Why you should treat cold emails like ads

Author

Tom Grainger
April 17, 2024

Cold email is a form of advertising.

Your goal is to convert cold traffic into paying customers.

This might seem controversial but the worst performing cold emails look like emails.

"Hi, I hope you are having a great day, my name is john smith, I wanted to introduce myself as the head of business dev..... blah blah blah"

Congrats… your prospect is asleep, has sent you email to spam and has called the police on you for being boring.

In all seriousness.

If you want a great example of how to structure your cold emails.

Open up instagram right now and start scrolling.

Every ad you see, stop and watch it through.

What do you notice?

In most cases they are structured like this:

  1. Call out their buyer quickly to grab attention

  2. Strike a pain point to keep attention

  3. Present offer and back up with lots of social proof to intrigue the viewer and build trust

  4. Illicit a direct response through a CTA.

This is the same way you should structure your cold emails.

→ Grab attention
→ Maintain attention through pain
→ Showcase your offer and back it up with a relevant example
→ Get a response

You’re not there to introduce yourself, 'build trust’ or ‘deliver value’

You are only after a response.

It’s the same process we used at my company to take a manufacturing company from $0 in pipeline to $1.25m in pipeline in under 2 months.

Tom

P.S. We’ve been secretly deploying a classified tool across for ourselves and clients over the past 6 months.

It’s changed the entire game for us.

No longer playing roulette on google sheets.

Paying VA’s to manually personalise leads.

Praying and hoping we could nail targeting through terrible Apollo & sales nav filters.

Now we quickly build relevant lead lists, score them based on complex qualifications, enrich decision makers fast and personalise emails at scale.

We’ve partnered up to offer my newsletter subs 3000 free credits for new users.

If you’re sending any form of cold email you’d be a fool not to use this tool.