How to avoid being spammy while cold-emailing?
I think the title mostly clears the question I have.
Hi, I am Mukul and I am currently working on Changelogg.io. To get initial users and feedback, I am trying to post in forums and cold-emailing relevant people. How do you find the right balance between sending the right message to convey the product and sound less spammy? Struggling with this currently
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Hi Mukul,
The top 3 tips from my experience with Mailmeteor:
PS: you must be very careful about how you send emails, especially cold emails. By following these best practices you will increase your opening rate and avoid falling into spam: https://support.mailmeteor.com/introduction/quick-start/sending-guidelines
If you'd like to try Mailmeteor, here is the link: https://mailmeteor.com
Thanks for the above points!
An important thing I've learnt while doing cold outreach for Somma is the importance of qualifying your leads before emailing them. You have to do your homework to make sure they are the kind of people who would be interested by what you offer. Sending an email to the wrong person will sound spammy no matter how good your email is.
I hope the solid advice from this thread help you get your emails answered! I know how hard finding initial customers to talk to can be. :)
Great question!
Here's a teardown I did of a great cold email someone sent me (and what they could have improved).
And here's a podcast episode with Baird Hall (founder of Wavve.co) where he goes into detail about how he used cold outreach to find his first customers.
Happy to answer any specific questions too!
I listened to this podcast last week. It was amazing with great insights and I started wondering on this question after that :)
That's a great teardown! It got me thinking on various points which are currently missing in my email.
This might sound like novice questions but would love to know your thoughts:
Thanks, glad you found them helpful!
Unfortunately, the answer to both of those questions (based on what I know about your situation) is... it depends.
To answer your question in a more vague (but infinitely more useful) way, think of your sales process in terms of a small series of steps. At each step, you're reducing the perceived risk, and increasing the expected reward for the prospect.
A demo call is reasonably high risk from a first email (in most cases). You're asking for a stranger's time. And time is precious. They also haven't probably had much time to understand the value of the reward yet.
Instead, ask yourself, what's the smallest action you could ask them to take which would be a step towards buying your product?
Sometimes, that's a call. Often it's a question via email. What's one thing you need to find out in order to be able to send them a follow-up email that'll make them really understand if/why they need your product?
Again, it depends. Definitely don't lie.
None of that is usually information that is relevant to the person you're emailing in a first email.
At that stage, I often go with something like "I'm working on this thing that removes { pain } for { people like you }".
Without knowing your product I don't know if that'd work for you though.
It's all about personalization IMO.
In order to sound less spammy you have to research the contact before hand and demonstrate within the first sentence that you know who they are and that you have a good reason to contact them!
Agreed with this ^ quality is way more important then quantity in this case. People like it when it shows you're proactive and you give a shit about them.
One other tip is to be short, concise and have a clear ask - it's annoying when there's a confusing ask at the end.
Yeah, this was kind of the question I had in my mind. When I started working, I got a few advice like "You should send 50-100 emails a day, etc to have even small conversions". So I got confused about whether I should prefer quantity or quality. As mentioned above, I think the quality is the answer. I will try to focus more on that from now on.
#1 reason how to make your sales succeed is to be relevant! Even if you pick the right company where you product is a fit, if you ping the wrong stakeholder, you made a huge mistake and thats a #1 mistake I see new founders making. Say you are selling an adtech product and you focus on performance marketing. If you ping a marketer, but they focus on brand, its irrelevant to them. Usually if they are a good person they can redirect to the other department or CMO but its not their KPI, or duty so its irrelevant. Don't waste your time on wrong stakeholders, do your research and test it out. You need a clear user persona.
Having the right stakeholder is crucial.
That and most developers forget that most people get lost in numbers. "It will save you ___ compared to ___" is about as much as you need. No math!
People here left legit advice on personalizing your email and keeping it concise, but let me share one tip that I believe has been a defining factor when I cold emailed.
That is... ruthless follow-up. 😃Seriously, I'd need to send 5 emails to someone until they replied something and 5 more afterward until I finally land a meeting with them.
Today people get a gazillion of emails daily. Yours will likely be lost unless you keep being persistent.
Also one last thing. Following up has nothing to do with being impolite.
Your email is unsolicited? It's spam.
Always know who your customer is. Like really drill down and get into the finer details as this helps a great deal. People look at cold calling as this bad thing to do but it's honestly not that bad when you are reaching out to someone with relevant products, otherwise, it is spammy.
Sometimes the best thing to do is create actionable and useful content and share that instead of sales focused. Unfortunately with so many SaaS platforms and new software coming out, there are tribes of salespeople coming with them and that means people get more and more cold to direct sales messaging.
Changelogging looks advanced to me, even with no-code but the article you have in the blog is 6 reasons to have a changelog which appears to be for beginners. So I suppose the question is who are you targeting? Small non-tech teams? Or technical people? Right now I can't really tell and I would say the content addresses non-tech people but the platform appears to be for technical people. I honestly do not know many people outside of the tech world that will use or hear of Github.
Ultimately put the work in to understand your customer and how you can help them individually. Automation and doing things quickly is not the way right now.
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