Ever feel like your cold emails get about as much attention as a middle child at a family reunion? We've all been there pounding the digital pavement, firing off 50, 100, even 200 daily cold emails. And what do you get for all of your blood, sweat and tears?
Crickets. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that is about to change. Over the past few years, I've gone full blown mad scientist on this problem, sending literally hundreds of thousands of cold emails testing thousands of different toq variations in order to figure out that unique hook that would work every single time.
And after an unbelievable amount of trial and error, about two years ago, I did it. I found the perfect unique hook that anybody could use in a cold email in order to see success. And not only has this unique hook I'm about to tell you right now generated are companies scaling with systems millions of dollars.
But it has worked for over 1000 of our clients, all the way from Fortune 500 CEOs, sharks from Shark Tank down to the run of the mill every day service based business. So in order for me to properly explain to you the results of this experiment, I first have to give you a little bit of background information so that that way you can make sure that you know the foundations of how to use this for your business and not just the copy and paste from what I'm going to tell you. You see, ironically enough, before we even focus on the messaging, what your cold email says and what that specific unique hoax going to be, that's going to get replies.
We actually have to take a step back and focus on an area that I ignored for years. In my early days of cold email and cold messaging. I did what all the gurus online told me to do.
I just went online, downloaded a list of hundreds of thousands of businesses with no kind of qualification or filters and started cold emailing them. And then when inevitably the campaign didn't work out, I would always think that it was a messaging problem, like, Oh, I needed to change this subject line, this intro hook, or this call to action. I needed to add a link, not have a link.
And I was so focused on that small part there that I didn't notice the blaring problem right in front of my eyes. You see, before you can even worry about whether your messaging is working or not, you have to make sure that the right people are reading the message because if you have the best messaging in the world but you have the wrong people reading that message, it doesn't matter. It's not going to work out.
And once I made this realization, I actually stopped doing what everybody else was saying. And I spent the majority of my time not on messaging, but actually on the scraping part of it, the audience generation, part of the lead generation process, instead of just copy and pasting the same list that everybody else was using, I would spend three, five, ten, 15 hours a week just isolating who is my perfect ideal avatar, who, if they saw this message, would have the highest chance of not only responding but getting on a call with me and close it. And once I turn my attention to getting the most qualified people possible to send these emails to my email campaigns took off and so did my business.
And I actually ended up creating this graphic here that I now share with our clients called the outbound funnel. And as you can see on the left hand side, the first thing that you need to identify is the audience, but not just real estate agents, for example, or not just doctors or not just coaches and consultants, but getting hyper specific with not only who they are, but what their characteristics are, where they hang out, and where you can find the most qualified list of those people. Only then does it make sense to focus on the messaging, and I've said this in a few other of my YouTube videos, but I still don't think that it sinks in because I still get messages on a daily basis of people saying their cold email isn't working.
And my first question is always to ask them, Well, who are you sending a cold email to? And eight times out of ten, they're just sending it to this random list of people without any consideration of if these are the right people. So before we talk about the actual messaging and the Hulk here, you need to make sure that we're spending some time on the audience.
So an example that I love to give would be if you're going after real estate agents will instead of just scraping on D7 lead finder, every real estate agent in the United States, which has over 2 million real estate agents and by the way, 60% of them make less than $40,000 a year. So the majority of these people probably can't afford your services anyway. We start thinking, okay, probably the best real estate agents that I'm going to be able to work with are the ones that are already seeing success, not the ones that are just starting out and not the ones that are struggling for the past few years, but the ones that are already closing a few deals every single month.
And also I want to make sure that they know how to manage cold leads, right? If I'm going to be sending them cold leads as an example in this experiment, if my business is, for example, an advertising agency and I'm going to be sending these real estate agents cold leads in order to make sure that they're closing these cold leads, it would be helpful if they came in already knowing how to close cold lead. So the second thing I want to do is not only make sure that they're having deal flow coming in, they're already closing sales, but they're closing cold sales because that's a very big difference.
But that's not all. If you've been in business long enough, you know that most money is made not after the first sale, but after the second, third, fourth. It's safe.
So what if every single sale you brought your real estate agent also generated them another sale from a referral? Well, then we need to make sure that our real estate agents have good bedside manner. Meaning they know how to communicate with people.
They're respectful to their clients, They answer their questions, they pick up the phone whenever their clients call. And I know that a lot of these things seem simple, but you have to remember what I talked about earlier. 60% plus of real estate agents make less than $40,000 a year.
So just by that very definition, the majority of agents are not following this framework. They're not closing up sales. They're definitely not closing sales from cold leads.
And they don't know how to properly handle a client in order to get more referrals from them and thus make more money. So what we want to do is instead of sending the email blast out to the 2 million plus real estate agents, we want to find an area where we can get a little bit more specific and try to find these three characteristics. A great example of a free tool you could use would be something like Zillow, because Zillow has a tool called an agent finder and you could literally say, I'm looking for real estate agents in Atlanta, Georgia, and then you could filter by the real estate agents that have highest number of reviews, meaning that they're closing a lot of deals because people are leaving them, reviews that have the highest score on reviews.
So, you know, they have a good bedside table manner. And you can even identify on that website the Zillow premier agents. And what that means is that those agents are actually literally already spending money with Zillow to show up at the top of those search results in order to get more leads.
So that means that they are experienced in closing cold sales. And just like that, we took an audience of over 2 million people with the vast majority being unqualified, and we narrowed it down to probably a few hundred thousand, but with all of them, with the right intention and the ability to be able to pay you money. So now that we have the audience down, we can start talking about the messaging and that unique hook that I learned after sending thousands of cold emails.
And this right here, ladies and gentlemen, is our 10 million plus cold email template. Now, I'm going to cover the unique Hulk here in a moment. But first, I want to show you the foundations of creating a cold email.
So that way we make sure the stuff around the hook is still powerful enough to elicit a response from your prospects. So as you can see here, you have a subject line. So that's obviously the first thing we do identify an inside of a subject line.
You want to make sure whatever your subject line, your use, it's interesting enough to open. So don't make it salesy and don't make it bland. You want to make it so that it's curiosity driven, meaning that I'm not going to say something like Buy from us.
You always have to remember that the first 1 to 14 words roughly, are going to show up inside of the text preview before that person's opens that email once again, in order to have the highest chance of this messaging converting, ironically enough, we need to focus mostly on the stages before them reading the messaging, like them being in the right audience and them actually opening the email from the subject line. So my first line of text is not necessarily my hook, but it's something that plays along with my subject line. So if I said something about a question about company, then my first line of text would be like, Hey Bob, I came across companies name in my Facebook ads newsfeed and I want to reach out.
So that is in unison. It is congruent with the subject line and thus there a much higher chance of opening it and continuing to read the rest of the message. Now we can talk about the unique cook.
So what is this unique cook that has been battle tested by literally thousands of different businesses and hundreds of thousands of different emails? Well, believe it or not, it's your transformational statement. This is the short 5 to 15 word sentence that lets that person know exactly who you are, who you help, why they should listen to you, why they should work with you, and any kind of risk reversals that you have that would entice them to stop what they're doing.
Respond back to that email and maybe get on a call to speak with you. And there's this whole school of thought out there that tells people to, you know, you know, start with a few opening lines. Tell them about yourself, tell them about your family, tell them a little bit about your business and you're wasting all this precious time and energy of this other person.
And that's going to lead to a very low conversion rate. And instead, if you can condense all of that kind of, you know, warm rapport building process into that first line of tax, you have a much higher chance of getting that person to respond. Because remember, we know that they're qualified based on our audience section of this video and the unique hook that we've seen work ten times out of ten is this I help X get Y without Z or your money back set in a different way.
I help real estate agents get more deals without having to cold call or your money back or I help real estate agents get 3 to 5 new deals a month without having a cold call, run open houses or rely on referrals or their money back. And this statement is so simple, so short that you may think that it doesn't work. But I can promise you from data testing thousands of cold emails that this does work and it works almost every single time.
And the reason why it works is because it condenses your entire business into one simple sentence that a third grader could. Understand. And the majority of the time when we're trying to improve our response rates and our lead generation efforts, we're focusing just on this one unique look right here.
We're trying different statements, we're trying different claims, we're trying different risk reversals in order to get the highest response rate. We've learned based on our observations, that by focusing your efforts on optimizing this one line of text, you have a five times higher likelihood of actually increasing your response rate than focusing on anything else inside this messaging here. Now, we're not done yet because even though we've just gone through the most important part of this message, we need to put some supporting assets inside of this message in order to convince this person to take the time out of the day to book the call and speak with us.
So the next line of texture typically be a risk reversal. And that was kind of like what we said a moment ago with all your money back or we'll continue to work with you, etc. , etc.
, etc. . Most people don't do this.
And so what we want to do is take another line of text and make that more crystal clear. So if we say, I help real estate agents get three more closings a month without having to do cold calling or holding open houses or their money back, my next line of checks might say something like, You read that right. If we don't get you three closed deals in the next 30 days, we give you all of your money back.
Then you want to go into some social proof. So the first thing that's going to go through somebody's head is their B. S.
meter, right? They're going to think, Oh, this person's lying. I get emails like this every single day, and this is where you can start to separate yourself from your competition.
Here is where you list your specific client win. So I would say something like like Sarah, who was able to close 15 deals in her first 60 days of working with us, and like Bob, who was able to generate over $100,000 in commissions within 45 days of working with us, etc. , etc.
, etc. . Now, I heard this from somebody that I was on a webinar with the other day when we listed out all of our social proof.
They said, Hey, I don't think this will work for me because I don't have as much social proof as you guys do. And the truth is we do have a lot of social proof. We literally have thousands of client wins in case studies and testimonials, but we didn't start with all of that.
And so you don't have to either, even if you just have one really solid case out of your testimonial, you can just go deep on that one case. I love your testimonial in this part here, and if you don't have any of them, then don't worry so much about cold email and instead focusing on just getting results for your clients because that's going to have the biggest impact on your entire business. Next, you want to make your call to action.
So here is where we're actually saying, okay, now that you understand who we are, what we do, and using the social proof around it, let's get on a call, right? So you might put your calendar link there or you might just ask them to respond back and let you know if you're interested or not. Then you want to put additional assets and resources.
So if you have like a video sales letter or if you have maybe some case studies on a website or if you have a YouTube channel, you can put that in there as well. And that's going to kind of support some of the claims that we made above this. And then another call to action, which is pretty much just duplicating the call to action above it, and you'll put your signature below that.
Now, I can't stress this enough. Make sure you're following the right order of operations when it comes to your outbound messaging. So the first thing we need to focus on is the audience.
If that's not right, everything else is not going to work or it's going to barely work. Okay? So make sure you're getting the most qualified list of people that you can possibly find by using softwares like Lincoln Sales Navigator, Phantom Buster, or even manually scraping off websites.
I promise you, whatever time or money you invest in, that is going to be worth it. Then once we get the audience down, we can focus on the messaging. And the first part of focusing on the messaging is the subject line and that personalized introduction and tax preview.
So make sure that it's curiosity driven and it's going to entice them to open the email and it's congruent between the subject line and that first line of text. So you can have high email open rates. And then what we want to do is have the puncher, the banger, the unique hook, the thing that is the money maker, and that is that transformational statement.
Spend a lot of time sitting here thinking of what this is and don't just do what everybody else does, because then you're going to sound like everybody else, right? What makes you unique versus everybody else that's sending emails to this person at the same time? And then finally, make sure you put your supporting assets inside of you or your case studies, your testimonials, your YouTube page, your website, anything else that lets them know that you're not just this fly by night person that crafted up this email, watching some crazy guy on YouTube yell at you through a camera, let me know down below if you have any questions about this cold email process.
