Transcript for:
Effective Outbound Email Strategies Overview

All right. Hey everyone. Today I've got Enzo in the uh house and I thought we would do something special. Last year, some of you might know, I made a GEX wrapped 2023 document and it has literally been four months since I published the document and I haven't done a YouTube video about it. Enzo's in my house right now and I said, you know what, let's do the YouTube video together. But when we do the YouTube video, we can go over what has changed in the last five months since I wrote the document and any opinions Enzo might want to add in. Let's hop into the video. And so, if you guys have been around the channel at all, you know that I like to do do things in one take. I totally forgot. If you're new to the channel, my name is Eric Doslowski. I send about three million cold emails a month on behalf of our customers. We are certified by Smartle. The founder has told us that we are in the top four, sometimes top three of all the people who get responses on the platform. And we're going to go through a document I created that is literally 120 pages long about outbound email. We'll see if we have any changes. Enzo is going to give his own opinions and see if we agree and disagree or add any insights as well. I have a lot of respect for Enzo and the outbound campaigns that he runs. I fully admit I think Enzo is a better copywriter than I am. And uh I just want to let him intro himself a little bit, but Enzo, anything you want to say? Yeah. Hi guys. Uh I'm Enzo. I'm the founder and CEO of C7 Lab. We're an advant agency here doing code email, cold calling, sometime even dark mail. Uh my track record is not as good as Eric. He's the guy of course. Uh but yeah, we also smart lead enterprise partner enterprise partner uh working with instantly and all the great tools out there. So yeah, super excited to dig into the GX wrapped for 2024 and tell you everything that changed since then. Perfect. And so the if you haven't seen the stock before, basically every year I find it fun to just write out as much as I know about Outbound as I possibly can. Lee Jen J has already done a review of the stock which I really appreciated but we've never done a review and I wanted to get to it and with Enzo in the house I wanted to make sure we hammer it. So this part is just a preamble about just what we're going to cover. In my opinion I feel like the scope of this document is everything that has to do with coming up with an outbound idea and then getting a positive response. So that includes setting up your email infrastructure, building your lists and then your campaign copyrightiting, your strategy and using clay on top of that. Last year I made this doc and people were asking well what do you do after a positive response it's like that's not the scope of this document so I apologize. So we're going to focus on email deliverability list building campaign strategy and copyrightiting. This is just some social proof. Last year Smartly is really hard to figure out how many positive responses you've actually generated. So I think we did 10,000 but if you reach out to Babb he will confirm that we're getting you know the like the top amount of replies from people. I have this plaque from Instantly saying that we've generated 5,000 leads uh on the platform. We are a smart lead shop as you might know. I love the Instantly people. There's only a couple of reasons for that. If you're a beginner, I would say go use Instantly. And if you need more custom things, use Smartle. I do the outbound for instantly.ai. So, we generated 5,000 verified leads for instantly.ai. And that's just that account. It's not shared with other customers. So, that's how we got that plaque. And these are just some other social proof things that nobody cares about. Um, and you can see the doc yourself if you like. So the first thing Enzo that I started this doc with was an outbound too long didn't read because I knew re when I made this that I was going to write a substantial amount of pages. I didn't know it' get to 120 pages but it was going to be a lot. So I wanted to start the whole thing with 101 level. I believe that if you just get an instantly or smartly account you buy in boxes through a done for you setup you listen to the guidelines on the platform of their warming Apollo.io IO is a probably a really great place to just initially pull lists from. We use Apollo in conjunction with Clay a ton, but there's also tons of tools that you could use for email enrichment as well, including Prospio, Lead Magic, Try Kit, ICPS, and all those things in Clay. Verify those leads with a third party tool. Um, all of them are basically the same. Just pick your favorite based on price. And then when writing emails, keep it longer. I mean, keep it shorter than 100 words. First sentence, why are you reaching out and why now? Explain how you help. Third sentence, show social proof. Fourth sentence, call to action. And then we could get into a little bit of things here. Is there anything that if you were to add to a just like I want to start an outbound campaign, I'm a beginner. This is my checklist. Is there anything else you would add to this checklist here? No, I think you cover pretty much everything. Um all the tools really straightforward. Um I think there's everything all the basics all the basic tools you need to get done. Obviously, yeah, you can get some level of personalization if you want some CHP and stuff. So like customers customize a couple stuff, but other than that, like you got everything you need to get started. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. And so then this is just going over email deliverability 101. It says we've managed 51,000 inboxes. At this time, we've managed like 73,000 inboxes. So it's it's actually higher than that now. But anyway, we're basically using Google accounts and then Hypertight accounts as well. That is still true. Uh, I hit here about how every piece of advice I'm going to give on inbox deliverability stems from what do spammers do and how can I do the opposite of that. Super true. That's that's still the way that I think about this framework as well. We're still sending 30 to 50 emails per day per inbox. When we're using hypertide, we're sending two emails per day. So that's still the same thing. Why do we I do really well in that. We do 15 15 emails per inbox. 15 emails per inbox. Oh, okay. Really really really low. What h what made you decide to go to 15 emails per inbox? It is dumb thing is that when was the last time you sent 15 emails in a single day? Never. Yeah. But I went to 30 and I saw it was all fine. No, but when you do it manually yourself never. So my idea is like when was the last time you actually sent 50 emails a day? Now I'm trying to think on the email service provider side. Can a human send 15 emails a day? Most likely. How often an email send 30 or 50 email a day? Never. Yeah. And the way I'm thinking about this is like I'm trying to replicate human be as close as possible and that's why I'm trying to stay below 15. Was there ever a time that you were sending something more like 30 to 50? Yes. You know, back in the day, but like I feel that my inbox self just last longer when I'm around the 10 to 15 uh really. Okay, that's interesting. Okay. Well, I really like that. All right, cool. Um, so one thing that I put in the doc is that we set up two inboxes on each domain and I even put a disclosure here. Why do we put two in boxes versus three? I don't think it really matters that much. If you wanted to put three on, I have no scientific proof to show that two versus three is better. Um, but I know that putting penman boxes on one domain is just too risky. So, would you uh do two as well? Yeah. Okay, cool. So, we're using smartly instantly for all of them. Uh, recently big platforms have also come out trying to kind of try to disrupt them. I have not moved yet since the writing of this. So we're still using smart lead and instantly. Um I know you're doing something if you want to explain what you're doing across all the platforms. Yeah. Yeah. Um my idea is that all platform are great. I love smart lead I love in a lot of mail. But I cannot explain there's some type of seasonality between platforms. Sometimes you know some of them are the same lead list the same copy the same data sources everything the same. One would outperform one by another. I cannot explain why. And also some platform tend to have you know some time out of the year where they're not performing really well. They have 10 bugs and what I do is I split my inboxes through all the platforms which mean that I never given point if a platform is the bed I can just you know keep selling in another platform uh or just like moving really fast. My idea is that I'll never dependent on one single platform and I can be really agile and really speed in my way of moving and moving through. So it's not like you're sending emails every day from all three. you're just uploading the inboxes. So if the day comes that you need, I'm just like I can do it right away. Not and I think that's really good. What one So one thing here is um so I put in here why doesn't Google and Outlook just ban you from cold email altogether? And I made some assumptions about why they're not banning you. Basically I thought there would be a profit incentive and um you can't make a spam filter so tight that regular users are affected. I actually was speaking to somebody who is connected to a Google account manager and since writing this, they actually told me that as far as they could tell with the Google spam team, they are much more concerned with fishing attacks than they are with cold email. And that's why I think there's a lot more longevity on cold email and the way that Google and Outlook will like clamp down on things than I thought there was because they are actually they know about cold email. They know that it's happening. They know that all these platforms exist, but fishing is the real problem that they want to stop. And any and when you think back of any update that they've made, it all is usually around, you know, blocking fishing as well as cold emails. And so that really made me made me think, okay, there's a lot more longevity on this than I originally thought. Um, I also at one point had the opportunity to do a 30 minute kind of free consulting call with the Google Ads team in the United Kingdom. And when they started the call, this was like two years ago, but when they started the call, I I kind of went on and I was like, "Okay, are you guys just asking me questions so that you could go tell the spam team about what we do so that you like heard it straight from me?" And uh they were like, "No, we hate the spam team. We we can't get our emails delivered to sell Google Ads to the United Kingdom." And so even them, they're having them. Yeah. Yeah. And so they were asking for our opinions on it. And uh so that that even even the fact that they're doing those cold emails, I think that um there's cold email is here to stay much longer than I thought. I hope this gives some confidence for people. It's the the fishing that they're really going after. I think you point two is probably the most important point that you put out there is that no matter our even though they care about us, you cannot make it so hard that it's impossible for regular people to send emails. Yes. Exactly. And that's why I think the key to winning cold call emails is yes, your offer is everything, but are are you writing like another human is writing? And that will allow you to get through all the SP that you need to go through in my opinion. Yes. Yep. I and I totally agree with that. So, a lot of this is just in the weeds stuff. Um, in my previous video when we made this, it was pretty in the weeds, but we don't have to bore everybody with that. We can just keep going. So, with list building 101, the main thing that I basically said here is all these platforms are getting their data from LinkedIn. you're essentially just buying a LinkedIn scraper whenever buying any of these platforms. They'll find their emails, but you need to have some other platforms to try to find more emails from that. We're still to this day using all of these. So, this still makes a lot of sense for me. Basically, the what I wanted to get across here was how lists were essentially made because sometimes people will come to us and they'll say, "Well, how do you not have a list of every naturopathic doctor uh you know, and their email address?" I'm like, "Well, they don't have LinkedIn profiles." Like that's you know that's the tough part right that is a big big tough part as well I'll tell you on the tools like I mean prosper like top dogs lead magic as well ICP as well the nuance that I'm saying and I don't know do you have a lot of your printed customers no not really uh you will figure out that the the tools actually have different coverage based on geographies as well oh interesting yeah so I tend to figure out that certain to email provider works better on European like data set versus uh the one that we tend to use in the United States. It's something really interesting that I'm seeing across. I wonder why that is because I don't think this is a secret. A lot of these email providers are either getting their data from someplace of somebody else is probably you signed in your terms and conditions that they can see your CRM data and if you have a Chrome extension, a lot of times they'll read their your emails and try to get the signature data out of the emails. And so a lot of them are either doing that or they're just straight up guessing emails. If you were to add eric1growth engineext.com, you'll never be able to have an email provider that guesses that. So I wonder why in Europe it's different because a lot of this still is just a lot of guessing or like CRM importing. Two things I think there's one of a lot of we talked about it on the car the other day. A lot of them are um white labeling or the tools. Yeah. But also I think as well there's one that you have tree infrastructures um enter.io are the one that have really really strong and true infrastructure know the way they do things. I said that I don't really know. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So, we're using debounce right now. I will say that they haven't really been accepting customers and so we are trying to get off of debounce. The the real reason I actually want to get off of debounce isn't even like a validation problem. They just don't allow for auto billing. So, then I have to manually update it for the credits. Yeah. I don't know why. So, we're probably getting off of Demount pretty soon. Copyrightiting. These are some people that I would just shout out as really great copyrighters. I I say this a lot of times when I make YouTube videos. I feel like I love the inbox deliverability stuff and I love the list building stuff and I love the clay building stuff. I do not try to say I am any kind of master copywriter. So I shout out these people. Alise is on my team. He's one of the greatest copyriters I've ever seen. I was seeing Enzo's copy. Um you should be able to Yeah, you should. Yeah. Yeah. I've been seeing Enzo's copy and I really think he's a creative angle and I think he'll really help on a lot of campaign strategies. This is just a general framework that we follow that like maybe you have a different email but if you've never written a cold email before this is probably a really easy way to just think about the email. Is there anything you think through? I think this is probably the best we still following similar framework. The idea to me is like how the line that I'm writing is connecting to the next line and the idea is like how the first line you're writing make me them want make them want to read the next line and make them want to get to read the next line. Yeah. So, all the way up to build up to the Nicole. Yes. Boom. Was that David Oglevie who said that? I forget. I'm putting myself out there. But yeah, it's the Yeah, absolutely. It's probably the game actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the first line. Your headline should sell the subline and then it should sell the line. Yeah. Um, all right. So, then for the rest of the document, like I said, we jump really deep into everything because I I wanted people to just be able to just say, "Okay, I want a quick start. I just want to start sending emails." This is where we're going to start getting a little crazy. All right. All right. So, for one thing, I wonder I really wonder if you experienced this, too. I'll never forget this. May 1st is my birthday. And on May 1st of 2024, we lost like 10,000 inboxes or something. Maybe I even put it in here. We lost 7,000 inboxes or something crazy in one day. And um it was it was just bad. Yeah, there was a huge Outlook crisis in 2024. And some other changes that I saw was in 20 the beginning of 2024, it felt like if you burned a domain and you warmed it up for a month, you could use it again. I don't think you could use it anymore. So, okay, I would agree with that. And then in June of 2024 after the Outlook crisis of all the inboxes getting banned and July of 2024, I wasn't even sure if we'd have a business because I had some campaigns that were ripping and we were getting great deliverability and then we just dropped off and I had a bunch of like I think I had like five or six customers that we onboarded and none of their campaigns were working because we couldn't get the deliverability right. And so I don't know did you do you remember back in 2024 anything like that? May and October are like two months for me that was like something is happening. Yeah. May was obviously the out crisis and October is the time that I was able to put on a map where it was really hard to get to 5% reply rate over. Yes. That was the day like 5% reply rate was like not well it was it's still a thing but like not as common. Yeah. Like before I was like oh can I get 12? Can I be eight? by going by five is like really what's the reply rate now that if you're like this is it's below this reply rate we need to shut off this campaign like below below below 1% okay I think we're yeah we're online yeah I think also whenever we say these things it's also like I know some people who are selling chocolate to B2B companies and they're getting like 6% reply rate because they're saying like we'll give you free chocolate it's like this also changes amongst industries a ton and big thing we're talking about targeting the US market right now That's in an English language. That's true. That's true. European like we can get to 12% in local languages and they cannot even imagine where we able to say in English. People like when we sending cold emails there, they're just losing their mind. It's insane. But we're talking about US market in America targeting you know B2B customers of you know companies B2B SAS even like I'll tell you local based businesses I can get like a five six%. Like yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Very interesting. Um, basically I just go over here that what we started doing was we just created batches of like inboxes that we wouldn't touch because we just wanted to um diversify a little bit more. I know you do that as well. Um, Google inboxes versus hypertide inboxes. Who little mistake there. Um, so far like we just have Google inboxes because we scale a lot more volume on the Google inboxes. I've never had a problem with hypertide inboxes. I don't know if there's anything I mean works great. Google is just like for me is always the foundation of everything we do. Yeah. Exactly. They've been biggest for my market share over there. Like you need to have the Google boxes. Yeah. Um Taylor Heren, shout out to Taylor. He we both actually the amount of times that we've talked about Taylor and he's not even here is a lot during this weekend. So, uh shout out to him. He actually ran a test that I think everybody should just see because sometimes people will sign up and they'll say, "Oh, we're having a problem with Hyper Tide." And I'm just like, "I I'm so sorry." Like, I don't know what to tell you because I'm using it. Taylor has this deliverability testing on it. I like I'm I'm sorry. This is just the way that it is. Um, all right. So, email deliverability stuff. ESP matching. This is when you send Google inboxes send to Google inboxes and out inboxes send to Outlook inboxes. At the time, I was saying that this isn't that important. Since then, there's been a lot of Outlook problems. And I don't know, I we still don't really do ESP matching. Really? Do you do any ESP matching? that the numbers that I'm seeing are not like relevant enough where I can justify like an ASOP like oh we need to do that like it just adds complexity. Yeah. It's just like even hypertide they'll say don't ESP match Outlook to Outlook on the hypertide inboxes. It needs to have a pool of the sending and uh I I have heard anecdotally that people are saying the deliverability is better from Outlook to Outlook. I'm sure some people in the comments are going to have some opinions on this. This ultimately is not something I even like people DM me all the time and they say what are you doing about Outlook and we're really not doing anything about it to be quite frank. I don't even really think about this that often. I don't think about email deliverability sorry because I'm like the way I have to think about it is like what do I have control over? Yes, my control is like is my copy is just like feels like a human wrote it. Do I'm sending a volume where you could imagine a human would send that money. A do I have a great offer? Am I segmenting my list really well? Do I have the signals that let me know that when I'm sending to that email to that person with that, you know, offer personalization? It would generate the potential interest that I have a lot of control over. And I feel that if I'm stacking those together, ultimately my deliverability will be better because people will respond to me some positively, sometimes maybe less negatively. Even when they respond negatively, it's still good for my deliver. And that's the thing that I like to have control over deliverability whether like all the thing that we're going to do. Yes, fax super important, but is the fundamental done really well? Yeah, that's what you think that Yeah, I tell everybody that the only thing that matters is how often people mark you with spam. You can probably send So, a Google inbox can actually send 2,000 emails a day. That's the actual limit that send. And if no one was ever marking you as spam, it'd be fine. But that's just the basically the middle in the world, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's But people, no matter how good your email is, somebody's going to mark you with spam. Spin tax. We actually don't use a whole lot of spin tax growth. No. Unless you're sending over like a thousand emails a day on a campaign, we don't spin tax it. But we're also using at minimum an AI generated first line and an AI generated third line and then the first line of the second email is AI generated as well too. So we are getting that variation of the copy. But I don't unless you're going over a thousand emails in the same copy. We don't spin text. Yeah. Okay. No, for sure. Um that makes sense. Cool. Domain masking. I personally think that this is a fugazi. Um, so domain masking, if you haven't heard about it, is basically, so when we send these emails, we're sending growth engineext.com and then we're buying gothrowen engineext.com and then we're sending from gogrowthenext.com because there's a separate reputation on this one. Then we will forward the website because there's no website here. We'll forward it to growth engineext.com. So, this domain masking idea is this idea that, oh, hey, um, you want to send it all to a different website because Google isn't stupid and they'll see if you start getting marked on spam and all this is forwarding to your website, then you know they're going to hunt you down and they're going to ruin your deliverability on your main website and it's all going to be for nothing. One, I've never seen that actually play out any of our customers. That's never been a thing. And two, if that were also true, I'm going to close my agency and I'm going to start a business where what we're going to do is I'm going to go to uh HubSpot and I'm going to say, "Hey, let's ruin Salesforce's deliverability and then buy domains that look like Salesforce and then try to sell Bitcoin over cold email and ruin Salesforce's email deliverability so they can't communicate with customers." Great business model. See that? That would be great if that were true. And so I just I I don't think domain masking is really a thing. No, don't think either. Okay, cool. We agree on that. So spam tests like lock apps or smart delivery. Okay. So I only use this directionally to know do I think landing in spam? Do I think we're landing in inbox? I only use it as a signal. I don't trust it 100%. I talk about why. But I'm like it's a direction. If I say hey all the eliminating me is spam. I'm like I'm probably if I'm getting like most of them getting 100% like oh okay I'm I'm going to look somewhere else. Yeah. But fundamentally, why you not getting any response? The inbox are cooked, the copy sucks, you're not sending enough volumes, or you targeting the wrong people. Yeah. Yeah. That that can only be done. So, you know, from there, just you and I would agree with that. And so, the the thing of the inbox placement test is one, if you're landing in spam a little bit, you're definitely landing in spam far more than you think. Like, if the inbox placement test says you land in spam, you're definitely landing in spam. But if you are landing in the inbox and you still think that there's a problem, what are you going to do? You're going to have to set up more domains and inboxes. That's why we don't we just default to setting up more domains and inboxes because you just can't trust it. All this stuff you can read. This is nerd stuff. Don't worry about it. Lessons from bounces. If your bounce rate really increases, see if there's a status code 550 error and it's a spam one. What is bounce rate that you take action versus the one that you don't take action? So you when we were having so many Outlook problems, I was like, "Oh my gosh, we just and I know you guys are going to think it's crazy, but this whole channel is about transparency." I was like, "Oh my god, we like we're having so many Outlook problems. Uh, we have to find 4% is a like an acceptable bounce rate." Cuz at one point in 2024, it was insane. It was like I felt like every campaign I launched was having heavy bounces. And then when we figured out the ALOC problem now and with instantly AI's email verification now a lot of our campaigns are at like 0.5. Yeah. Maybe 1% as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I used I'm just full transparency. It was like oh my god this is so crazy. But we're still getting responses even with a 5% bounce rate. But I was like oh man this is we're absolutely cooked right now. This is so terrible. Um so then I would still say under 2% is like what you should really be striving for. But um yeah, now for the big change was instantly verification because I just like the the way that they have their underlying data set up. So yeah, inbox volume test. Okay, so this I just ran a test. I had a friend who wanted to use one of our internal domains and they wanted to send out a thousand emails from one domain on one inbox and it was to a list of people who had all opted in for the messages. So, we made the subject line even though the domain wasn't the same. We made the subject line the same company name. There was an event coming up and then all of the copy was like that it was coming from the company. We did an inbox test before we ran it and I sent emails to myself and then we ran it and we sent a emails in one day from one inbox and then the next day I sent emails to myself and to emails that had never received an email and they all landed in the inbox. It just it just further proved my like nobody marks you as spam. You're good. You're good. And that's the the biggest thing that matters for any that's interesting. Um, warm up ooth masking. All right. So, domain age I think is important. So, we just had a customer that I hope I hope we'll be able to talk about one day. We just got them their first five leads or something this week, but the first week that we launched, we were basically getting a 10% reply rate and it was looking really, really bad. And they're targeting companies with over 5,000 employees. And so, yeah. And so the big the only difference that happened in their campaigns because we didn't even get a chance to rewrite the campaigns by that point cuz quite frankly they take forever to approve copy. But um the only thing that happened was we always keep batches of inboxes since some inboxes aged for like 6 weeks before we used them and then we used those and then we immediately started getting uh I think actually we started getting a 2.12% reply rate the last time I checked and we generated the first leads and so it just made me think like oh when you're trying to go to these spam filters at these larger enterprise companies domain age is really really important. Yeah. So there's that. Um, on the other hand, do you believe that the the branding domains actually matter? People actually respond or care for that. Are you saying this because of how passionately I feel about this? Do you know how passionate I am? I know. I know, but at the same time, I'm like, I'm starting to believe there's something you do where like nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. So, I can't talk about I'm allowed to talk about this company one-on-one, but I'm not I have an NDA publicly, so I can't I can't say the company, but there is a company that everybody has heard of, and we send emails, and their domain is six letters long, and we are sending emails from domains that are like 30 letters long, and it is like, and we still get positive responses every day. But do you have the name of the domain? The name of the company. Yes. Yes. So we have the name of the company in the domain. But the other thing that we weren't we were kind of doing this back when I wrote this doc, but now we're going all in on it is we started launching free tests for people, which I can talk about why. Well, I'm not going to talk about why in this video, but we started to launch free tests for people. And so we'll send from a fake woman's name who has no LinkedIn profile and it's from a domain that doesn't point anywhere and it's something super generic like growthsassolutions.co or something like that. We will launch from those domains and we do not find so we'll send about a thousand emails and if we get less than two leads for somebody or two leads or below I don't expect them to work with us and we're using the free test because they qualify for us. We get leads for people all the time and the domains don't point anywhere. the domains don't have the name of the company in them or anything. Oh yeah. And we from those free tests we just do it and the only I mean when they become a customer of course we put the name of their company and we forward there and we do all those other things but I know they could get responses and not even have the website point anywhere. So I have a question to you. Do you think there's and on that specific test that you're doing and I'm wearing I think this is a really good look magnet but do you think there's a differences in the response rate you're getting based on the sophistication of the people you're trying to reach out to versus like if you're trying to reach out to roofers or hack I'm assuming you get a nobody would care would look at the domain if you're reaching out to B2 visa somehow like with some kind of sophistication those guys will respond less because they not able to figure out who you are. Yeah. What do you do with the signature? By the way, the signature is just straight up just the the name and it just says the name of the inbox and then it says New York, New York. We don't do anything else with the signature. So, I don't know because we've proven enough times I had one person who was contacting B2B SAS founders and they only wanted to contact B2B SAS founders with over 50,000 website visitors because of their so good traffic. Yeah. Yeah. They had an offer where they were basically there's SEO and then there's AIO. I don't know like typing shout out. If you type into chat GPT and you say how do you use clay.com to scrape Google maps my video pop up. So that's what I'm talking about. Like how can you optimize the AI search? So AI search engine I don't know something like that. That's what they do. We ran a free test for them. We only had to send 600 emails before we got the two positive responses that were really matter. So I Yeah. So, and then also we will also run the free test and then when they have their branded domains, the free test is pretty dang close to the branded domain test as well too. I think people care way more about the offer in the email than where it's coming from. Um, is it, you know, does it make sense that you should be sending from branded domains? Yes. Like I am not suggesting that people just spin up a bunch of generic domains and then they run those for the rest of their lives. It's so easy and it costs the same to put your brand in there. But if you're somebody who's really nervous and you don't want to buy the domains because you're not sure what's going to happen, this that and the other thing, it it it's going to be fine. Um, all right. So, now we're in the list building section. I created a whole data pipeline procedure that I think everybody should check out that uses clay and it's got a bunch of other stuff in here. Uh, I just want to talk about email waterfalling. How many providers do you have in your email waterfall? Too many. Like boards five like uh Prospill, ICP, Live Magics, Enrow. Oh, you have Enro in there. Oh, okay. Yeah. Very French people, you know. Yeah, you're bougie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, prosp magic as well. And that's pretty much it. I think those guys get the most coverage. Sometimes sometime when I'm now on the streets have like really bad coverage or like really difficult to get. I'll throw a whis in there. I'll throw like probably an in there, but like it's really occasional like it's not systematic. But yeah, most of those guys will get it from Yeah, absolutely. inviting. And so, um, now I have an opinion on this, but I wonder what you think. Why not? Because a lot of these only charge you for a valid email address. So, why not run eight of them instead of four because then you will get the subscription for all of them. Well, then you got to get the other thing is is that in my opinion, a lot of the sauce of these companies is pretty similar and so you want to diversify because they do have their differences. at one point you're just like the squeeze that you're going to get for having all those subscriptions and everything is not going to pan out because if it's a catch all domain like there's usually not a lot of things that people can do about the catch all domain and so I think at a certain point you're just checking so many things and then the juice you're going to get from that is going to be so the first five that we talk about going to give you what 50% of it 40 50% 60% depending on type of going after you're gonna have two three or more you're going to probably 1% it's not worth it. Yeah. And so the rest of this is just stuff that I think you read. I don't think there's going to be any comments on it. Um I had a whole section on here on what's the deal with clay.com. And I hear all the time still to this day even though we're both Clay Enterprise partners. We were just at a Clay partner event. That's why we're together. And uh you know there's still people who come to me and they say, "Okay, you know, do I really have to be using clay.com?" And I always tell them it's like, "Look, you're going to run an email campaign, right? I know you're going to download a list and then you're going to take that CSV file and you're going to upload it to a tool that's going to verify that and then you have to wait for it to verify and then you're going to download that verification list and you're going to upload it to another list to try to find more emails and you're going to wait for that to happen and then you're going to download that list and then you're going to like upload it to GPT for sheets to like write your first line or whatever you're going to do and so then it's like yeah I'm going to do all those things. It's like all right clay the at bare minimum just streamlines that entire process and so is there anything else that you would say is like a simple workflow that people should be using in clay that you know if they're like oh I'm not sure if I should get started with clay is there another example that you would give them I mean of course like we can like signal and intent there's always this question like what is real signal what is intent we can just do discuss and argue whether what's signal and intent what I like to do is like you know understand you know door is thing and so we're dealing with hey how do I make sure somebody do not take me as a spy and for me getting intent or some type of intent signals about the company has a actual problem I give you an example that I'm using a lot because I have a client that you know when the company seems to have really bad review like I want to target company that would need a 3PL provider if I able to figure out what company which company is standard like 50% of all the negative reviews regarding like logistics shipping and Well, I'm assuming that my list is going to get better and probably going to get more respond versus if I'm not doing it. So, that's in the cases where you would want to use clay like how can you make sure that all you're doing and building those lists actually for something it will get positive response and I'm using clay as this like brain that would just confirm the assumption that I'm going that I'm going with from my client. Oh, hey, this is the people we should reach out to because of these reasons. Otherwise, well, you know, there's 300 million LinkedIn profile there would be spending days like figure out where you want to send to. And uh Clay is really just the workflow layer cuz you could do the Google review thing in a different place, but then you'd have to like use ampify and then dump it someplace and then AI analyze it in the dump and then upload it someplace else. It would just get and also it look it would break all those automation because you have to do at scale like you know like it would break like this thing works on play use. Yeah. And so for anybody watching, I have a tutorial for clay.com that again, shout out to Google. If you search tutorial forcllay.com, this video is the first thing that'll pop up. Beating Clay's SEO shout out. Um, this is just exercises. I know, right? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, this is just some exercises of just crawl rock, crawl, walk, run that you should get into. Okay. Campaign strategy. I was thinking about this and I wanted to ask you and I was like, "Oh, we'll wait for the campaign strategy part." I How often do you think that triggers and signals matter more than the offer? I don't think it's either. I think it's all complete. But I'll tell you the offer is everything in my opinion. Yes, the offer is the thing because here's the thing. When offers people, hey, do you want me to run a lead generation code for you for free? like uh I'm not sure I don't care about somebody going I want to say that yes that is like and even those guys that following instantly or following like smartly they're following clay hey anybody do you want to us to run a cod oh sure of course so my opinion the offer is always king the the the trigger and then it's just like why you should prioritize those leads any other that's just how I'm thinking about yeah and so with the so you I even was in my head my gut reaction was the offer matters more and then you said the 3PL example I was like ah yeah that's true. So I feel like sometimes people get bogged down with signals to the point where they're trying to get way too fancy and just improving their offer would make a bigger difference. I think from a prioritization standpoint if you can find stores or like uh CPG brands that are having logistics problems in their reviews and things aren't showing up on time. That is like one that is absolutely what you should be leading with in the cold email because with campaign strategy anytime you automate anything I say it all the time. You should think about what you would research about a prospect for 10 minutes and then work backwards from that and automate that. You shouldn't be doing just fancy things that you see on LinkedIn uh even though they look fun. And so that is a perfect example of that. And then that gives you a couple and then it gives you the copy. the copy basically writes itself, but then there's going to be people who maybe don't have reviews that you could find and they might have logistics problems and you still want to email those people and then you just want to just put best foot forward with the best email that you can and it just doesn't necessarily have a signal but then the offer just like really matters beyond that as well too. Yeah. Um All right. So, what did I put here? The most sector. Oh, okay. So, for success obviously for outbound campaigns it's close revenue. Nothing else matters. The only thing is we both run agencies and that's just tough. Like we get you the positive responses then if we were totally control the revenue then I might as well you know run your business and go become your VP of sales. So uh I know I just wanted to put in here that of course closed revenue the only thing but the three things that you need to solve for first or is like how can we get people to respond then how can we get people to book meetings and then how can we convert them to customers. I have a quick thing that I want to go through on this. And so my opinion is that there are outbound agencies out there and I'm calling them out right now because I think they're lying. There are outbound agencies who are out there who are saying, "Oh, it's going to take six months for outbound to work." And then I always say to that, it's like, "Well, no, you really should be able to tell if an outbound campaign is going to work within the first one to three campaigns as far as positive replies. You should not take six months to try to crack something on and like and take six months just to get positive replies. So the only time that we've launched a campaign, the first thing didn't work and then we cracked something four or five or six campaigns deep is when we radically changed the list or we radically changed the way that we're positioning the offer. Would you agree with that as well? I agree 100%. I think honestly the positive reply like if inside one month you're not getting results like and that you working with a partner that's like actively trying getting worried. Yeah. Yeah. And so then that's why all of our agreements are monthtomonth because I actually think that at one point then the agency that you're working with is then just going to do copyrightiting that you tell them to write and they're just going to regurgitate and you should probably just take the infrastructure and try some things yourselves but that's neither here nor there at this point. So, I think you should be able to get people to respond pretty quickly. Otherwise, you need to radically change the list you're targeting and the way that you're positioning your value proposition or the way that you're creating your offer. And a lot of times people come to us and they'll say, "Well, people are coming inbound, so we know that our offer works." That's fine. A lot of times you need to create an offer that's created for cold traffic to get them to convert. So, I think List and those guys do a great job of this. to just not even take an example of one that we built where they really have client ascension, they have list kit, they have everything, but they sell this done for you, you know, cold email setup that's I think $1,000 or $1,500. And so it's really easy to say yes to it. You just get the infrastructure in your hands. It's just ready to go. And then they upsell people from there. I think if they were to try to run ads at the upsells that they have after that offer would be really difficult. But the fact that they have this thing that they could liquidate the ad spend on immediately and then get something into something really easy is a really good idea. And so you're actually really really great about this and we should probably take a pit stop now. But I think that yes, the what you were saying if I were to cold email somebody and say, "Hey, we could get you leads. Do you want leads? Let's talk." That's not going to have as high of a response rate of we will launch an ad campaign for you for free. of course. But so when you're working with a customer and they don't have that front-end offer ready to go, how do you think about helping them do that? And I can even start thinking about a company if you need an example of somebody we could try to make one for that's not neither of our customers. I think there's a couple of principles I'm trying to follow all the time which means that what can I say that nobody else in your market can say? Yeah. And what you provide that no one in your computer is willing to provide. Yeah. Let's do let's start from that and you're going to tell me what you're willing to do. I'll tell you what it would work well and we can like work from that. But I think like the first thing is how we can get people to respond. There's only one answer provide more value than anybody else. Yes, that's how you win. This is I'm not you there's nothing magical about it. There's not the way of course there's like some infrastructure and some street good sauce. follow Eric on YouTube, but at the end and the core of everything is probably more than anybody else in the marketplace. And you're going to you're going to win. Yeah. Now, are you ready to get your hand dirty? And that's why I'm making that commitment with my with my partners when they jump on. Hey, we're going to build a segment together. You're going to design something, but you have to willing to work with me. I'm making this happen. And I think when you're able to get partner to to be willing to commit to that, you're going to be able to create great things. But yeah, you have to bring value. Yeah. Sometimes lead magnets cost money and then people be like but what if like it doesn't work out and so then what do you say that where's the question acquisition like the sample like hey if the lie value is $30,000 if that take 500 bucks to create is it worth it? Yes, probably because when we launch campaigns for people for free, that is not free for us. Like we we have cost now. We're trying to streamline it and everything, but that has actual costs for us. And so anyway, so I'm not sure if there's there's something that we talked about that I really like that you talked about and you could bring it up after if you uh if you feel like you want to publicly talk about it. But um the other thing I just wanted to touch on is you said that you wanted it to be valuable and so sometimes people are like, "Well, our webinar is valuable." It's like, okay, maybe like and so Hermoszi has a great framework around this where just okay, do the prospects know that somebody else in the marketplace is charging for the thing that you're offering? And that's a great way to cut of of a lead magnet. Yeah. What thing do you want me to talk about? The framework thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't mind. I can tell it's like I love that. Yeah. I thought it was so good. And you know what? You're getting escal, but I think I'm going to make a they're 40 minutes in. So, anybody who makes it this far, it's going to be a real one. 40 minutes in, you can DM me frame more. I will I will help you with whatever you need to do to see it if you did it. Um, it's I think when it comes to league magnet is most of the time how you framing things, how you positioning things. People will be surprised my league magnets could be also like created by my partner, but it's also also how I'm framing I'm framing my CTA. And I was giving him an example. Oh, a lot of people like to do, oh, can I get can I send you a case study and case study and like or or or they will say in their email, this is the case study that we achieved with the customer. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is really lame because you talk about somebody else and nobody cares about other people. They only care about themselves. So the way I'm using the case thing, hey, can I send you the case or this is the case that we got like I'm switching, hey, can I send you the framework we used to make this happen or can it we discuss the framework? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can we can I walk you through the framework used to make them? So if I tell somebody uh do you want me to show uh can I send you the case uh we used to get 239 leads to growenx.com versus say can I walk you through the framework we use 239 to growx.com it's different because frameworks means that there's a system there's something that I can learn from the case study from is cool that you guys cool but doesn't mean it's going to it's going to be usable or valuable for me when I use it out and I send you the framework that underline there's a system there's method that I'm going to be able to learn from that and that my pro and that probably going to be useful to me and that slight change how you're framing your CTA for me I still consider that a magnet and how you do this that well it's so valuable that you need to get on the call for me to work with you and that is the same thing that's a guest you can call it a guest but for me it's just like how you firming this allow you to be way more powerful moreful in your CTA versus you know the more regular audit test type things and then one thing that that brought to my mind that um uh it also kind of writes your email too then because then you can say hey like I I'm being serious we really have a framework and then you can we kind of summarize the framework and then say how it you know we could hop on a call to see how it applies to your business as well too but what I really loved about that is because we kind of do get into this trap of saying like hey we generated 30% more X for other company everything and then when you're when you said that your lead magnet was these frameworks and that the framework was tied like the only way you were going to talk about the framework was on a call. I was like, cuz there's so many people who we work with and they don't have lead magnets ready to go. And the other thing is you don't even know if the lead magnet is going to work. And so then for you to invest all this time to make this lead magnet streamlined and then you don't know if it works. But if you have a framework, you just can like it could be a virtual assistant offer and you could just say, hey, this is how we take a 100 applications, whittle it down to four people to test. This is how we train them and this is how we make decisions on who's good and who's not. And then that's how we get one person who's ready to be placed into your business. Whether you want a virtual assistant right now or not, do you want to work through the framework of how we hire offshore talent so you get a really reliable person every time? Nobody wants to way different email than do you just want offshore talent for sure. Yeah. And so then any that applies to any company because sometimes people will, you know, and I know one of your lead magnets is you'll build a clay table for free and put 5,000 leads in it and then very quickly people are like, "But I'm not a services company. I can't just give something away for free." It's like yes, but you know something about your customer or you know something about the audience that you know that they would want to know or or something about your process. And it's so funny there's somebody viewing this document which is I don't even talk about this document. I don't know how these people find this. So a thing is is solve the answer to every single cold email that we sending which is what's in it for me. Yes. watching for me% and if you able to answer that you're going to have a positive response and that's all we're trying to do those you see that watching it for me what should I respond and it's funny because I'm trying in my best my abilities to simplify also what kind of response I'm getting from the prospect and for me it's only yes I only want them to say yes because only I have yes I have permission to do whatever I want after that and I want them to answer I don't want them to as if it's problem. I don't want them to as all is this something that you've been talking I was just like yes I just want to say this. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. So now the reason now we went on a big tangent but on how to how we can get people to respond and we're going to go more into that as well too. The um so the thing is is then the reason why outbound might take months to make work is because an outbound lead is so much different than an inbound lead. So hard. And I found that out. I was running outbound for myself for a really long time and then we got to a point where I didn't really need to run outbound. But then I started getting afraid like oh what if this inbound gets cut off and I started running outbound campaigns again and it it was like punched me in the face about how much different an outbound lead was than an inbound lead. And a lot of times when we work with people they're not prepared for that. And so when we go through all these this funnel of like how can we get people to respond? That's the campaign strategy and we're going to talk about that way more. How can we get people to book meetings? That's mostly speak to lead type stuff. like they already said yes. That's mostly just focus on your workflow and just booking them. And then how can we get those people to convert to customers? That's the part that'll punch you in the face. And every business after they get leads has to go through their own journey of figuring that out. Um what's a good response rate? Sometimes I hate this on LinkedIn. I made a post about it. Like Yeah, I saw I saw you made a post. I I hate when other outbound agency owners, they will make a post about a campaign that they did and they sent 500 emails. Yeah. They sent 500 emails and they got 125 leads or something like that. I used to pay those people to know what they were posting about because I wanted to see what they do. What was the sauce? The amount of times that they re-engaging old customers, they're reaching out to people who were going to attend an event in three days and they were just emailing people at the event, giving gift card. Yeah. Giving cards for responses or just these other gimmicky things is really high. And so I think it really inflates what people think a good response rate is. Like we said, 1% is kind of our like you're below 1%. There's a copy issue, there's a list issue, there's an inbox deliverability issue. That's just the the fact. And so when when it comes to good response rate, I think we put in the average here of positive responses. What did I even put in here? Being a person is like if I'm above 15, I'm doing fine. 15%. Uh positive reply rate. Oh. Oh, yeah. Positive reply rate. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, the rate of reply. It's hard because like I think there's an industry type like you know influences of sense but I'll tell you if you anything between you know five to two like all right yeah and so I put in here that the average across all of our customers is for every 350 contacts we reach out to get a positive response since I have publicly said this tons of people will come to me and they'll say well we want to get to the 350 and it's like well okay you sell uh a like cyber security offer to people that like they only do their cyber security changes every 10 years,000 employees. It's like okay what like what how how many people are even in the market for this thing right now? And so this is very this is very much an average number and it's not an average number of you should be able to get to this and that means your campaign is average. we work now at the time of this writing I think we had 30 customers and now we're at 50 customers and so it is like the average across all those offers and so what you need to do and actually Enzo and we were just talking about this he had a customer he is basically getting a great response rate for his customer and he generated 50 leads for them and then they said we can't wait to you know increase the email to lead ratio so we could get even more leads and their TAM has 400,000 easy in it and more yeah they sent way less than that 400,000 they they had a lot to go and I was I talked to him I was like man that stinks because what are the odds that you're going to increase that email to lead ratio by even 20%. What you like you're already sending a pretty good campaign if there is a 100% bump in there it is going to be because the list is so niche that you're not going to be able to run it all year round. What is going to be easier to do? Send more emails or to write eight different campaigns and see if something's going to outperform. Right. So I don't know if you have anything about that. Yeah, I think uh well by the way I'm still getting hit by prospect of people that saw you doing things like well I want to hit one point but 350. I'm like man I know but $100,000 thumbs up. Yeah it's it's it's uh 350 is the average across offers. Not even like everybody should be hitting that and you have client that get 100 leads like in three days but probably also like you know Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. So even Yeah. So a customer I'm super proud of. We have in the last 30 days we have generated a thousand literally 1,19 positive responses. Is that because I'm an outbound genius or because we're have a project management system that follows the guidance on inbox deliverability and we're pulling lists and we're validating them and they fit their offer. It is 90% the project management side. And I mean, yeah, that script that I wrote them is cracked. And like, well, it's not cracked. It's like we've we tried 20 other experiments and just this one works. One thing I would want to shout out is Taylor Heren will publicly post a lot of things. He will very often come up with like, oh, this campaign was a 6X. He maybe he's got the magic touch and he's better than me. I don't know. But like very often I find that you usually have a campaign and then you can make that campaign better and then you can make that campaign better and then after two or three iterations of making that campaign better in a scaled way, you you're probably better off sending more emails and sticking with your winner and then like yes, of course, if something comes around and you have like a great like there's an industry trend happening or something and you're going to target that, that's fine, but they usually don't last that long, you know? So anyway, that's just my feeling on that. Um, okay. One thing is I tried to address here why outbound campaigns don't work and what you can do about it. And so what I put here so far was chunking up and down. And so mainly getting really into the weeds about how your solution is different. So if there was an email finder and you were to say, "Hey, we have an email finder that's super good. Here's how it works." or here's the offer, whatever. I think that you could chunk down on the email finder and say, "Hey, the way we find our leads is I'm not sure if you know this, but we can validate catch all because if you sign into Gmail and there's no email that exists, it doesn't pass you to the password screen, but if it does exist, it'll pass you to the password screen. We'll get you all the emails that are like that." So, I think you could get super specific to show the differentiation in your product and that's one way to increase your response rates or you could chunk up and just talk about the outcome and you could just say, hey, you know, we helped somebody increase their outbound campaign by 17%. Do you want to know how? And then don't even talk about the email finder until after they respond because then you're just talking about outcomes instead of just being a commoditized email finder. So, that's what I mean by check. I do always up uh because my belief is that people don't care about features and benefit that much. Um so for the email finder example, if somebody sent you your that email, you wouldn't be more interested. I'd be more interested if they could confirm to me that that's exactly how it works. I'd be more interested. But is it because it's so so so technical to us? And uh let me give you an example. I have a good moment here. Um go back to the 3PL example. Um, one of my client was one of the 10 uh people that was able to get e-commerce branding to Target. So, we were saying, "Hey, by the way, I see you guys at Walmart, but you at this job, but you're not at Target. Do you want us to help you get there? Because we're actually one of the only 10 people that can get people inside Target. Why I'm doing this? I could have talked to be more reliable. We're going to be faster than everybody. Going to be cheaper than everybody. and you're gonna get on camera and say, "Hey, where do all the e-commerce store want to be and where's the drip? They want to be target." I'm gonna talk about that. Yes, that's a great example, Ch. That's a really really good. I think people would always get way more moved by where they desire to be, where they dream versus how this this features and benefit their life. That's just my belief. But yeah, I respect your No. And so I I I definitely agree. And so this is another thing with like SEO services. Like you should never email somebody about SEO services. You should literally just talk about the outcome of how you increase revenue and then talk about the framework of how you increase their revenue and that'll work way better. Um the other one is just changing making them think about their pain differently. So uh this is just a quick one. I'm not sure if you'll have anything to react to this. I love Josh Brown's cold email. Yeah. I think it's great. So if you send an email and you're an accounting service and you say, "Hey, we you need to get your taxes done. We can help you. We have a lot of experience doing taxes. let me know you need help. It's, you know, you're going to get whatever. But in Josh Bron's course, I love that he put this. How do you know your current tax accountant is using every legal loophole to get you as much back from the government as possible? I love that. This is sick. So, this making them think about their pain differently. So, this is leaning into a couple things. One, it's making them think about the pain differently, but it's also two, leaning into the fact that everybody we're talking to has an account. All right? So instead of saying you can do somebody's work, just say like what's the main problem of having an account? I know what they did. You know what is really interesting? Yeah. He was saying that you don't know what they did, but more importantly like you don't want to really talk to them like you don't like you just want you to get your thing done. You want to be oh I cannot pay less taxes and you just you address that right away. And I think this is actually I'm having an account offer coming up. I'm probably going to use that. Yes. It's so great. So then uh the third one is just creating an offer for cold traffic. And I just say like when we did a free email deliverability audit, this was the response rate. And then and you can see the copy if you'd like to read and pause. And then when we said, "Hey, we have free list." This is the response rate that we're getting on the free list. And then when we said, "Hey, we can launch a campaign for you for free." This is the response that we got on the free. Yeah, this is just showing the the cold offer. the but the one that I think about all the time that I didn't put into this doc is I think about where are your prospects at in the funnel and how can you use cold email to move them forward now very often the CAC on this doesn't work out for working with an agency so this might be for somebody else but I was thinking about it okay why do cyber security offers not work on cold email because I mean people care about it when they something happened today exactly and so it's like wouldn't so now cold email is just reaching out to people and seeing if they're interested in something. They would be much better served if they were to put together a dinner and email CEOs locally and just say, "Hey, this other cool CEO is going to be there. Do you want to have a dinner at this really nice place?" And then get to know people that way and then think of CAC that way. And so another thing is like sometimes people want cold emails just to book meetings and that just might not be totally realistic with your offering and you need to use it as another place higher up in the funnel. A dinner funnel will always work. A community funnel, so inviting people to a free community will always work as well, too. And then some kind of event thing doesn't work as well as the other things, but it'll still work really well um as well. And so that was just another thing that I I'm thinking on is is sometimes booking a meeting isn't going to work for you, but using cold email somewhere higher in the funnel and it's cheap enough to do that, just not with an agency um would be better for you. I think and I think you touched on the point people focus of course the goal is a million and create revenue and SQ and all that kind of stuff but the goal of outbound is to get people to respond that is the first goal of it you open the door they say yes because why yes important because then we don't have deliverability issue to deal with like we we we have the room connect on LinkedIn we can send messages do guys say they will need to chat with me and that's why I think you're right we should think of as as a funnel that can open the conversation to anything else is obviously the goal, but this is only one way to use it. Yeah. Here I put a lot of just email copy and things. Basically, with copyrightiting, the one way that we think of a lot of variations of copy is when you think about it, there's only six offers in the world. You can only help people save time, save money, make more money, reduce risk, raise their status, or live longer. B2B, we focus on these four because living longer is like a gym membership and then raising their status is like Rolexes or APs if you're, you know, real serious. And so, I know maybe there's something to be said here. Uh, but we'll go into actually let's go over the sequence structure. This is what we've been using. And actually, a lot of times we've been cutting it at email three as well. But we'll do email one net new email, email two threaded to email one, and then email three net new email. And then if we have a four, we'll thread it to email three. But I do not follow up in the same thread. Um, and the way we're doing this is generally it'll say this is one offer. This is whatever we didn't have time to say in email one, we'll put it into email two. And then in email three, we will if we were talking about helping them save money or some other value proposition, we'll pivot to another value proposition in email three. And then in email four, we'll actually try to see and say, "Hey, you know, I thought I reached out to you because I thought of this. Is there not somebody else like Maxine that I should be reaching out to instead? Um, and the reason we don't thread them all together is because when I receive emails, one, nobody receives nobody remembers the email that they received yesterday. So, you know, like, but when you send me four emails threaded together, it just reminds me that you're the person that I didn't respond. Yeah. And so, it's just leaving a trail of the fact that you spammed them. And so, um, that's why we cut these on an overall sequence structure. Would you have anything to add to that? Oh, actually enlightened me on my I'm doing a new traded on email as well. I probably should like do only two at a time and this is really good one. The way I do this that email one is my league man. I try to put all the firepower in those. Email two, I'm trying to like even more firepower. Email two is like hail mary like hey this is everything we have. I think it's going to be great or shout out to Maxine. Yeah, it's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then so using your TAM is just basically I'm just going to go over this very quickly. If you have 100,000 people in your TAM, you figured out something that works and you want to scale as much as possible. Just want to figure out the volume that you can send that you reuse the list once a quarter is really what you're going after. And not even so much because they you're going to, you know, spam them. They're going to they're going to remember you and everything because they won't. But uh like the only that I remember from people who cold email me that I remember are either really good ones or the people that I said unsubscribe and they didn't unsubscribe me. That's the only email. I I don't know who sent me an email this week. Yeah. I don't I don't know. So, it's not so much about emailing them because you're you're messaging them too often. It's just nothing has really changed in their business and you want 3 months to go by to see some kind of change in the business. Um, all right. So, now we have some copyrightiting leverage. This is just some things that we created of just so if you're going through your frameworks and you're thinking, okay, we're helping we're going to pitch this offer in a save money offer, a make more money offer, a reduced risk offer of all these other things. These are just more things that we think about as far as like how can we also make more variations. So to think deeply about what's in it for them. We've talked about that a lot. So I don't know if there's anything you want to add to that, but we've talked about that a lot. Um niche down on your outcome value or feature. That was chunking up and down as well. Lead magnet or front end offer. We talked about a lot. Enzo is the king of that. Um let's see what else. Test before you put a lot of effort in. This is like I one time had somebody who was like, "We're going to create this lead magnet. It's going to take three months of engineering time to put it together. Um, should we do it?" I was like, "H maybe like let's let's come up with a way that you could test it and see if it'll work." Straight line to cash. I sometimes see people making lead magnets that don't actually produce revenue for them. So, you want to make sure any lead magnet you do like I was talking to a chocolate company. This is a perfect example of how your CCA can change things a little bit. They were like, "We're getting great responses there. We're getting like 6% responses." I was like, "Why are you photographing?" Like, "Keep go forth." Yeah, keep go forth and keep doing that. And then he said, "Um, well, we're emailing people and we're saying, hey, we've got this chocolate company. We do XYZ. Um, and you know, could I send you some free chocolate?" And I was like, "Oh, of course." And he's like, "We're we can't book any of the things." I was like, "Of course, man. Like, you you lost your firepower." So then all we said was, "Hey man, just change it to um," hey, we've got a really platform that's really accessible to B2B companies. Uh, when we get together and I show it to you, I'll show you how easy it is by sending you a free chocolate basket. And so it's like, yeah, tying it to the car. Oh, I have so much hit the sauce to be effective. So Oh, I got you guys have sol because I'm feeling in a good mood today, man. So I okay I'm just trying to think if I got you know it's legal I can't say it uh so the way we're doing this as well and which is really interesting is like I like to send free samples as part of magnet how do I get to respond people we call it on the phone we talk together on the phone how do I get people to respond or to actually get on a call before we send anything is like same thing hey uh we have free chocolate or we have this thing uh do you want it oh yeah sure cool and and we responding is it the right address and we purposely make a mistake in the address and so they can correct us and then we responding oh okay just to make sure that we have everything right let's jump off call so I can review your order and make sure I send I have nothing wrong and everything good because they know that oh they're going to send me something properly like wow this is not going to cost me anything to jump on a call just to make sure everything's right they already did mistake with the address that's interesting and then they jump on it and then they use that to actually pointify And then this side we don't know. That is really interesting. Now that reminds me of something else because sometimes people come to us and they say we should be getting 20% response rates overall. And it's like okay I don't know where you heard that from. That just reminds me of um Guom Cabain the guy who was the expert for ramp. Yeah. Ramp. And then segment. And he's just I really like the stuff that he puts out. One time they ran an experiment and I put it in the dock somewhere but I just want it what you said just reminded me. They ran an experiment where they said, "Hey, we're going to give you a free gift." And then they would make the address 10 numbers wrong. So if it was like uh 100 Park Avenue, they would make it 110 Park Avenue. And so then they were doing this to see, okay, everybody should respond. Why would you not respond to this email? We're going to send you a free gift. Just confirm your address. That campaign got like an 11% response rate. And so it kind of showed me that there's like a limit to uh like a response rate based on email. But anyway, um all right. outcome based case study messaging. I'm switching this. I've learned through Enzo and we've all learned that we need to add in frameworks in here for sure. Um, let's see. Oh, so here I'm just sharing examples of how we could cold email people with screenshots of successful things that we've done for our customers. Uh, pain messaging, poke the bear, you should read that with Josh Braun, direct offer messaging, this is fire. Everybody should probably read this. I'm trying to think of is there anything that is there anything that you keep in mind? So we have trigger messaging. So what messaging is there anything you keep in mind when you're I don't want to run through all these when you're writing campaigns. You said oh we tried let's try this other angle. There's always something that I do when I'm getting new customers or new partners is that and I don't know what you think about it curious your opinion but what people tell me was their time and when you're looking as who's paying for the bills it tend to be two different type of people and oh yeah and I'm like initially like oh we we these are customer best customers and I'm like hold on give me the last 120 days of closed one let me see the the close call let me see the discovery call and we use that see what people ask that question, what is their worry? And that we use that to understand like what people are coming from, what they worried about, what they really interested in. And you know, we tend I'm doing that on my team. They hate me for that. But I make them watch also like the the recording because you can often see in the eyes of the prospect the aha moment they get it. Yes. And then what happened? What question do they ask? What the sales rep said? What could what the what the prospect said? And that usually would that will allow you to understand, okay, this is where I need to dig to actually probably come up with something. Yes. Okay. I really like that's true. That's too Yeah. Yeah. That's really really good. Um I'm trying to think of anything else. This is just all like email variations that I think everybody should just read through this. I just tried to come up with as many ways that you can think about campaigns and angles that you could take. So, the big thing I would say, uh, I used to be super big on this hypothesis on finding message market fit, which I'm always bad about capitalizing things. I guess that should be capitalized. Um, so the first time I ever heard about message market fit, I'm pretty sure I have to give credence to either Kellen or Jordan Crawford to the fact that they came up with it. I used to be really big on this that I would run every customer through the first batch we're going to do is look like targeting with AI generating copy and then the second batch we're going to do is testing triggers and then the the next one is going to be messaging templates with different angles and then we'll do non-scalable things in batch four um as well too. What I've actually found that probably one or two of these things really move the needle and it's more based on your offer more than anything else. And so if you try a lookike targeting campaign and you say, "Hey, we have this great case study. This is what we did for the case study. Go target other people that are like that case study." That's a great one to start off with. Everyone should be doing that. When we're testing triggers, honestly, you could have your own custom triggers. Again, if you can answer that question, what would I research about this company for 10 minutes and then work backs from that? Like Google reviews of people saying that their packages are arriving late, great. That's something you should go with right off the bat. reaching out people who are new in their role probably the trigger that everybody should be starting with as well too and so I found that we were actually over complicating this a lot and that's why we shifted to the free test because I thought that all of these things could give you a scientific hypothesis on how to have best chance of making sure that a campaign would work and we actually found that we were doing a lot of fancy things that didn't matter and just messaging the offer to the right people with some the lookalike stuff and the new and old roll thing was the biggest thing and then after that you could see if it resonated or if it didn't and save our customers time and save our time as well. And so I don't actually really believe in this hypothesis as much anymore because like I said, you really should be able to run an outbound campaign and then get responses and then tweak it and get more. If you run an outbound campaign and you're getting zero responses and try three, four different things, you need to be thinking about changing your list or changing your offer. I'm not sure if you have an opinion specifically when you onboard customers about how you work through this. And I was like very so how many compan and uh and know what's how my steak going to get cooked and I'm like before I was like oh we're going to do six different type of cup look alive magnets uh we're going to do social listening we're going to do website and at the end of the day most of the time what is your case studies okay and the way I'm thinking about case studies is really simple if you have a case studies with I don't know Nike cool I'm going to figure out everybody else that is in the apparel or footwear or anything and like hey those those guys would like to look would like to be like Nike one day cool this is what we need for the guy you have aiming to be one day uh and by the way do you want it where we did put them we're going to give it to you for free that solve most of my problem that get like to be honest 80% of all the responses that we need or the result that we're getting for customer there's always age cases about okay like uh there's something happening and then try different things but as I said like lookal is usually the good thing to go and then how do I relate to the offer you know at the end of the day it's always something but yeah I was trying to complex things and usually it's always the same yeah totally agreed and so again that's why we launched free tests because we felt that we could just cut through the noise a little bit more um when you're prompting AI big thing again what would you research about your customers for 10 minutes and how would that change your message if you have insane prompting like You you sent me a dog the other day. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and uh I I gave it to Harvey and he looked like I'm not even prompting him. As close as that, Steve, what's so funny is um so there's two hacks to prompting. I feel like one is you got to get some kind of voice to text dictation service. I'm using Whisper Flow right now, but um you got to do something because you're going to type and it's just going to hold you back from actually putting in all the things that you should do. And then um asking chat tot make a prompt for you also works really well. Works pretty well. Yeah, there are some things that work with AI prompting that are so odd that like if you ask it, hey, you know, take as much time as you need, but just remember if you get this wrong, I'm going to get fired. So, I really need you to be like, I don't know why. My life is on the line. Yes. I don't know why that makes a difference, but anyway. So, um uh this is just our framework for how we prompt AI. The big thing I would say when I look at people's AI prompts is they're not giving enough examples. And so examples is something that you could do where you say like this is the prompt. But if you think about the chatbt interface, you can put into the API call and say like given this input, this is what I want the output to look like and given this input, this is what I want the output to look like and then run it after that. And I think if you're creating one sentence, you need at least two examples. And if you're creating something longer than a sentence, you need four examples. And if you're doing industry classification, you need like six, seven examples in there. And so that's just a new prompting rule that we've created since I made this. And always beg. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is just a bunch of examples of honestly AI generated things to give you examples, things that you can do. And a lot of these I probably wouldn't even do anymore because they're so old that oh, this company analogy thing, I just wouldn't suggest anybody does that. Um, this will still work really well. I've never used your company an emoji before. Bro, did it work well? It never worked well for me. So, the way I can tell that it never worked well is because nobody ever complimented me. Because when we send a good AI generated line, people would be like, "Oh, thank you so much for finally sending me a great email." And nobody ever said anything about it. Okay. Interesting. Huh. All right. Um, did this does this and then that isn't even There was somebody who made that. I'm so sorry. Local restaurant call still doing it to this day. Local restaurant call out. Yeah. Yeah. That that one is like Jordan Crawford. hates me for that one. Why? I Oh, he hates this one. But I like this a lot. I think for like local service based businesses, it feels like more local people, they want to feel like, oh, like who's this guy? We don't my wife been there. We love it. Yeah. When we do deal sourcing campaigns, sometimes people will respond to this as the PS line and not to the email. And they'll literally just respond back to us and they're like, "Oh, I love that steakhouse. I was there the other day." And I'm like, "Oh, but do you want to sell your company? You want to sell your company?" So, yeah. I love this one. Jordan Crawford hates me for this. um a case for using GPT to write your emails. This is just one case. I have a whole post about this. Um we were running this campaign and uh it just is just a perfect example of how Play was able to increase the positive response rates for a C. This was actually for instantly.ai. Um, and we tried a ton of common things that people think that they should trying and the AI generated messaging beat out the technographic integration campaign, the super short messaging, doing a lookalike campaign, and then it also beat out founders that didn't have a sales team, and it beat out newly hired VPs of sales as well. So, it's just a little thing. I said the trigger of the year last year was built by Trigify for social listening. Still works to this day. I would agree with that. Um, these are just some ideas that you can use to invalidate cold email as a channel that's just not going to work for you. I'm not sure if you want have anything to say about that. Um, you should have less than 3,000 people in your town. Yeah, you should ad. So, we ran some experiments and so we said domains and what they look like and it turned out that it didn't matter. This person closed a huge deal just from our Camille at like Invictus emails, so it doesn't matter. Um, and in this in the space that they're in, they need like certifications and they need there's got to be a lot of trust and things and nobody mattered. And they closed the deal with Korean Airlines. This is crazy. Yeah. So, like the domains don't matter. Likely to engage versus random leads from Apollo. I've never seen this make a difference. Yeah. Okay. Agreed. Calendar links versus request for meetings. I'm interested what you think about this. Uh I have a strong opinion on this. Every time we add a calendar link, it doesn't work. Doesn't work. Yeah. You have to suggest two times. We suggest two times uh a day and you suggest two day per. So suggest two times per day and then that's what we do. It's not just Tuesday or Thursday at 10 2 p.m. It's like Tuesday at 10 and 3 or Thursday at 11 and 2. Yeah. That's what works for the best for us. Uh and we don't get respons get kind because I think people feel lazy. Yes. They would I think they would rather send theirs. Yeah. Or so we search. Oh, by the way, send me your calendar if none of those time works. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you request a meeting, does it matter how long you ask for? Asking for seven minutes versus 15 minutes versus 30 minutes. I actually have never seen this big. I don't think those guys, yeah, I'll only take going to take like 8.5 minutes of your time. Yeah. Do for me. So, basic subject lines versus object other subject lines. I know people love to hate on quick question or a question for first name or some of these very common subject lines. They're very common because they work. And if you don't have a subject line that's beating the common ones, like I would love for you to have a subject line that beats the common ones, but sometimes you just can't make that. And so some of these common ones will outperform your best ideas. Um quick cushion is the best thing for us. Yeah. And so there's that. We try to make it two to three words that somebody uh a customer or colleague would have reached out to them for. And then we try to make the preview text look like it's possible that it's just a regular email coming to them. So that's another thing. Um sending at different times during the day. Sometimes we get asked about this. I know that sending on Friday afternoon and Monday morning is not great, but other than that it doesn't really matter. I love adding PS lines. I still Wait a question. I'm sending seven days a week. Yeah. I So you told me to send seven days a week and went to fun and sealed. Yeah, but we got a drop off in responses. We did that. So do are you tracking like do you get the same amount of responses on Saturday? I'm still getting responses. That's kind of what I'm trying to get. I'm not going to get like the same volume, but I'm going to get like if I get like seven in a day on a on a on a on a not on Friday. It's always lower. something like seven or five on a on the day of the week and I get like maybe three or four during the weekend per day like that's fine for me. Okay, cool. Interesting. Um, so some future of cold email stuff. So, email deliverability. I changed my opinion on this when I uh when I talked vicariously through somebody else about that Google account manager and the fact that they care way more about fishing than cold email, which makes a lot of sense. Um, I've already been speaking to sending platforms that mimic human behavior. So if we have to go there, we'll go there. Um I believe that data costs are going to start approaching zero and AI agents are going to be here to stay. I mean Clayent has been absolutely insane ever since we've been doing things doing work for free. Patrick Spilchowski just created like a clay table that automatically created a web app using lovable via the API and like a bunch of things like this is just happening more and more evolving role of STRs. I think if it can be automated, it'll be taken off their plate and they'll just be focusing on things that they actually have to be doing. Um, I think age domains are going to make a big difference. I don't know any other like future of cold email things that you would think about. No, this is the real deal. Yeah, but not AISDR. Yeah. Well, so let's talk about that. Why do you think AISDRs aren't going to work even though we're kind of like a version of some of these AIDS? Because you still have to think like we're human. They don't like these things that how would an AI would think about I'm going to make a typo and a manager some because then they're going to correct me and then I'm going to take the opportunity to get on a call that thinking like because you have to think like you meant and that thing I don't think yeah I would have level of thinking like the forward message we were talking last night I don't know where like how you would have approached that thing when yeah yeah so I also think that so when we were building clay when I worked there the if there was ever a option between picking something that would make something more flexible for the users or easier to use we picked flexibility every time which is you know now the biggest complaint but also the biggest power of clay and that's where I think the AISRs go wrong is they feel like they found a playbook and they want to stuff everybody into that playbook that works but you really need much more flexibility than that yeah um I think they'll nail it one day because I mean I so the real problem with AISRs in my opinion more more than anything is they make a promise that they can do outbound for anybody and we know as service providers we can't do outbound for everybody and you're not going to be successful every time. Money you will to pay me I would not take cyber security I would never take cyber security ever again. Yeah. Exactly. And so that's the I think that's more of the issue is um the overpromise. The overpromise. Yeah. Yeah. because they're making it sound like oh there's one AISDR company that like they posted they were like all of our customers got you know 700 meetings in the you know in whatever and I was like I got a thousand positive responses oh in the past 30 days and I was like I got a thousand positive responses for one person what are you talking about and so it's got I really got to ratchet up a little bit more but I mean anyway now we've been doing this for an hour and 20 minutes any final thoughts that you want to make sure well I hope everyone enjoyed this if you made it all the way here. I super appreciate you. Um, I hope you found this valuable. I wish I could say that Enzo and I can do this all the time, but Enzo lives on the other side of the world. So, maybe we could do a Riverside thing if people like this. We're going to do it in Let's do it in September. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah, we can do it again in September. We'll get another video for everybody. Thanks so much for watching and uh I guess this is the time I should say subscribe, but thanks so much for watching. Bye, everybody. Cheers.