Every wondered how to get an email address for people a company if you don’t already know them?
Now you’ve ventured into the delicate art of “colding,” or cold emailing. That’s when you reach out to someone personally even though they don’t know you.
It’s a delicate art because it requires doing something slightly offputting practice of sending someone an email with whom you haven’t previously corresponded.
Think you’ve got the best cold pitch? You probably don’t. Some tips:
- Study basic cold pitches. A lot of them
- Try them out on people you know first
- Don’t oversell or overstate your proposition upfront
- Don’t over-assume or presume their need upfront
- Be a real person
- Identify them informally
- Identify yourself up-front informally (Hi ___, my name is ____)
Is it spam? Well, direct email (person-to-person— and I mean a real, actual email that you composed and sent not) is a long tradition of marketing and it can indeed work.
Remember, when cold-emailing you aren’t sending marketing email, you are sending personal email.
And don’t mean just an email that sounds “personalized.” Don’t use a template and stick the person’s first name in like “Dear [FIRST NAME]”
Trust me, although you might think you’ve redefined a ‘personal email’ but nobody’s fooled— a generic template will be seen as exactly what it is and will go to the trash box very quickly.
The best way to do cold calling and cold email are to always follow this mantra: If you want the person reading the email to spend 2 minutes reading it, you should spend 2 minutes (or more) writing a unique, personal email for them. Not just an email the “looks” or “feels” personal— you really need to research them, understand their needs, and make a short pitch about how you can help them (ideally, how you can solve their immediate problem or help transform them).
Today’s tool is Hunter.io. Knowing the domain name of the company you are targeting, you can get nearly anybody’s contact info for that company.
Let’s take adobe.com as an example.
Boom! Work emails, names, job titles, and phone numbers for over 2000 employees at Adobe.
You gotta watch out becaues a lot of the data can be junk, might be old or stale, or has records for generic emails like hr@ or press@ the company you are researching.
Pretty much, what you see is what you get. You can do 50 searches per month for free. (Keep in mind if you search twice for the same domain that counts twice for your limit.) After that you can sign up for a Hunter account to let you keep going.
Be careful when cold emailing — sometimes people don’t like it. But for every one of those people just mark them “removed” and keep going. Remember, everybody falls into 5 categories:
1 – people who will never be your customer
2 – people who are unlikely to be your customers
3 – people who are on the fence
4 – people who are likely to be your customer
5 – people who are already or will definately become your customer
In cold emailing and marketing research, your task is to identify your 3s— that is, the people who are on the fence. Your #4 and #5s are important too, of course, but those are the people who are already on your list, already see your social media posts, etc. The #1s and #2s won’t ever be receptive to your message, and you should forget about them. Every minute you spend worried about a “no” is a minute you could be spending on someone who is a “maybe.” Go after your mabies.