This Cold Email Strategy is Boring, But It Made $999,750 (Steal This)

The cold email strategy I'm about to show you is very boring, but I used it to generate $999,750 in closed annual reoccurring revenue for a 200 person marketing agency named Directive Consulting. And it booked more than 700 meetings just for Directive in roughly 6 months. But here's what's crazy about that is that it worked so well that their entire leadership team when they spun out a sister agency that's specializing in LinkedIn ads called Abe, they asked us to build the exact same system for that business, too.

Across both our emails closed just under $1. 6 million in annual reoccurring revenue. The reason that I wanted to make this video is that there's nothing complicated in it.

We wrote one email, sent it once to everybody in the total adjustable market, and just repeated that every 30 to 60 days for them. So, I'm going to walk you through exactly how we did it, how we turned it into a sevenf figureure money printer, and how we tied all of it back to closed deals instead of just positive replies. All right, so who are Directive and who are Abe?

Directive is a 200 person performance marketing agency and they work with some of the largest B2B companies and SAS companies in the entire world. to name a few. They work with Gong, Amazon, Zoom Info, Samsung, Adobe, Calendarly, Uber Freight, and so on and so on.

They already run SEO, paid search, and paid social for a lot of their clients. They measure their marketing channels for a living. They're very good at measuring it, and they are very picky when they bring on a new marketing partner like ourselves to do cold email for them when they're already pros at marketing in these other channels.

Just that baseline changed what we had to deliver before we would even get started with them. Most cold email vendors are just going to report positive replies in a spreadsheet. Directives was never going to accept that because none of those numbers tell you if the channel made money.

So cold email had to create pipeline and close deals at the same time that they were running ads for themselves. We had to be able to prove our worth when stacked up directly against them. And so from day one, we set up closed deal attribution and we would link it all back to individual campaigns.

And they had crazy analytics on their back end. they have to be for what they do. That means that when a deal closed, we could point at the exact campaign that produced it.

And it was so good that we permanently installed that entire system for everybody else to use it with Outfound io. And so now anybody can do the same type of attribution. So they can actually know where do the results come from for their clients when they're running campaigns.

or anybody who's just running a sales team. They could install something like Outfound at their company and be able to immediately know all of their sales reps, which campaigns, which variants, which copy are actually driving revenue for them directly down to the individual campaign that was set. This matters because it changes what you need to optimize for.

If you're grading on positive replies, you'll drift towards copy that gets people to say yes, but may never actually get them to buy. If you're grading on closed revenue, you'll move toward the segment and offer that actually produces buyers. Even when that gets you fewer replies, a lot of the time, that is the difference between a profitable cold email campaign and one that just looks good and has a really high reply rate and makes you feel good at night instead of actually paying for your bills at night.

Beyond that, there's a second reason attribution mattered. So much for Directive specifically. Their total addressable market is under a million people.

About 700,000 people, which is not small, but it's small for our standards. We've worked with clients where their total addressable market is 132 million people. But the other thing about directive is that they're very premium.

So, one deal is extremely extremely valuable to them. And when a deal is that valuable, you can't just judge a campaign on volume metrics because the campaign that produces four replies might be the one producing the capital. People assume a strategy like this only works if you have millions of people to email.

That's not necessarily true. You either need a big market or you need big deals. And in Direct's case, they had both.

And so through this whole thing, we owned the entire channel for them. We took care of the ideal customer targeting, the prospect data, the strategy, the copy, the sending infrastructure, the deliverability, handling replies, routing it to their sales team, all the way through attributing the closed deals back to the campaigns that produce them. Now, of course, did we work with our clients and co-create a lot of those things and really pair it up to their systems?

Of course, we did. But our responsibility is that we take care of all of those things for our clients. And so their team didn't touch any of it.

They primarily just took the calls and replied back to our leads. So like I said, we mapped out Directives entire market and sent each person just one email. That decision is where we go against what almost everyone else does in this space.

The standard play in cold email is to build a small list of targeting companies. Maybe they show some intent and then hammer them with a four or fivepart follow-up sequence in a single week. for anybody who doesn't know us, when they hop on a sales call, that's what they expect until we totally just blow their world with a way better system for actually producing revenue for them.

And so, the way that we look at it is that one contact, they get one email, and then we leave them alone until the next cycle. We don't hit them with four follow-ups asking if they saw the first one or asking for their thoughts. And here's why we don't follow up.

And I want to keep this really simple. If someone doesn't want what you're selling today, sending them the same thing three more times this week isn't going to change their mind. They either have a problem you solve or they don't.

And most people that are sending four or five part emails in a single week or even a single month for that matter, they're just spamming their market. And what happens is cold email might be good for them this month and they might have a great month, but then they'll notice, huh, next month it's not as good. And a year from now it's just completely dead.

And it's because they tried to squeeze everything out of it immediately instead of actually working the channel, doing longterm, and thinking about the long-term implications of the entire channel. And the other thing is that timing is really important for this. 2 months from now, they might have hired a new VP, lost a vendor, or finally gotten budget approved.

So, what we actually want is to reach that person again when their situation has changed, not four more times while it's exactly the same. See, follow-ups burn that person today when you go in cycles of 30 to 60 days. You save that email for the day that it actually might work for them.

There's also a math problem, too. An intent list is usually a few thousand companies at most. You send five emails to each of them and you've burned through your entire audience in just like a week.

Now you've got nowhere left to go. You still don't know if your message resonated or if it was even the right audience in the first place. And everything you learn there because it was super niched makes it so that you can't learn anything when you go to someone else that is super niche.

And mapping your whole market just means that this never happened. You always have more people to test on. And because the volume is so much bigger, you can actually pull insights from it while at the same time not annoying the hell out of your future customer.

This is why I say we treat every email like an ad. Think about it how a paid ad works. You put it in front of your market.

Some people act on it and everyone else scrolls right past. You don't chase down the people who scrolled past and show them the same ad four more times that week. You show it to the market again later.

And so one email every 30 to 60 days is the exact same thing. It's just landing in an inbox instead of in a feed. It means nobody in your market ever gets worn out on you.

Now, you might think to yourself, that's not exactly how ads and cold emails work. And I would agree with you a little bit. But here's a thing that you need to understand about the different mediums.

On an ad, you can show the same person the same ad maybe in the same day or throughout the same week and you're trying to get this thought into their mind. But the thing about an ad is that people action an ad when they see it. There's not really a way to like save an ad and like I'm going to come back to it later.

I don't know a single person who does that with ads where with email it's very different. Most people treat email like a to-do list. And so they have an email come in and they go, you know what, this isn't crap.

I'm not going to archive it right now or I'm going to add it to a folder that's like a later folder or whatever and I'm going to get to it later. And then when they actually do have the free time or the thing comes up, they're able to find that email. They go, cool, this is the one that I want to get back to and they will get back to an email 4 weeks later.

The same mindsets that you learned when you run ads can be applied to cold email. But of course, you need to understand certain differences about the medium in which we're talking to your future clients with. You take all of that back and so what we did with directive is if their total adjustable market was about 700,000 people, we were sending about 350,000 emails every single month.

So, we could email everybody every 30 to 60 days. And if they had different initiatives come up, of course, we could go more towards the 30-day mark, but every 60 days was more than enough to allow their team to be able to do their thing. Another thing that we will do with our clients is we will get them a list of everybody who clicked on our emails cuz we're the only B2B company, let alone B2B cold email agency in the entire world, that can track opens, clicks, and we can insert links inside of our emails due to a proprietary enterprise vendor we have for infrastructure called Halo.

And so what that means is that every single click, we'll stream it over to our clients and they can run ads against that. And the crazy part is that one of our clients who spends like six digits a month on ads did that exact tactic and they decreased their cost per lead by 50%. It's just insane.

Every 30 to 60 days, every single person who could buy from them heard from them once. No one got missed. And once we found the message that worked, generally speaking, at scale, we could put it in front of the entire market and have the highest conversions, the most bang for our buck on the whole market instead of just finding one email that works good for like a 100red people.

That's the whole strategy. And that's why I call it kind of boring. There's not a trigger to catch, no timing hack, no special AI personalization that we do, no signal we're supposed to spot.

It's just a clear offer sent once to everybody who could buy on a repeated cycle. It's also why we were able to move so fast for them. We started on strategy, offers, copy, the total adjustable market research on day one, and campaigns were live for them just a week later.

Before I get into what this looked like at scale, very specifically for them, if you want us to build this for your company, click the first link in the description below and book an intro call with us. We'll map your total adjustable market and show you exactly how we'd reach 100% of it every 30 to 60 days. With the market mapped, the next question is what you actually put in the email.

You see, Garrett, the founder, he had a strong opinion about it. He wanted the coolest AI stuff possible. He wanted us to pull in each prospect's LinkedIn ads, match our offer to their ad copy and the whole nine.

On paper, it seemed like a really good idea. And my perspective whenever a client comes to ideas with us is let's test them and let's see what wins. And those are the kind of campaigns that are really fun and they get us excited to be able to launch them.

And what's really crazy about that is all this fancy stuff, it actually ended up becoming our worst performing campaign of the entire engagement. And the variant that beat it was the one with basically nothing in it. What I usually like to do with every client is I like to have a version of the cat copy that is always live that just states the core value proposition with no decoration or flashy stuff on top of that.

Some sort of here's what we do. If you want it, here's the link for you. And that's the one that kept winning against the fancy super AIE enriched copy that we wrote.

And the fancy version didn't lose because AI is bad at writing. When you reference someone's LinkedIn ads, you're proving you did research on them, but no one's really grading you on effort. They're deciding in about two seconds if they want the thing that you're selling or not.

And to be candid, everybody's inbox right now is full of AI personalized BS. And everybody knows it's just a bunch of people trying to polish a turd, but at the end of the day, it's still a turd. So, you need to have a good offer that is actually gold, not turds.

And people spend so much time right now trying to do all this fancy stuff with cold email. And it's like, no, man. At the end of the day, is your offer any good?

That is the only thing that's going to dictate if cold email is going to print or not print cash for you. Every sentence you spend proving you research them is a sentence you're not actually spending on your offer, which is what actually matters. That's why you should always keep a boring control underneath any of your clever ideas.

As if we had only tested the sophisticated angles for directive, we would have concluded that their market just didn't respond to cold email at all. And the control is what told us that if you strip everything away and just focus on the core value proposition, then the email prints. So, what exactly was that email copy that worked for them?

I'm going to have a little bit of it masked up because there is a couple secret tactics that they were using that they have asked us to not share. And it certainly makes sense. Every time I seem to share a specific tactic, all of a sudden it is the only cold email that's going out across the entire industry.

And so, I'm going to fog it just a little bit, but the main point doesn't change too much. The reason that it worked for them is because of this special tactic necessarily. It's because, in my opinion, they had really good social proof and they had a really cracked sales team.

So their best version of the copy was something like, "Hey Joe, if you take a call with us, we're going to give you X. " But more important than that, we run ads for companies like Amazon, Oracle, Gong, and what we would do is we looked at all the companies that they did work with, and we would create a matrix and we would pick out which company to use that was most similar to them. And so that way we could always bring up relevant companies, but we would always also try to include like an Amazon or another big name whenever we could.

And then it was as simple as if you would like to book a call in order to get the bonus above, then just reply yes and we will send over our calendar link. And it was that simple. The second a yes came through.

Their team was super super fast. In fact, they were so good at it that on our website, we actually built a thing with them. If you go to our website and you go to the very bottom of the page and then you click on the positive reply playbook here, then you'll actually see this little thing.

We actually made this with Directive Consulting cuz they were so good at booking about 80% of our positive replies directly into calls. And so that's something that can really help you out if you're trying to duplicate what worked so well for them. Additionally, while you're on this page, you can actually see kind of a written version of the entire timeline.

Everything that we've done with Directive here and kind of just the written version of what I'm talking to you about now. The quick version is that once we landed on the plain just direct offer, here's the best way to say it. Here's the right social proof.

Um, things really took off. You see, in the first month, we produced about 54 positive replies and they booked about 28 of those into calls. But you can also see in about the second month, we got a bunch of learnings implemented for them and so on.

And there was a 4-day period where we got them 71 positive replies once again in only 4 days. It was great. And they have a longer sales cycle.

And so 6 weeks after launch, Directive closed their first deal worth over 60 grand, which paid for our retainer for the following 12 months. And so everything from here was just pure profit and growth. And at that point, it would have been really easy to just put more volume into campaigns and call the strategy finished.

But that's not how we operate. We're always trying to figure out how can we optimize further. You see, a winning campaign tells you that something worked, but it doesn't tell you if a campaign segment, a different offer, or different angle could work three times better.

The only way you find out is to keep running things against each other after you've already won. So, we just kept treating the campaigns like ads. Hundreds and hundreds of campaigns for directive across our entire engagement.

We tested segments against each other instead of just assuming we knew which one would buy. We changed how the offer was presented, not just the wording around it. We ran multiple angles and different types of bonuses so maybe they'd get a certain thing instead of a different thing.

And we would also try different values of the bonuses as well. And we always ran multiple copy angles instead of just trying to write one perfect email. And then once something worked really, really well, then of course we would put volume behind it and scale it up to their total addressable market, which is what I call our 702010 rule.

About 70% of all of our volume will be on what works. 20% of our volume will be on better versions of what is working. And then 10% of our volume is on completely different crazy ideas.

So that way we can always be trying the cutting edge stuff. And additionally, some offers and some copy will of course fatigue. And so that 10% usually saves us cuz we'll get really good signals for just crazy ideas that are actually going to do better than the 70%.

And if you were to just go 100% to just make money right now and you therefore stop testing when everything's working good, you have no replacement ready for when the current winner is going to die. Additionally, for whatever reason, this is pure speculation, but our deals also started becoming more valuable for them as time went on. This probably because they were running ads.

So they had already not saturated. I don't really believe in saturation, but like they have already cast a very wide net and have everything established. And so in cold email, we're going to be talking to people that don't even go on social media, but they clear their work emails every single day.

And so their head of sales, Devon Range, he even said, "Our ACV, when we started this thing, we were selling everybody a 60K startup package and now that thing is six figure deals. " And that wouldn't just come from sending more to the first winning campaign. Comes from finding out which segments were buying the bigger deals and then moving volume towards them.

What's pretty funny is that in a few months into this testing, the volume of leads actually became a problem. At one point, we had 71 positive replies come in in just like over four days. And Directive used to get half that number an entire month from us.

And their sales team could only handle about 16 calls a day at that point in time. And on a single Wednesday, we had booked 14 of their slots. Devon even sent a screenshot of the calendar to their CFO, and her response in Slack was, "What in the world?

" And she probably said something a little bit more candid than that, to be fair. At around the same time, we also got this from Devon. SAS team, do not stop what you're doing.

As of this note, we have 16 active leads, seven calls scheduled, six were waiting on a response to schedule, and one has gone on to scope of work. And in our best month with them, we scheduled 215 calls, and 176 of them were actually held. And this only worked as well as it did because Directive was ready for it.

They already had a sales team converting 80% of our positive replies into calls. They were willing to incentivize meetings in their CTA, which most companies won't do. They had a proven offer and a proven sales process before we ever showed up.

They didn't show up to us, go, "Hey, do cold email. " And when they couldn't close our leads, blame us. They knew exactly what it looked like to scale a company.

They'd been here before. And if you're missing any of those things, more volume just means more leads that you aren't going to be able to convert and just increases the probability that you're going to burn this channel. And that's the part that nobody really warns you about with outbound is that if you hire somebody that is just trying to get results out now or they don't really know what they're doing.

They don't really know how to properly scale up a go to market engine specifically in cold email. They can really like hurt your business long term. And then I see a lot of people well they'll be like hey I've gone through like five cold email agencies.

And I'm like great that's five different people that have probably burnt your TAM because you didn't do it properly. So, a lot of times the selection that you make with a cold email partner can have cascading effects on the road and if you pick bad, it could genuinely hurt you. And that's, you know, that's a part nobody really warns you about with outbound, but it's something you need to be cognizant of here cuz you can be so bad that your your company name becomes a spam word.

But on the other end of the coin, the channel will happily produce more demand than your company can absorb. So, you also need to be ready for it. All right.

So, where did all of that land after 6 months of tracked revenue with them? That was $999,750 in closed annual reoccurring revenue for them. That was from over 700 booked meetings.

And our cold emails accounted for 7. 87% of Directives entire company pipeline. Remember, these are the guys who are the best in the world at running ads for some of the largest companies in the world.

They run ads for themselves. They have other channels for themselves. And cold email in only 6 months got up to about 8% of their entire pipeline.

It sat right next to SEO, paid search, paid channels, channels they had been running for years, and it returned roughly 33 times what our retainer was, which at the time our seed tier was only 5K a month. Since then, our prices have gone up and our prices continue to go up as we, you know, we can only bring on so many clients at a particular point in time. But honestly, the clearest proof it worked well is what they did next.

You see, Directive and Abe, another B2B company, their sister company, Abe, they shared one leadership team. Garrett was the founder and CEO of both. Lissa moved over from Directive to Abe as their managing director.

And so when Abe spun out, they came to us and built the exact same system for them. Abe didn't have the same setup as Directive, which made it a decent test of whether the strategy would work in other cases. And Abe already had a mature LinkedIn engine.

So our job was to prove cold email could sit next to it as a separate source of pipeline. We scaled that across their full total account list. sent about 1.

17 million emails to about 607,000 unique prospects for them. And our best campaign would convert one lead for every 134 emails that we would send for them, which is the second best that we have ever seen. For Abe, that produced about $597,000 in closed annual reoccurring revenue, roughly 20 times their retainer, and their first deal from us was worth over 150 grand in annual contract value.

So across both agencies, that's over 1,596,750 in closed annual reoccurring revenue and over $1,300 meetings booked from the same boring strategy that we did for them for only 6 months. So if you want cold email treated as a channel you can measure and close revenue instead of a pile of replies nobody's going to be able to follow up on, book an intro call with us. The first link is in the description.

We'll map your total adjustable market so you know exactly how many people could buy what you sell. Then we'll set up a multi-dommain infrastructure and handle deliverability on a oneofone Halo enterprise infrastructure that literally no one else in the entire world has access to. Everyone else will be just sending plain text emails.

We'll be able to track opens, clicks, and insert links inside of your emails. One of our other clients that we just launched on that. We sent 90,000 emails for them.

We have zero positive replies and we have 45 booked meetings for them cuz they just click a link and their sales team doesn't even actually have to hunt the leads anymore. Anyways, once we set up that infrastructure, we test fast to find the message and the segment that will actually convert. Once we find it, we scale to 100% of your total addressable market and we keep reaching out to them every 30 60 days.

So, click that first link below and book your call. It's the exact same strategy that we use for directive. And if you want the full breakdown of how we've built a cold email machine for a SAS company, completely different PLG motion, free signups, no meetings for Fixer AI that was generated over $4.

3 million in annual pipeline revenue for them, then watch this video next.