’t matter. Just buy Google inboxes. You send more for the same money at pretty much the same quality.
• Clone your website with domain masking instead of redirecting. A lot of people redirect their sending domains to their main website, but the providers have caught on and it lands you in spam. Clone the site on the new domain instead. Same branding, same everything, no redirect. People who look you up, and a lot of them do, still see who you are.
• Keep emails short. Don’t send people paragraphs.
• Don’t add links, images, banners, embeds or anything clickable.
• Don’t track opens or clicks. It’s pointless anyway. Tracking installs a pixel that’s easy to detect and screams marketing email.
• Use spintax (spinning syntax). These are variations within the same email, like rotating "hi", "hey" and "hello", while the rest of the script stays the same. You’re not sending the exact same email a million times.
• Use short, simple subject lines. "Quick question" is one of the best we’ve had. It’s boring and not creative, but it works.
• Quickly replace domains and inboxes that stop performing. Keep sending from them and they hurt the server too.
• Keep a pool of warmed-up inboxes at all times. Domains eventually burn, that’s inevitable. With warmed-up inboxes on the side, you swap them in and keep sending with no downtime. We do this for clients all the time.
• Warm up new domains for at least 2 weeks. There are tools for that. Or buy pre-warmed ones, which cost more in the first month.

And the list goes on. There’s a lot to deliverability that you only learn after years of trial and error, and at scale it’s much more complex and takes active effort every single day.

If you don’t want to do any of this yourself, and skip months of trial and error buying and managing tools without knowing what works, you can work with us. We script, send and manage 50,000 to a million+ cold emails per month, and a team of our SDRs manages the replies and books calls for you. All you do is show up to the meetings. It’s done for you end to end, and you pay per held meeting, so if people don’t show up you pay nothing. If that sounds interesting, book a call with me and we’ll see if it makes sense for you.

3. Scripts and personalization

If your offer is adjusted for cold traffic and your deliverability is right, scripts are the last puzzle piece. Here are 4 frameworks we found after sending 20 million emails. This is what I meant by simple and boring. They’re short and to the point, with nothing fancy about them, and that’s why they work.

1. The one sentence email. This is the best performing email we’ve had over the last few years, across every product, service and industry. It’s a pattern interrupt and it goes straight to the point.

"Hey [first name], if we did [specific service] and got you [outcome] with [risk reversal], would that be worth a quick chat?"

The service is the actual mechanism, not the outcome. For us it would be:

"If we send cold emails and get you qualified sales calls, and you only pay us per meeting held, would that be worth a quick chat?"

It holds everything from the cold traffic offer section in as few words as humanly possible. Optionally, add a PS with social proof: "Recently did this for [client] and got them [result]."

2. A relevant pain point right away.

"Hey John, [relevant personalized line]. Are you currently dealing with [pain you solve]? If so, we’ll do [service or product] to get you [outcome] in [timeframe], plus [risk reversal]. Did this for [known company] and got them [result]. Interested?"

By personalization I don’t mean telling people where they went to school or some other bullshit that doesn’t matter. Don’t write "I saw your post and think what you do is truly amazing." Look for something relevant to the problem you solve, like a new funding round or a hire they’re making. That’s personalization that works. Keep it to one short sentence, and if you can’t find anything, leave it out. It doesn’t need to be personalized.

The question is what matters. It’s a longer email, but "are you currently dealing with [pain]?" grabs attention right away, and the CTA stays simple. Ideally, describe the pain in their own words, the way they’d complain about it to a colleague on Monday morning. Then they see that you get them, and it feels familiar right away.

3. Lead with a case study. This works well if you have a really good one.

"Hey [name], recently got [client] [result] by doing [service or product]. Confident we could do the same for you. You’d only pay per result. Want me to send over the case study?"

Swap the risk reversal for whatever fits, like a money-back guarantee if it doesn’t work. You can also test different CTAs: "Want me to send over the case study?", "Worth a chat?", "Want to see the case study?" or "Interested?" They all work, so split test them. If they ask for the case study, they read it, you call them up and book a meeting to show how you’d do the same for them.

Usually in B2B, if your offer or money-back guarantee is strong, you don’t need a lead magnet like a case study and can go straight for the meeting. Try it out.

4. Signal-based.

"Hey [name], saw you guys are hiring a [relevant position]. We’ll do the same job with [main unique selling point] and [risk reversal]. Already doing this for [client 1], [client 2] and [client 3], getting them [outcome] every month. Worth a quick chat?"

This one is based on hiring. You literally say: I saw you’re hiring for this, I’ll do the same thing but better. Then you explain how.

These are simple, and that’s why they work. But keep split testing different frameworks. These are 4 of many that work, and changing a few words can get you a completely different result.

Cold email isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it channel. It takes daily effort, skill and experience to make it work profitably and predictably, which is why most companies end up saying it doesn’t work for them. It does. You just need to get it right.

If you need help with this, we do it every day for clients in software, B2B services, physical products, manufacturing, AI, agencies, consulting and many more. It’s performance based, so you pay per held meeting and nothing for no-shows. We handle the whole thing end to end, from mapping your market and finding the data to sending the cold emails. You get an SDR team without paying the loaded cost of one or two SDRs. On leadarc.io you can see how it works in a quick explainer video, read case studies and FAQs, and book a call.