Why should companies care about their sequences?

More engagement = Less Spam Reports = Protecting Deliverability = More value for data

Better yield from your lists – no matter how you build your prospect list, it costs time and resources to do that. The better your sequences perform, the better yield you’re getting from that list, which is exceptionally important. You don’t want to just burn your data budget.

There’s a number of ways you can frame copy depending on your goals – and the right outbound copy can help make sure you’re messaging and your goals are aligned.

What are the elements of effective cold email outreach?

There are three key elements to effective cold email outreach:

• Deliverables
• Data
• Copywriting ← we are addressing this in this guide

Without any one of these things, campaign performance suffers – people who say the copy doesn’t matter usually have pretty good copy – whether they know it or not.

What is the most important trait of strong copywriting?

Your offer has to be something people want and are willing to pay for – your offer is something you can play a/ a bit in the copywriting – what positioning, angle, or slice of the product really gets people fired up?

What does an effective cold email sequence look like? 

There are multiple “scales of awareness” that you need to be considerate of in your outreach – scales of awareness is a direct marketing concept, based on the work of Eugene Schwartz in his book Breakthrough Advertising.

Stage	What it is	What to focus outreach on
Unaware	The prospect doesn’t know they have a problem.	• Symptoms of the problems • Education.
Problem aware	The prospect knows they have a problem but doesn’t know how to solve it ← Hasn’t heard of your solution yet (or possibly even your category)	• Validating problem • Insights on how to solve • Insights on how peers have solved • Value props that focus on different ways of framing problem/solution
Solution aware	The prospect knows there are solutions but hasn’t chosen one ← May or may not have heard of your specific solution. Probably not in contact with Sales yet.	• Differentiators in how problem is solved Insights on how peers have solved • Value props that focus on different ways of framing problem/solution
Product aware	The prospect knows about the solution but isn’t sure it’s right for them ← May or may not have reached out/connected with Sales yet. May or may not have already tried other solutions.	• Unique mechanisms – what makes the way your solution delivers results a better fit for XYZ type of prospect than others? • Social proof that focuses on before/after outcomes
Most aware	The prospect knows about the product and is close to making a purchase ← They’re either already in your CRM or they’ve already DQ’d you and are looking at competitors.	• Unique mechanisms – what makes the way your solution delivers results a better fit for XYZ type of prospect than others?

You can’t necessarily know where on the scale the prospects on your list will fall – in some markets, nearly everyone in your ICP is at least solution aware. In other markets, you’ll have a mix where many are also unaware.

Certain triggers can give insight into where specific prospects are on the awareness scale – for example, first time founders might be in the unaware stage for the problem you solve. Second-time founders are likely problem-aware, but may not know there’s a solution.

The people who are most likely to respond to a meeting request are in the problem aware → product aware stages – that’s who we’re going to focus on writing messages for.

What are the elements of a strong value proposition

The 3 elements of a strong value proposition from You Exec are:

• Valuable (Prospect wants or needs it)
• Differentiated
• Substantiated (social proof/credibility)

Put it all together and that looks like:

“We help [types of prospects]  [do thing they need] [with desirable mechanism or without undesirable problem]”

• Substantiated: When you’re testing standalone value props in cold email, usually the “substantiated” part is implied (although you may also add an explicit credibility/social proof line below as part of your whole email.
• Valuable: The problem they need to solve or outcome they need to achieve is an element you may need to play with and test multiple variations of to find what gets the best response**
• Differentiated: You may also test whether leaning into the mechanism or problem avoidance works better here. 

Note: If you’re not sure what value prop performs best for your offer on cold channels, test multiple variations before you get too fancy with triggers.

What are the triggers to customize and segment messaging within a sequence? 

Once you know which value props work best for your audience(s), time to start thinking about triggers – and how they change the message. Here’s a few examples of common triggers:

• Hiring for a relevant role
• Headcount growth
• Tech used
• 1st time in role
• Multiple locations or remote workforce

• New in role
• Attending an industry event
• Similar to existing clients/case study clients

• Ads they’re running
• Recent website visitor (pro tip: treat them like they’re any other cold contact)
• Who they follow on LinkedIn (pro tip: treat them like they’re any other cold contact)
• Using a competitor 

Before taking the time to setup a trigger, ask yourself:

• Does segmenting this way increase the likelihood of relevance to my prospect?
• Does it meaningfully change anything about the message?
• Does it increase my chances of a positive response?

👉 A fantastic resource for finding just about anything you need to know on automating triggers and research for cold email (for free):https://www.youtube.com/@ericnowoslawski/videos ** Disclosure: I write a ton of outreach for Eric Nowoslawski’s agency. But even if I didn’t, I’d still recommend his resources for learning this stuff. I’m not incentivized in any way to make that rec.

How should you think about deploying AI for cold email outreach? 

A lot of people erroneously think AI is going to write their cold emails for them – to be fair, there’s a lot of influencers out there telling you it will. But even in an extremely AI-forward agency, we still have human copywriters.

Here’s how we use AI:

• Generating snippets for personalization and contextualization
• Generating ideas for testing

In my experience:

• Al is great at summarizing info into natural language for merging into your email…
• It is NOT good at generating whole email templates/frameworks

Pro-tip #1: The point isn’t how fancy you can get with your triggers and personalization –  As Eric Nowoslawski would say, “the point is to scale the message you would write manually with 5 min of research.” The reason for triggers is to capture and/or keep the prospect’s attention with information that is specific to them.

What are examples of frameworks for composing strong emails?

Here’s a couple of frameworks I rely on just about every time I write an email:

Framework 1: Value Prop First:

• Opening line – context/attention/relevance 
• Value prop 
• Additional context/relevance/proof 
• CTA

Example:

Example of Value Prop First

Hey {{first_name}} – saw your LinkedIn post about gearing up for Black Friday. We have a platform that helped several other independent beauty brands, like MegaLash and Farm-to-Face, support their rapidly increasing ticket volume last year – without adding any additional reps over the holidays. Basically, it brings every CS task and interaction into a single command center so reps can modify, update, submit new orders and communicate with customers from ONE tab. Worth taking a peek to see if it’s something to consider for your team as well?

Framework 2: Problem-Based Message

• Opening line-context/Ann/Relevance 
• Problem 
• Why it’s a problem (stats are great here) 
• Relevance-based CTA

Example of Problem-Based Message

Hey {{first_name}} – saw your LinkedIn post about gearing up for Black Friday. Don’t know if this is also an issue for your team, but most Customer Service reps are switching back and forth between 5-6 tabs for every CS inquiry that comes through. That tab-switching adds almost 2 minutes to each ticket they try to close. MegaLash and Farm-to-Face, 3x’d their support volume last year, without adding additional reps (even during the holidays). Any interest in how they did it?

How do you write a high-performing email subject line?

Your subject lines should never look like your marketing team wrote them –  no offense to marketing and there ARE occasional exceptions, but as a rule, none of the rules of writing great newsletter or marketing email subject lines apply to cold email.  In a way, you don’t WANT them to stand out or act like a headline.It’s counterintuitive, but you want your subject lines to feel like something a normal person would send to a coworker.

Here are the rules you want to master before you try breaking them and testing anything else:

• Keep it short – 2-3 words max
• Make it relevant to the content of the email – the reasons why are obvious.
• Take a casual tone – they should feel like something you might use in a 1:1 email to a colleague/coworker

Building Campaigns

How should you schedule touchpoints in an email campaign?

There are two schools of thought here:

1. Shorter sequences (3 emails) so you can cycle back through your lists faster
2. Longer sequences to get more tries at bat

I do more approach 1 today, and most people will probably fall into this bucket – but if you’re reaching out to notoriously hard to contact industries (like healthcare), more touch points over a longer period of time often perform better.

What Success Metrics should you look at to track the performance of your campaign?

Much has changed with this in just the last 6 months – changes with Google finally killed off open tracking for cold email (unless you want deliverability issues), so now the metric is simple: look at your replies.

Right now, look for 1 positive response for every 300 contacts – as the marker of a campaign worth scaling. Not every campaign will hit those metrics – sometimes they’re still worth scaling (depends on industry/offer). Some will exceed those metrics (often when they have a killer offer and a hungry market).

Early stats to look at for overall reply rates:

• Leading KPI: 2-3% total reply rate
• Below 1% reply rate, there’s a deliverability problem

What categories of tools should you consider to support your campaigns?

Pay attention to what the top outbound agencies are doing – most of them talk about this stuff freely on LinkedIn. Because of the volume of email they send and the variety of clients they support, they’re always going to be using the the very best tools for scaling outreach.

Tool category	Example vendors
Sequencers	This varies so much depending on your situation/team structure/org size. But in general, Instantly and Smartlead are the top choices right now. If you’re not in a position to switch, you might want to at least look at the deliverability tools platforms like Instantly offer, and use them to support the rest of your stack.
Data tools	At the time of this update, most people are using Apollo for their base data and then enriching or supplementing with other tools based on their needs/use cases. Other platforms to look at include: • Clay has a ton of enrichment and personalization use-cases. • Builtwith helps ID technology in use on prospect’s websites • Ocean.io helps find “lookalike” prospects Eric’s YouTube channel is a great place for ideas on which platforms will work best for what you’re trying to accomplish.
Spam Checkers	Mail Meteor is super helpful for making sure you’re not going to land in the Spam folder for easily avoidable mistakes.
Readability tools	Hemingway is a great app and Lavender is another to consider
Message Creation	Octave is a neat tool but you need to have good copywriting frameworks to train it on and get the best use.