My agency generates a combined £100m in sales pipeline for 200+ companies every single month. We’ve also used this technique to acquire over 500 new clients at our agency in the past 12 months.

Today I'm going to share with you exactly how we do it.

I’ll show you under the hood, and share the tactics that other agency owners don’t want you to know.

Why listen to me?

My agency (Linked Hacker) has generated more appointments using cold email than any other agency in the world.

We’ve generated billions of dollars of sales pipeline for 2,000+ companies across 62 industries in 20+ countries.

Every month we send over 1 million first-touch emails with an average open rate of 62% (5x industry average).

We have A/B tested tens of thousands of email copies for almost every type of business imaginable.

Every month I talk to the founders of some of the world’s biggest cold email agencies and cold email software providers to learn what’s working and what’s not.

No one knows more about cold email than us, and today, for the first time ever, I’m going to share it with you.

The Process

There are four keys to making a cold email campaign successful:

1. An irresistible hook/offer
2. Hyper-targeted list building
3. Super clean data
4. Great copywriting

Irresistible Hook/Offers

Without this, the world’s best cold email specialists won’t be able to get you good results.

When I started Linked Hacker, I’d email people and tell them that I’d ‘discovered an amazing growth hack’ and if they could spare 10 minutes, I’d share it with them. 3% of people we emailed booked a call.

Some companies are able to offer a free trial or a free sample, others offer a free audit or report, and some offer a free gift voucher in return for 20 minutes of the prospect’s time.

One of our best-performing campaigns was for one of the world’s most well-known executive training companies. They targeted heads of L&D and offered a free no no-obligation training day for the prospect’s exec team. In their first week, they closed Vodofone on a £200k deal.

Most businesses think there is no irresistible hook for their business, but that’s rarely the case. You just have to get creative.

Hyper-Targeted List Building

The key to long-term results is deliverability. Even with the best hook, targeting and email copy, you won’t get good results with a 20% open rate.

Deliverability is largely determined by engagement and spam rates.

To get good engagement and low spam complaint rates, your list needs to be hyper-targeted.

There are many tools out there for finding the right people. For the majority of clients, we use Sales Navigator on LinkedIn to find the right people. Break your list down into ICPs so that you can target one specific set of prospects/companies at a time and tailor the email copies to them.

For trickier target markets, we use Ocean.io. Their lookalike tool allows you to put in the website of a few of your ideal clients, and it’ll give you a list of every company that is similar. You can use their other filters to hone in on your ideal clients. Once you have a list of companies, you can export the list and import it into Sales Navigator. You can then use the job title filter to find the ideal prospects at those companies. Warning, a full Ocean license starts at €20,000 per year.

Once we have a list of prospects to target on Sales Navigator, we use our own in-house software to guess and then verify their email address with 98% accuracy. We don’t sell this software, but you can use a combination of PhantomBuster (to collect the list), DropContact (to find the emails), AnyMailFinder (to find emails of the prospects that DropContact couldn’t find), Bouncer (to verify some of the emails) and Scrubby (to verify the catch-all emails) to achieve a similar result.

Super Clean Data

The reason we don’t use other well known tools, is because they are often only 90% accurate, meaning 10% of your emails will bounce. Maintaining a hard bounce rate of less than 5% is key to deliverability. We average 2%.

As well as using best-in-class email finding and verification tools, we clean our data thoroughly in a Google Sheet. When you scrape data from LinkedIn and other websites, you’ll often find that the prospects names have special characters and the company names will often include thing like LLC or Ltd. To be able to use these data points in your email copy, you’ll need to edit the data in a Google Sheet prior to uploading it to your chosen email-sending software.

We cleaned 50,000 rows of data manually and then trained an Open AI model to learn how to do it for us. We then created a Google Apps Script so that we can run the model in a Google Sheet. You will need to manually go through this data, or have a VA do it.

Great Copywriting

Once you have a killer offer and a clean list of prospects, the last step is to write an engaging email copy.

The key to a good copy is getting the reader to read the next line and the next line after that until they’ve read the whole email and you’ve had a chance to get your irresistible offer across.

Here’s an example of a copy that got a 10% reply rate and 20% CTR across thousands of emails:

Note that the copy has a lot of spintax. You should add as much spintax to your copies as possible to increase the number of variations that are sent. This particular copy has 36 different variations (plus unique first names and company names).

Software & Settings

To send our campaigns, we use Quickmail.io. For the average user, there isn’t much difference between Quickmail and the likes of Instantly, Woodpecker, Smartlead and all the other copycats, but we find Quickmail the best for our needs. The email software you use won’t make a huge difference to your campaign.

You also need to make sure that your domain has SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured (you can pay a guy $10 on Fiverr to do this) and that your email address has been warmed up for at least a week. You can use an auto-warmer such as Mailflow, but it also helps to send some manual emails to your own accounts (and then reply to them and click on the links).

When you start sending, start with 10 emails per day per email account, then double each day until you get to 200 per day. Never send more than 200 emails per day from one email account. You can have multiple emails on each domain. You can redirect responses from the new email account to your main email address to make your life easier.

For new domains and emails, we recommend buying them through Office 365. Google has very similar deliverability but has been suspending a lot of domains recently, making life hard. The best ESP to use changes constantly, so if you’re reading this in six months from now, drop me a line and ask me which one is best right now.

Summary

Cold email is still one of the best-performing B2B marketing channels out there. Our average demo rate across our client base today is 0.5%, meaning for every 1,000 emails we send, 5 prospects book a call. Given the low costs, it’s still by far the cheapest B2B lead gen channel out there for 99% of businesses.

Cold email is a grey area, and the ESPs are constantly trying to make it difficult for people to do it at scale. Because of this, what works and what doesn’t changes every few months. But don’t worry, next time there is a big change or we discover something that’s working well, I’ll let you know in my monthly email :-)

Sneak Peak

12 months ago we started using LinkedIn Ads to generate demos for our sales team. Since then, we’ve generated 1,872 calls/demos for our sales team at an average cost of $76.87 per call. We closed 449 (24%) of those into paying clients, at a cost of $320 per client.

We’ve since produced similar results for tens of other companies in lots of different industries.

So many companies are sleeping on LinkedIn Ads, which is making it a gold mine for the rest of us.

In next month’s email, I’ll share with you exactly how we run our ads and the secrets to getting the cost per call so low.

Thanks for reading.

If you have any questions or feedback, simply reply to this email. I read every reply.

I look forward to seeing you again next month.

Lee