We’re just gonna come out and say it – opinions are divided among sales experts. Shocking, we know. But especially shocking is the divide among how email can be leveraged to grow a business.
While some sales leaders are adamant that sending cold emails is a dead practice – I mean, look at your inbox now and tell us it isn’t full of pitches…
There’s a growing consensus that sending cold emails is a practice that is actually more important than it has been in a long time – hello restrictions on retargeting campaigns…
The key, the proponents of cold emails say, is getting the message delivered to your target audience.
On this episode of Evolved Sales LIVE, host Jonathan Fischer sits down with Chrisley Ceme, expert in helping businesses deliver their services more efficiently and effectively (especially through email), to discuss the latest challenges with cold email and how to overcome them to increase ROI.
Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn for more engaging sales insights and discussions! Happy watching!
Meet Chrisley:
For the last decade or so, Chrisley Ceme has made himself an expert on helping businesses gain customers and deliver services more effectively, especially using email as the Director of Strategy and business development for tech startup senders. Chrisley is currently the Head of Business Growth at Senders.
Check out the transcription of this webinar episode below!
Jonathan Fischer 0:04
Welcome back. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jonathan Fisher. With recent restrictions on retargeting and increased marketing competition. Overall, business development leaders are finding that email based outreach is suddenly more important than it's been in a long time. But it has to be done right? Getting your messages delivered, opened. And creating ROI requires just the right tactics and strategies. And today's guest is here to help with just that. For the last decade or so, Chrisley has made himself an expert on helping businesses gain customers and deliver services more effectively, especially using email as the Director of Strategy and business development for tech startup senders. He's got his hand on the pulse of what works and what doesn't, when it comes to email based outreach. So this is gonna be a great conversation. Chris Lee, welcome to the show. Fantastic to have you.
Chrisley Ceme 0:53
Yes, thank you. Appreciate it, Jon. And thank you for having me as well.
Jonathan Fischer 0:56
Right on? Well, we've got a great topic. I know a lot of our listeners are very excited to learn more about email is one of those things that even divides opinions, I think, among folks trying to work and gain customers. But before we jump into some of that stuff, would you share a little bit with the listener? How did you come by all the insights you're gonna be sharing today?
Chrisley Ceme 1:14
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I mean, came back through it really just starting on my journey out of college, like most people, you know, spent too many years partying, and many years, I guess, studying, if you will, but came out of school, I said, alright, what can I do, got into sales, really started with door to door sales and kind of grew into Texas Tech sales and started as an SDR from there, the company that I was working for, at the time, they weren't really established in cold email themselves. So we were really all experimenting together. And I found out very quickly, that if you send a lot of emails at random, your domain can get burned. And we went through that trauma for that that company. And then from there as well, I started to pick up these skill sets, and continue those on my journey throughout sales.
Jonathan Fischer 2:05
Well, yeah, sometimes the best lessons are the ones gained through some pain, that's for sure. Sure. Well, great. Well, we're excited to jump in because it is such a useful topic right now with, as I mentioned at the intro, so many changes. In the online marketplace, we're gonna jump in in just a moment. But first, a little reminder to our live audience as live, this is your opportunity to participate. So go and start posting your questions. Whenever they occur to you in the chat, we're going to bank those for the very end. And at the bottom of the half hour, we'll have some live q&a with our online expert right here together. So Chris Lee, jumping right in then. So what are I always like to ask what are the leading mistakes that are currently being made by marketers when it comes to their email outreach?
Chrisley Ceme 2:51
Great question. Currently, with email, I would say the biggest mistake that people are making currently is that they're so focused on the content and what it is that they're selling, and ultimately trying to sell their product through cold email, rather than using cold email as an introductory piece, whether it's to book a meeting, or bring out more awareness to yourselves, whatever the case may be, instead of trying to use cold email to ultimately sell the consumer, because now you're just adding way too much filler words and words and your emails in general, it's not sticking to the point of getting them in conversation.
Jonathan Fischer 3:32
So I can I totally get that when you are seeing a message that is going right in for the kill. It can be pretty off putting. Are there other mistakes? I mean, you mentioned the one about, you know, kind of blowing up your domain, do you still see that today, folks kind of trying to jump back in and getting burned by the Internet? Authorities? as it were?
Chrisley Ceme 3:55
Oh, that's certainly that's certainly still out there and quite prevalent. And, you know, in simply put, I can see certainly why that happens. Whereas, you know, years ago, yes, that did happen to me. But it took a lot more volume a lot more basically damaging the system before that occurred. Whereas now, your big email service providers are much more attuned and aware of these things going on. And yes, you definitely want to make sure your domain is secure prior to doing this. And there are many, you know, simple ways of doing this, especially in the beginning. And you know, you're not going to be having that much volume to begin with. But we can certainly get into that as we continue on. But yes, definitely having that secure. deliverability is a big, big one. And it's not as daunting or price li or anything like that, as people may assume that it is just because it's tech. And typically when we don't know things, we assume it costs much more.
Jonathan Fischer 4:48
Yeah. Well, and I think we will segue into something I did want to ask about which is kind of maybe you could briefly make the case for email based outreach because I find in my conversations with especially founders So a lot of business development, people may know that, that email marketing has legs, but I think a lot of founders feel kind of kind of maybe it's not outright burned on it, they feel a little hesitant to really buy in fully in terms of what capabilities are. I don't know, maybe you're in a different circle. I don't know if you find that still true. But maybe could you make the case for email marketing? And in terms of, you know, today's situation online?
Chrisley Ceme 5:25
Yeah, absolutely. It's a huge vital piece that I think many founders miss, because it's not, you know, quote, unquote, the in vogue thing to do, it's kind of always been there. And it's, and it's, you know, some people will look at it as scraping the bottom of the barrel. But in fact, especially in today's market, when you just look at the price for advertising and promotion, and putting yourself out there, cold email is something that you can start relatively fast, relative and relatively inexpensively and get a lot of reach versus, you know, going through paid ads, where yes, you can be, you can be somewhat even more targeted with paid ads and things of that nature. But in regards to getting started quickly, a be testing your product in terms of product, market, fit, messaging, so on and so forth, your best bet is actually going to definitely be cold email, just from the amount of people you can reach in the amount of time you can reach them, and get good results back to see kind of where you're where you want to take things moving forward.
Jonathan Fischer 6:21
And so maybe it doesn't belong on our list of mistakes, a lot of business owners are under utilizing this as an engine for growth. Oh, absolutely.
Chrisley Ceme 6:28
Especially, especially in the beginning phases, where you have people want to, you know, try and raise so much funding to be able to do paid ads and bring in a social team, and we're all those things are great and necessary, I don't want to be little their value, you can get started on a lot of those things, while in those beginning phases. And even as your company is, you know, established or whatever the case may be to just be talking to people that you would not be talking to, you know, the time old adage, time is money is true. That time that you're spending talking to those high leverage high targeted customers, you can also have your cold email campaigns running in the background reaching out to people who, even if you only get one to 3% of those people to convert into paying customers, that's one to 3% more people than you were getting previously by not reaching out to them.
Jonathan Fischer 7:18
Right. So it sounds like if I can summarize I mean, it's kind of a low cost, low risk channel for potential growth. And it's almost like why wouldn't you? Is it? Would you agree with that?
Chrisley Ceme 7:30
Yeah, yeah. And in fact, I'd say the only risk, if you want to call it a risk, is that domain, you know, damage, which can certainly be alleviated in a multitude of different ways.
Jonathan Fischer 7:43
Well, and so that brings us to a great entry point into what are the best practices. So let's let's kind of be laid out for us, Chris Lee, as an expert is what you do every day for clients, right, is help them structure email campaigns that will work, what are the key elements in a campaign that's working? And then give us the tactics and strategies to make all of those elements be effective? If you would?
Chrisley Ceme 8:06
Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, first and foremost, what you want to do is set up that secure infrastructure in regards to sending your emails because regardless of your subject lines, or contents, even your targeting, if the emails aren't getting there, and your domain is being burned, it's all for naught. So now, ways in which you can do that, you can certainly set up what's called a sending subdomain, which very simply put is prefix in period in front of your domain, or separate domain, if you will, off of yours. And what that will align for as long as you have it set up with the proper DNS configurations. demark, so on and so forth, is that your email service provider, even though it has the same branding, we'll consider that sending subdomain a completely separate entity from your main domain. So for example, if your website is google.com, the email address that these cold emails may be coming from might be something like jonathan@try.google.com. With that jonathan@try.google.com Sending address, Google in this case, we'll look at that as a completely separate entity from google.com. So that's the first you know, first layer, if you will, of protection. And then from there, you definitely want to you know, be rotating your IP addresses, you can use a platform like a instantly or SendGrid or something to that degree. Get this set up into like a sequence or tool simply like a MailChimp, Apollo, there's many, many, many different tools out there to have your setup technically to make sure Okay, your main domain is not gonna get burned. And you can now start to iterate on these email campaigns.
Jonathan Fischer 9:54
All right, so you've got to have the infrastructure in place not getting burned and any of you Explain for listeners that are just taking given this a new, fresh look? What happens if your domain does get burned? Like what does that actually look like?
Chrisley Ceme 10:08
Oh, yeah, no great, great question. So what what will start to happen is your internal emails, you know, emails that maybe you're sending to current customers, colleagues, teammates, whatever the case may be, will either start falling into spam folders or end up coming in as phishing, potentially, you'll start to not be able to potentially even send emails at all, like they're just not getting sent out, so on and so forth. And then what ends up happening is you have to contact you know, either Google or Microsoft, whoever your email service provider is, typically, it's, it's one of those two who are doing it this severely. And then basically take, stop sending for about two to three weeks, while they reset your servers and systems and get you all up and running again, to where you can do this. So now, if you had current prospects, that were you know, in communications with your sales teams, whatever the case may be, those can end up being halted, invoices that you're sending out, might not be reaching these clients. And now you're not receiving payments, thinking your clients are being delinquent or something, when in actuality, they're not even getting the invoices, this whole multitude of things that can occur, it can be fixed. So it's not, hey, once this happens, you're screwed forever. But it takes a whole bunch of time, which now ends up resulting in a dip in other business arenas.
Jonathan Fischer 11:30
Okay. So I mean, there's something to take pretty seriously, it could create headaches and cost you money, wouldn't make try will end your business, but certainly to be avoided. But like a lot of risks, like, you know, don't go down there and stand on that middle rail. You know, it sounds like it's also pretty easy to avoid by having other subdomains, so how many? How many likes? So if I'm, if I'm in a start up, and I want to get rolling, do I just want enough to get rolling? Or do I need multiple? Or to talk to us about that? Yeah,
Chrisley Ceme 11:58
no, great question. In the beginning, I would say one to two is more than enough to get rolling. I would say ideally, if you can do two in the beginning, that's great and have one that's actually not being in use, that's just warming in the background, just in case you have to swap out one of them, you can continue sending your cold emails as normal, while the other one is being swapped out and put back in from that, that sending subdomain, yes, you will want to, you know, you'd want to use like a separate SMTP server for these emails to go out. Simply put, you can think of a separate server, almost like a VPN, that's just kind of scrambling the, the IP addresses so that, again, it's another layer so that the email service providers aren't, you know, marking your emails as spam or excuse me, looking at your stuff and saying, Oh, this is a potential spam spam bot, and now you can blacklisted so that separate server is like the next piece of the security.
Jonathan Fischer 13:01
Okay, that sounds good. And then do you have recommendations on subdomains? Do you like it? Like if you're if your whole approach to selling is kind of product, lead maybe has more of a product type domain, like, you know, cool gadget.com, as opposed to a variation on Acme company that builds the cool gadget. That's a little silly sounding but I think, sorry, listener, I'll try to do better. But as long as you get the idea, right, like, like, how is it? Is it good or bad to be a little bit cute? Maybe that's actually a legit question, right? With some of these subdomains you would use in marketing.
Chrisley Ceme 13:34
Um, you don't want to get too cute. There's, there's a fine line. Just because some of that cuteness could also become a spam trigger, if you will, and get you kind of burned by by Google faster. So you know, I would the best way to do it, I would say honestly, is to take whatever your domain is. And then as far as you're sending something goes, you something like either hello.try.or Go dot, especially in the beginning, then over time, as your your, you know, running your campaigns, you're seeing your success or seeing what's going on, you can try and iterate as you're creating new sending subdomains as your team is scaling up. Hopefully, that's the reason why you're doing so then you can potentially try and play around with those and a B test, even those domains to see if Hey, it's sending the same message saying whatever, but the domain is a little different. Are we getting a better a better response? But in the beginning, I would say stick to like those pretty generic either Hello, try or go dot, you should be good to go.
Jonathan Fischer 14:35
Okay, cool. So we've got our subdomain or two picked out, you know, go go fish, your company, or whatever. And we've got our email set up with that to send out our cold messages. So let's talk what's next in the chain of building a really effective outreach strategy
Chrisley Ceme 14:51
here. Yeah, so next from there as you want to definitely identify whom it is that you are targeting. And you want to get pretty granular witness. So for example, if you're a candle company, you make candles, and you want to start using codeine to get your candles out there more. Okay, yeah, you know, you want to speak to, you know, retailers, maybe small business owners, whatever the case may be, but you will also be looking a level deeper and saying, Okay, those are the industries I want to go after. But then now, who are those target? Job Titles, if you will, you know, so in this particular particular case, you might want to go after retail buyers, owners, founders know, whatever the case may be, and really bring it down to that level of titles. You want to look at, obviously, locations if you're location specific, so on and so forth. And amass this list of as many different contacts as you can that fit that criteria that you're going after.
Jonathan Fischer 15:50
Now, I have noticed recently that a lot more marketers are defeating my spam filter, which is good for them. How, how are you? And I imagine you know, what they're doing our some ways you can defeat the spam filters, and get those messages through once you have really good targeting in place.
Chrisley Ceme 16:09
Well, honestly, what we were speaking on previously, in regards to the setting up those sending subdomains and running SMTP servers in the background as well, those naturally are helping some spam filter spam filters as well. Because by using those, you're increasing the reputation of those sending subdomains over time, as long as you're consistently sending from there, in addition to all that, the which we didn't get into that, but the copy in the subject lines that you're using, and not using spam trigger words in your copy. You know, for example, you know, saying things like, click here for the discount code, or try this here for free things of that nature, in your cold email, especially in your subject line, or first two sentences are going to get you blocked by those spam filters much faster versus if you're sending these cold emails and saying those same things. But in different verbiage, you'll end up getting through those spam filters more often than that.
Jonathan Fischer 17:12
Well. And so that's a great segue to the next piece, which is the content. So you've given us a couple of ideas as to what to avoid? Is there a way that the that the team can can know that? Is there some API I can plug in and judge my copy for some of these trigger terms? Or, you know what, tell us a bit more about that building? Some Yeah, subject lines and copy through.
Chrisley Ceme 17:36
So I mean, there's there's certainly many different lists and sources on there in terms of like cold email templates. But I would say first and foremost, you want to think of it in terms of when you're going to like a strip mall. And you're seeing those placards that are saying, hey, try discount here. And all those words are the words you don't want to use. First and foremost, there isn't a none of these, you know, Google's Microsoft or whoever are publishing, necessarily, hey, here's all the stuff that we look for. Because then naturally, all of us marketers would just be like, Okay, those are the words that we're not going to use. So there isn't any one telco source for all this. So part of it is just through trial and error. But other parts of it is certainly those key selling buzzwords that you quite frankly see on commercials, whether you're looking on on YouTube, or Facebook and seeing those ads, like those key words, especially together are going to be those things. And it's not to say that, hey, if you use any one email, you're gonna get flagged. But now if you're sending these cold emails and these cadences that you have set up, and then repeatedly going out each day over time. That's where the flagging comes into play.
Jonathan Fischer 18:42
Yeah, that makes sense. What are some? On the positive side of things? What are some good ideas for how to write headlines and messages that will make it through that will make it through to the to the reader and get them open? What are some best practices on on that part?
Chrisley Ceme 18:58
Well, first and foremost, honestly, believe it or not, the simpler it is the better, like we many people will try to get very cheeky with their subject lines and try to you know, say something that's never been said before, anything like that, well, I've seen at least recently that has been working very well is actually not using any capital letters in the subject lines, and keeping them subject lines to maybe three words, tops. So very much using like that three word approach to summarize what it is that you're doing, or the pain point that you're expressing in the email is another great one as well. So for example, if you're using a product that is ultimately aimed to help people get customer acquisition, literally, I would use the subject line customer acquisition, no capital letters, and that you'd be surprised for whatever reason how many people will actually open that email look at it and then you know ultimately decide based upon what they see if they're gonna you know, move forward or not.
Jonathan Fischer 19:57
That's a good one you guys anymore.
Chrisley Ceme 20:00
So let's see after a customer acquisition in terms of subject lines, you just need other things you can
Jonathan Fischer 20:05
other ideas for getting getting the human, the human being the other end of this deal to open it up.
Chrisley Ceme 20:12
Another big thing to think about. And it actually took, surprisingly, I didn't, it didn't really dawn on me until maybe like two or three years ago, is realizing that when people are receiving the emails, many times it's not on their desktop, they're looking at it on their phone. And on their phone, you can preview potentially either the first couple sentences of that email, or even depending on how many emails in your inbox, I want, given time, when you scroll down, you can read the entire email without ever opening email. So keeping that in mind, you definitely want your first two or three sentences to be kind of To the Point, whether it's introducing yourself introducing the product or introducing what it is that you do, you want to use that in your basically your first three sentences or first two lines, I would really say not even sentences, to just bring in the reader kind of thinking like when you opening the book, those first lines is what's going to get you to continue reading to see if you're even interested. Same approach here with cold email, in fact, maybe doubly so. Because this cold email is hey, it's just a couple of lines to begin with, to kind of get people to take the next step.
Jonathan Fischer 21:15
Good stuff. So you mentioned earlier on about trying to go right in for the sale as a no, no. What should these emails be structured to do? And how does that fit into an overall business development strategy?
Chrisley Ceme 21:29
Yes, so your cold emails, how I look at cold emails as I look at them as many movie trailers, if you will, and with the idea stating that the goal of the cold email is in terms of a movie, to get you to buy a ticket to see my movie, or to get you to come see my movie. Now in terms of cold email, it's not necessarily to sell the product. But it's to get you to either A, book a meeting with me, for me to sell you the product, or B, click on this link to you know, to sign up link to get more information on the product, join my newsletter, sign up for this blog, whatever the case may be. So knowing that what you want to do is say, okay, when we looked at the targeting and say, Hey, these are people who want to go after, what are their pain points? What is their current situation, and whatever it is that you're pitching? So, you know, for example, if you're pitching a solution for front end developers, and you say, Okay, what is the current problem with front end developers? What what is what are their current pain points, whether they're dealing with, and then you use that in the email to pitch, hey, this is why you should come chat with me. And then another big thing is at the end of the email, you're asked, you do not want your ads to be something that is to come middle. So for example, it's things that we're seeing right now that's driving engagement is providing a value add. So saying, Hey, would you like for me to send you our white paper that shows how you can get started? With your front end development today? At no cost? For example? Oh, now the readers like oh, okay, yeah, I'm in an agreeable state, I'd love to kind of see this worst case scenario doesn't work for me. Okay, now you get a yes. Now they're in your queue and your pipeline, and you can continue working them and now they're more or less.
Jonathan Fischer 23:20
So how, how do you best recommend for this email initiative to dovetail with everything else is going on? Like perhaps I have some social media based outreach going on? And obviously, I should have some technology lets me know whether that email was opened it up, maybe nothing else happens, do you is there are some savvy ways that we can follow up with some of these leads at least opened our first message where, you know, the business development team can know that and go find those folks and start reaching out as well?
Chrisley Ceme 23:50
Oh, yeah, absolutely. If you're, when you're sending these, these emails, you know, if you're using a platform, like I mentioned, like MailChimp, Apollo, you know, SalesLoft, whatever the case may be, they'll definitely have in there, those your open rates, your who's opened the email, so on and so forth. I would say in terms of next steps, if you're not getting a ton of responses on that first step, email, that's okay, as well. Typically, what we see is the most people tend to respond, post the second and third step anyway. So the second and third step are really your sweet spot emails in an email cadence. Ideally, I would say you want your email cadences to be three to four steps max. And then you can always refresh those campaigns, you know, 3060 90 days down the line. But in terms of answering your question, that second and third step is the is the sweet spot and how you want to follow up. There's a few different tactics. Currently, I'm in love with our nudge contact version, which is the second step is one line super quick. Hey, just sending a quick nudge to see if you like saw the information I sent previously. Thanks. Cool. And then as long as you set this up within your platform that you're What's your email sending out as a threat, so that whenever someone's getting the next step, within that email, they're seeing all the previous emails that you sent as well. This is another psychological approach, if anything else to get through them, like, Man, this person sent me a bunch of emails never responded to me, let me actually respond to this person one way or the other.
Jonathan Fischer 25:23
Very cool. Well, so let's set some expectations for the business development team that may be giving this a second look, what are what what are considered good numbers on an outreach campaigns of cold emailing?
Chrisley Ceme 25:37
Yeah. I would say from an open rate perspective 40% and above, you're doing pretty, pretty good. From a reply rate perspective, I mean, currently in the market, I would say if you're getting a three to 5% reply rate, you're definitely doing something well, within those replies, and you're interested reply rates, if those are anywhere from point one to point 3%? That's good. That's really good. And then, you know, above point, 3%, you're really doing well, obviously, depending on the volume and your targets as well. But I will say those are your kind of baseline metrics you want to be you want to be looking at?
Jonathan Fischer 26:21
Are there certain transactional constraints that make this a better versus not such a good approach to take, for example, you know, for reaching for, you know, six figure enterprise size deals? Is this maybe not the best approach? It is something where it's a little bit more transactional? Or do you find it can work everywhere? What are your What are your thoughts on that?
Chrisley Ceme 26:40
Yeah, um, I would say, cold email can work in all arenas, for sure. Now, when you're talking about those big six figure enterprise size deals, depending on what exactly it is that you're selling, what you're doing cold email may not be your best approach in terms of my primary vehicle of driving leads. For those bigger size deals. Yes, you want to use, I would say, you'd want to use cold email more for those people that aren't on your wish list where you're reaching out to them via LinkedIn, or very personal messaging, so on and so forth. So for those, I would say, yes, you can use cold email. But those are more forges, reaching out to those people that you aren't reaching out to, as I kind of mentioned earlier, outside of those types of deals. Yes, whether you're doing anything that you're doing for signups, for example, like let's say you have a freemium business model, where the goal is to get people to sign up, this cold email is tremendous for that you can put in UTM links in your emails so that you can track that customer's journey post email onto your website as well. And so that you can even see, hey, which email is getting the most people over to the website, which email are people coming over to the website the most and actually clicking Sign up, so on and so forth. Looking in your Google Analytics is a huge plus. So anything where you're trying to drive signups cold email is is amazing. Trying to book meetings, like cold email is great as well. But you would definitely want to mix it with other lead gen sources over time, but it's definitely a great place to start out.
Jonathan Fischer 28:18
Yeah, a lot of our our Sass based listeners are gonna love that because a lot of them have those models you just named and, you know, fairly transactional sized accounts can quickly grow from there. So that's a great, great to hear. Well, I'll tell you what, it's been a really great conversation, and it's gone by very quickly. And I'm grateful to you for that. Chris Lee, thanks so much for sharing your insights with our audience. I know that the listener absolutely love to go further with you. What's the best way they can do that?
Chrisley Ceme 28:45
Oh, absolutely. Yes, you can always feel free to check us out on senders dot CEO hit the contact now button, you'll get me and we can certainly have a chat and delve a little deeper into your situation for sure.
Jonathan Fischer 28:57
nicaise senders.co, put that on the screen, we'll put in the show notes. And when they fill in the form, they might actually get to talk to you. So that'd be pretty fantastic. Well, awesome. Well, it's time to go to q&a. So hopefully, you folks that are on our live team have got some great questions for us. And I think I see a few here. And we'll do some q&a with our expert on board. Let me take a look and see what we got. Yeah, here's one. This is a little bit and Matthew, can you restate this if you want, I saw a little bit of a side conversation here. This is from Matthew Young. What he's referring to he says I try to avoid getting sent to spam by not putting in too many links in his emails. And he tries to actually go through them by hand rephrase them, so that they look a little different as he's going through. Which gives me advice to Matthew perhaps Chrisley. Yeah,
Chrisley Ceme 29:53
I mean, I'd first be curious if these are emails you're sending at scale or one off cold emails, because that wouldn't Make a difference in how this is this is answered. But in the event that let's say these are one off cold emails that you're sending out, then yeah, absolutely. You don't necessarily need to rephrase every single last email because I'm sure that's a time suck. But what you're doing here does make a lot of sense in terms of not putting in too many links. Yes, that is also very true. But more importantly, is you don't want to be putting in so many different links that are to so many different places, one, because one, you're just directing your, your prospect into many different places, that's not necessarily where you want them to go, per se. And to, yes, that can potentially get you into into more spam. So if you are sending leads, you know, I would say use things like Bitly, if you can, if they're in different places, so at least the link name is the same. Also, you can use a UTM code, develop the UTM code site to generate your UTM codes, excuse me, so that now you can just place those into the email, and so that they offer that same kind of protection, if you will.
Jonathan Fischer 31:02
Nice. We sounds like we have a fellow practitioner that's been listening as well, he shares an interesting insight, it gets back to my earlier question about synergizing with our human outreach, and he's got a suggestion that maybe you could send a message to some of these prospects saying that you sent sent them a, a link on LinkedIn, a campaign to connect on LinkedIn, and you could kind of line those two up, it sounds like that would have to be managed very carefully. And the teams would have to be very, you know, very closely aligned, maybe even have one person overseeing it. But what are your thoughts on that?
Chrisley Ceme 31:37
Yeah, um, that is a great, for example, replacement for like what I mentioned the nudge, currently, that's kind of my favorite thing. And using that nudge line, and this particular case, this is another version of that, where you can certainly do this to your point, you'd want to make sure you're using a this is definitely something you wouldn't want to necessarily be doing with one off emails, as you might, you know, lose track unless you're, you know, just very organized. But you definitely wouldn't want to be using something like an Apollo, like a sales loft, tracking all those email sends. And then, you know, uploading that CSV, so that you know, okay, when you get this LinkedIn step it is after you receive the email, and they're not getting that LinkedIn email, maybe prior to them actually getting paid on LinkedIn. So that part of it you want to be mindful of, but outside of that, that's actually a very, very good tactic. Because a lot of people that we're seeing more and more, who won't respond to an email, but will respond to you via LinkedIn.
Jonathan Fischer 32:36
Yeah. Here's a question from Alex. He's asking what kind of messaging would you put in the email if you're just trying to reach out to prospect cold with the goal of getting a meeting? So maybe you can kind of give him an idea as to how that could be set up?
Chrisley Ceme 32:49
Yeah, absolutely. First, you want to meet the prospect where they're at? So why are you trying to get in touch with his prospect? What problem is it that you're trying to solve? Once you know, the problem that you're trying to solve? I was you would simply do or what I would simply do stay at an email saying who I am, and where I'm from, or whatever the case may be. And then say, Hey, if you're basically I know you have this problem, but I'm going to ask if you're suffering with this problem. Here are some of the things that I'm currently doing that solves this problem, list out those two or three bullet points, a quick little tidbit on those bullet points, keep it super brief, and kind of To the Point. And then at the end of the of the email or the body, you would say something to the effect of, hey, I'd love to have a quick chat to see if any of these solutions I have can help with you. And either provide a calendar link, or you can add, or you can say, after you say, Hey, would love to have this chat with you, or if easier, I would love to continue the communication through email this way, instead of the ask so much being Hey, come talk to me. The ask is hey, how would you like for me to continue this conversation with you to answer your questions. So now you're turning it from either? Okay, they read the email and no answer to okay, I'm interested. How do I want to continue this, if that makes sense?
Jonathan Fischer 34:11
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, maybe you have a similar concern here, we're just like going in too quickly for the sale could be a problem. Going too quickly in for a meeting, I mean, it's still a sale, I mean, that their time is extremely valuable. So you kind of have to work your way there by getting in touch being in touch with their pain points you solve sounds like would you would you
Chrisley Ceme 34:29
absolutely and also just understanding the how many this is so it kind of goes into are these one off? cold emails that you're sending? Are these part of the cadence because if they're part of the cadence, understand, okay, you have three four times. So at the end of the first step, you can use that first step really as an introductory piece into what problem you're solving. And at the bottom of the email, you can say, you know, not really even ask for them to do anything but send them a link to the website or your blog post or whatever the case may be. And then in your second email, ask Four, hey, let me I can send you more information or my white paper that explains this or hop on a call with me. So now a prospect isn't feeling bombarded, be as much as we're the ones selling the product and everything. But hey, gotta get more leads gotta get more leads, things do stay on the top of people's minds, people do open these emails. Even when you're looking at your conversion rates, and you're seeing all these unopened emails, trust me, when I tell you guys, people, open their emails, and they read their emails, and they will circle back when things come up. So this kind of goes into one of the bigger mistakes that Ian mentioned. And it's refreshing these leads, people always trying to search for new new, new, new new email addresses. And they've had all these people that they've emailed all year, maybe once, twice, three times, and never emailed again, reengage with all those people in a new campaign. And what I'd like to do is segment out how they their results from the previous campaign. So people who went through every single step never unsubscribed, but didn't open the emails, okay? For those guys, I'm gonna use a different pain point to try and get the trigger their mind, people who, you know, opened every email, but then didn't respond. Okay, that could have been a timing issue. It could have been whatever, okay, I'm gonna use this this approach. And so really using all these lead lists that you're buying and purchasing to their fullest extent and getting the juice out of them. Yeah, sorry, I was a little long winded there.
Jonathan Fischer 36:31
We don't fault guests for being long winded when you're dropping gold. Yeah, it's good. So here's a question from Levy, can you provide like a before after case study and didn't have to be perfect, but just top of mind? Can you kind of characterize maybe one of your, your own experiences and working with the client, maybe conceal the name, but just describe the company and give us an a before and after story?
Chrisley Ceme 36:53
Yeah, absolutely. So we were about last summer, we were working with this Tea Company of all of all companies that were looking to expand their their outreach. And they had a signup process, a premium process, but and also direct wholesale process as well, in terms of producing sales. So people could either set up meetings or just bulk order on the website. Their issue was they just weren't getting enough people to click on their emails and look at their stuff. So what we did, taking a very different approach than even kind of what we normally do is first we told them, Hey, what are your best and most popular teas that people are buying? Once they told us that we put that image into their emails into the body of the emails. So that now people are seeing what the best practice is not even not even realizing that. Then from there, what we said was, okay, let's look at your targeting. At the time, they were targeting mostly restaurants, pizzerias, basically places where people go to eat. And what we told them was, look what you're really a T, A T thing, you should be reaching out to all places that have walking people, offices, so on and so forth. So we started reaching out to dentists, offices, doctors, offices, churches, office buildings, schools, barber shops, anywhere where people might have one of those go jugs of water that used to be offset, you can also have teeth, why not? So we expanded her target base, if you will. So, after all that then looking at the contents of the messaging, we say you're overcomplicating this trying to sell this T as the most Amazonian whatever, instead of just saying, Hey, here's our value for you, all your guests that are coming in gross parts looking for something to drink, and we segment them out by industry. So each cadence if you will, each three or four step cadence had different messaging per industry that they were being sent to. So for dentists, we have different messaging for dentists messaging for doctors, messaging for plumbers, whatever the case may be, AB test this over time, and they saw a 3x return in terms of just the click through rates on their website, over a three month span.
Jonathan Fischer 39:15
Nice nice that's pretty cool. That's not that's a great story. So just being kind of savvy about what's actually happening among their buyers and playing up an opportunity once you saw one there and that's that's really powerful. I've got two different questions in that are kind of I think we could maybe answer them together so Tom bolt is asking what platform are you using? I know you probably have more than one that you like maybe there's maybe there's some that you'd like less maybe we'll leave them on mentioned but there are there are some that you like better, and maybe you could share with that why and then let's combine that then with this other follow up question from Matthew young. He's also curious, you know, about putting pics and you just talked about putting a pic in sounds like there is the impression I had this impression too that could land you You in spam, so maybe, you know platform and deliverability combined to answer their if you would.
Chrisley Ceme 40:06
Yes, great question. So for me, primarily, I'm using Apollo in terms of my email sending platform. And primarily also just because it has like a quarter of a billion leads in there as well. So it's kind of a zoom info and HubSpot kind of married together from from that aspect. So that's why I like Apollo. But in Salesforce sales, loft, excuse me is another great tool as well. MailChimp is pretty good as well, just in terms of getting those email cadences set up for sure. And the other question in regards to the deliverability aspect of pictures, yes, pictures can certainly harmfully affect your deliverability. In the event that we were using them with with that previous company, we set up a separate sending subdomain and email address that we were using just for the cadences that had photos versus the cadences were that were the plain texts, primarily speaking, though, yes, you definitely want, especially with your b2b, cold emails, definitely want to stick into the plain text field if you can, or world if you can. But in this aspect, we just kind of doubled down on our security efforts, instead of separate contingencies, so that if there was any issues there, we can very quickly swap it out, repair it. And it has no impact on the other cold emails that are going on.
Jonathan Fischer 41:26
Okay. So occasionally it can, it can make sense, but overall, stick with text.
Chrisley Ceme 41:31
Yeah. And then even if you do want to use photos, I would just be very mindful of the volume of those particular cadences. Maybe not have those running all the time, maybe for very special promotions, or where it makes sense to have a photo in the cold email because it's driving the the text then okay, but just be very mindful of it.
Jonathan Fischer 41:52
Awesome. Well, I gotta say, this was a great conversation, Chris Lee, you are equal to your billing us definitely seem to be a great expert. And I encourage listeners to go and find Chris Lee and his whole team over there at senders dot CEO, Chris Lee, thanks for being a real star today. Appreciate you.
Chrisley Ceme 42:11
Okay, I appreciate it as well thank you for the time and to everyone who logged in and listened, I appreciate it. And please feel free to reach out anytime.
Jonathan Fischer 42:20
Awesome. Well, and we thank you the listener as well for making the show such a success. It's been it's a ball for me every single week to get to learn from experts on my second favorite topic after family. And so if you've been enjoying as much as I do, of course, you can go back and check out all of our previous guests by going wherever you'd like to get podcasts, and download your favorite episode of the evolved. sales leader. We're focused here primarily on b2b sales, but anything sales and business development related, there is a treasure trove of insights there on the Evolve sales leader podcast, go check it out wherever you'd like to do that sort of thing. And I also want to give give a big shout out to our sponsor, we're proudly powered by overpass they are the leading platform for getting business development related talent on your phones quickly and economically. Check them out an overpass.com It's free for the hiring manager to open an account. Post your job ad, the AI will send you a 15 and 20 great candidates and you get a free account executive to help further coordinate hiring some rockstars from a global workforce. Check him out@overpass.com Well, that's gonna do it for this episode. Once again, thanks for being here. I'm signing off everybody take care. We'll see you at the same time, same station next time. Bye bye for now.
