Critical Email Guidelines to Follow & Common Cold Email Mistakes | Lead Generation Machine | Sales

1. Length, tonality, & your first sentence: Hey, what's up, guys? So in this section, we're gonna learn about length tonality and your first sentence when it comes to your cold emails. Now, when it comes to the email length, you have two options here. If you're just getting started, I highly recommend you write a short email that's about 3 to 4 sentences, and basically you want to communicate. You know exactly how you can bring value to that company and at the end asked him for a meeting. So again, if your new T emails go ahead and stick with the 3 to 4 sentences. But if you want to a different strategies, I know that the long form e mails do work between 8 to 9 sentences so longer. Emails do require a lot more effort and take a lot more skill when it comes to copy writing . But they can also be very effective as well. So you know, if you want to get your feet a little bit wet and you want to try different strategies and write longer emails, you can go ahead and try that. But if you just want to write short e mails from now until forever short emails will definitely work for you as well. So it's definitely just up to you in terms of you know what your style is. But again, if your new three force and this is is good, So next part is where two people essentially view their email. So there's a statistic out there that basically, you know, everything in the pink. Ah, 67% of people open emails from a mobile device, whether it be a iPad, iPhone android device or any other type. So I mean, 67% of the people are going to look at it from their phones. And that's why you want to make your emails very bite size and phone size, because people are gonna look through it really quick and determine whether or not they should spend time on it. So only 32% actually opened on the desktop. Eso again. If you can write for mobile devices, it's going to translate well onto the desktop. So when you write your emails, it's all about thinking mobile first. So when it comes to, you know, actually writing the email, you wanna have a conversational style. So what you do not want to do is to seem like every other sales person out there. So a lot of times sales people have a bad rap in that, you know, they try to sell you junk, they'll say something like, Oh, this is brand new. This is gonna blow you away. This is the best thing ever. And the moment somebody gets that whiff of that tonality, it's like, Oh, boy, he's trying to sell me. So that's why you want to keep a casual tonality as if you were talking to a friend at the same time you are keeping it profession? No, Like I was just saying, You want to write more casually, but keep it professional like you're talking to someone at the bar or talking to a friend. You don't want to appear to Sales E. And the thing is, people like to do business with people that they like. You just want to come off as very relatable. You're listening to their problems. You're not trying to push any product. All you're saying is like, Hey, man, I know is that you're doing that. I'm doing this. I think we might be able to help each other so If it makes sense to talk, let me know what your calendar looks like. So basically, you know, you wanna have a conversational tonality and really build report with your copy writing. So a good example of conversational tonality is Hey, Patrick, I saw that you recently died. It added up. So, you know, you're basically just talking to them in plain English. There's nothing about that that sounds sales e. It's just talking like a normal person. The bad examples of tonality is Are you ready to be blown away? Right? That sounds very sales e or good day, sir. My company just launched, right? Nobody wants to hear that. Or if you are very Internet marketed, E and you say something like four limited time. So those kind of emails basically don't work at all like nobody's going to read them, though he's gonna want open them. And for sure, no one is gonna respond. So that's why you want to keep it cool and casual and just keep it like you're talking to a friend. So now that you understand the casual tonality side of things, let's talk about the first sentence that you're going to write So when you're writing your first sentence, you want to avoid talking about yourself. So an example would be My name is Patrick. And let me tell you about how great my company is the moment they read that they are not interested because they don't care about you. They care about themselves. So you want to be mindful of what your prospect wants to hear, and for the most part, they're gonna want to hear how you can save them time money or make more money. And so you want to keep that framework in your head as you write your emails and we're gonna go through some scripts on you know exactly how to write that. But from a strategic vision standpoint, this is the framework you want to keep in mind. 2. How to personalize your emails: So now we're gonna show you how you can personalize your e mails. And what it means to personalize is to make your emails custom and make the person feel like you're writing and email specifically for them, rather than them feeling like you're, you know, moving down your hitless in just emailing just anybody. So when it comes to personalization, one thing you can do is bring up mentions in the news. So if you see a company yum mentioned in the news for whatever reason, maybe they want award. Or maybe, you know, something really great happened for them. You could bring that up in your e mails and they will feel special because you did. Another thing you can do is you know, if they want any type of awards, like if they, you know, were awarded Forbes, you know, 100 or INC 5000 companies, something like that. You could bring that up and make them few a little born special about themselves and hopefully that will build report and get you that meeting. The next thing to do is use hyperlinks, So hyperlinks are interesting because a medicated example let's say you are selling S E O consulting services, and you're helping people rank on google dot com. So if you search in someone's name someone's company name and it shows that they are on the seventh page of Google, what you can do is you can email that company and say, like, Hey, you know, when you type in your company name and Google, you actually appear on the seventh page. Here's the hyperlink I helped companies. You get ranked on number one on Google, help these people. So let me know if it makes sense to talk. So if you send something like that, that's some real pressure, and it shows them that you actually can provide some value in. It shows that you're turning a latent pain into a realized pain with hyperlinks. So that's just one example. There are many other examples of hyperlinks, depending your industry, so you just gotta be creative about it when you're personalizing your subject lines, which is another trick is you want to put the first name of the person you're reaching out to in the subject line. So would be like, you know, if they were Patrick at Wave Studios, which is my company. It would be Patrick, um, my first name. And then whatever subject line you're going to write, like how toe generate more leads or how to get more traffic. Whatever the case may be, using the person's name is one strategy. Another thing is, you know, when you put in your unique benefit into the subject line, what you could do is actually add the geographic location to make a little bit more personalized. I help businesses in the Los Angeles area generate more foot traffic. Eso That's just example of just using a geographic location like Los Angeles putting that into, you know, combining it with your unique benefit. And it's gonna make you feel like you're writing a email specifically targeted for them. So personalization does, you know, increase your response rate and the rate that people will take a meeting with you because it makes them feel special. So that's something you want to keep in mind if you want to write personalized e mails 3. Format and spacing: alright, guys. So let's go ahead and talk about how to format and space out your e mails. So when it comes to spacing, you want to think about how to make it as easy to read as possible. And you know, the thing is, if you write long paragraphs or you write things that are hard to read or daunting to read , people might think like Oh, man, this is so long I don't want to do the actual work. So again you want to make it as easy to read as possible. So I'm gonna go ahead and give you an example. Take a look at this email. It's about four sentences long, and what I did was I combined all the sentences into one big paragraph, so it doesn't look too bad. But when you compare it to another email, this is the exact same copy. But the difference is I broke down the email into four different paragraphs, and basically each line is either a sentence or two sentences, and the reason why you want to do that is because when people are looking at this on their phone, especially the spacing allows them to read the sentence really easy and then move onto the next one and then move on to the next one. So again, remember your goal. The first sentence is to get them to read the second sentence and then so forth. And so the end, where you actually ask for a meeting, and it's very different from comparing it toothy first example where everything is bunched up into one paragraph, it does look a little daunting to read, and especially when it appears on the phone, it's gonna look very. It's gonna look like a lot of work, and so that's why you want to space it out. And the rule of thumb is basically for every sentence or two sentences you're gonna want Teoh create another paragraph just for that, and it definitely makes it easier on the eyes. So now, when it comes to formatting, you do not want to use any graphics or images or any complex HTML in your cold emails. Now for marketing emails like of newsletters, that's fine. But when it comes to be to be cold emails and you're emailing something buddy that you don't know, you definitely should keep it as simple as possible. So you want to make your emails look like how it would if you were to send your friend a friendly email, right? If you're sending email to your friend, you're not gonna want to, you know, add a lot of images or graphics or HTML You're just gonna write it as is. Here's an example of sales buzz Uh, an email I got from sales buzz. And so the thing of sales buzzes. I got this email from an employee at sales Buzz, and I was like, I don't remember signing up for sales buzz. I don't even know who sales buzz is. And basically, I get this image and I get all these different colors and it seems very sales or marketing . And I was like, I never signed up for this, So I'm not even gonna read. I just deleted it. Um, now here's an email actually got from Tai Lopez. And as you can see, Tylo Pez basically broke down his email where every sentence has its own paragraph and it's very easy to read, and basically it draws your ID to the top all the way to the bottom, and it gets you to read the whole thing, which is the goal, and at the end, you know it's to get someone to take in action. When you are writing your emails, just space it out every sentence or two sentences. You want to create a new paragraph, and that's going to make it a lot easier on the eyes for people to read your email hunt their mobile device. 4. Using a company email & formatting your email signature: Hey, what's up, guys? So in this section, we're going to show you why using a company email is important exactly how you're going to format your email signature at the bottom of every single email that you send out. So the company email. So check this out, guys, when you receive an email from a email address like Patrick at oracle dot com or Patrick at deng worldwide dot com, it's gonna be a lot more credible when you compare it to Patrick at gmail dot com or patrick at yahoo dot com. So if you're really serious about business, I highly recommend you not use a Gmail or Yahoo Ah, domain name because it basically makes you sound very unprofessional. And it seems like you're just some random person sending emails now. If you do have a company domain name attached to your email is going to make you look like a real business, and it's gonna build you a lot more credibility. Increase the odds of someone responding to your email. So if you don't have a company email, here's some things that you can do. You can attach your domain name that you own to Google maps for business. And so how it works is, let's say, for example, for me I own the domain name much a perfect dot com, which was one of my side businesses. And basically what I could do is I can purchase the at much a perfect domain name for Google Maps and make an email like Patrick at much a perfect dot com. Or, if I have employees Sally at much of perfect dot com, And for each email, it's only gonna cost $5 a month. So if you're actually serious about business and you want to get clients and you want to do it with cold emailing, I highly recommend you, You know, by a domain name that fits your company and then get the at your business name dot com because it's going to make you a lot more credible. And it's only $5 a month, so it's definitely worth the investment. Now let's go ahead and dive into how you want to format your email signature. So the goal of the email signature is to provide more information about yourself, build more credibility around your brand and appear more profession now. So is the essential information that is included. When to do that is your first name your last name? The role at the company, The company name your contact information. And this is optional social proof. So on the bottom, right. It's gonna be an example of the email signature that I used when I was at Oracle. And so the top it's gonna be my first name and my role enterprise account executive. And basically, the department I was in or the solutions I was selling was Human Capital Management Solutions at Oracle that you go the company name. I got my office phone number, my mobile phone number, my email address in there, Just in case anybody for its my email along it makes it a lot more easier for people to find my email and send it around and also has my physical location, which is optional for you. For me, because I was a sales person being in Redwood Shores in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley, I could actually meet people in person for a business meeting. So putting that in made it really easy. And at the bottom, you know, again, this one is optional. You could put in any type of social proof like if you are a company was featured in Forbes or Bloomberg or see and then you could basically put that into the bottom and hyperlinked them so that when people click on it, it goes to that article where they're writing about your company. Now, if you don't have any social proof, no. One's Britain about you quite yet, and you're just starting out, here's what you could do. Ah, you could offer some sort of value on the bottom of your email signature and attach a hyperlink so you could say something like Learn how you can and then add the value prop and then hyperlink that. So when someone clicks on the learn how you can, it'll take them to your website, and basically, what you could put on the website is case, study or a customer success story. Basically, when they go into your website, you could put in a case study or customer success story so it builds more credibility and shows that you are an actual legitimate business. Some other copy can uses, say something like See what everyone's talking about. Hyperlink. That or the bottom you could say like See how other fintech companies are generating more leads are generating leads and someone who is interested in fintech. My click that and then go on to your website. So again, this is optional. But it's just one way to build more social proof so that people are more likely to think of you as a legitimate business and take a meeting with you. 5. Having a professional website: all right. So having a professional website, it's going to be very important when it comes to B two b sales. And here's why. So the first thing someone does when they receive a cold email from you is check your website because that's going to be the place where there you're gonna have all your information. Who, your customers, ours and what services you offer. So what prospects are essentially doing is they're trying to see if it makes sense to take a meeting with you. So that's why you want to make your website very professional and clear on your website. You want to clearly demonstrate how you help your clients. Having testimonies or customer success stories is gonna help quite a bit, and you want to make sure your website is very clean and clear and the aesthetic makes sense. I see other websites where they have, like all these buttons and hyperlinks and everything. It's very confusing on what you're trying to do. So you want to make sure your website has a clear objective in mind and on the website, what you can also do is have a place where people can put in their email or join a newsletter so that you have their email and you could follow up with them later on for sure . What you want to do on your website is have a contact page where you want to make it very easy for people to reach out to somebody that works at the company, your company if they choose to do so. So let's go ahead and go through an example of someone who I feel has a really clean, effective website. Alright, guys. So we are on the lob dot com website and as you can see, it's a very clean, clear aesthetic. They're only showing you what they want to show you. And basically everybody in here has a purpose. So on the right in the beginning, you know, you could try right now. Over here, it tells you exactly what kind of services they offer and what makes them special scrolling down, you know, trusted by great companies. So it basically says that they're very credible. They work with some really big companies like c G. You know, couchsurfing booking dot com all really big companies again. It shows the features of what their product has very clear, and what's really interesting is at the very top. There's a button that says Try it now but it also says contact sales. So you want to make it very easy for your prospects to be able to contact you if they choose to from your website. And so that's everything we have to cover on having a professional website again. Just make it clean, make it clear, show what features and benefits you have to offer and any customer success stories as well . 6. Inspiring Curiosity: Alright, guys. So one of the most important frameworks toe have in mind when you are writing your cold emails is you're trying to inspire curiosity and let me go ahead, explain exactly what I mean by that. So when you're inspiring a prospects, curiosity, what you want to think about is when you're writing your email, you do not want to give away too much information. Your goal for your cold email is to get them curious enough to want to take a meeting with you. So you just want to say just enough to get the prospect to give the prospect an idea of what you do and how you can add value to their business. And then you want to ask for the meeting, and the reason why you want to inspire so much curiosity is because if you give away too much information, they're going to make a decision on whether or not taken meeting with you based on that information. So that's why you want to hold out a little bit and keep them hungry so that you there are a lot more incentivized to have learned more so that they could grow their business And the thing is, when you get them on the phone through your email, you can sell a lot better when you're talking to somebody over the phone or in person one on one. And this is a lot more effective than trying to sell something from a straight email and meets a very low probability that if you send someone a cold email that they're just gonna buy something right from their website, that just doesn't really happen, especially in B two b world. So the goal again is to limit the information that you give away so that you can get a phone meeting with um or an in person, depending on the type of business you're running. Something to keep in mind is you don't want to write anything in the email that that would automatically disqualify you in the prospects mine. So again, like when you are writing emails, don't make any assumptions. Don't exactly tell the prospect point by point exactly what you do. All you want to do is give them a general idea of what you do and how you could help people and sparked their curiosity. Enoughto learn more on the phone call. You might figure out that it may not be the best fit to work of each other, but the goal is to get that phone call in the first place. Now, if you disqualify yourself by giving away too much information in the very beginning, then you're not going to get any meetings at all. And you're basically dead in the water. So that's how you're going to inspire curiosity, so just keep that framework in mind as we go along the course. 7. How to email info and generic emails: alright, guys. So a lot of you might run into this challenge and where you can't get the person's actual email address and all you got to work with is a generic email, like in full at when you're handling thes generic emails. Here's what you want to do There's gonna be two different strategies that you can take. The 1st 1 is if you don't know the person's name at all. And all you have is that info at company dot com. Where you want to do is put yourself in a position where you ask for help. So an example of that would be, Hey there, I need a little help. I'm looking for the appropriate person who handles marketing, dot, dot dot and then you continue along with your email. So by putting yourself in the position where you're not commanding to talk to who's in charge, you're just asking for a little bit of help. Whoever gets that email is obviously going to help you out, because why wouldn't you help someone who's asking for out? And so that's one strategy you can go about? That's really effective, and I've done this quite a bit for local businesses. So strategy to work. If you know who the owner of the business is, What you want to do is just use their first name because a lot of times the business owner will be the one who is checking that info at email address. So in the subject line, what you want to do is just put the person's first name in there. So that would be the owner of the business. And then you would just continue on with your subject line like you normally would, and the first sentence or the first dressing is high Evan first name, and then you dive into the body. So this is only when you know exactly who the owner of the business is, and that's and you're kind of taking a guess. But But it does work so again, two strategies. The 1st 1 is if you ask for a little bit of help. The other one is You're basically just using the owners first name in the subject line. That's all you got to know when it comes to handling generic e mails 8. Using emojis, exclamation points, and smiley faces: Alright, guys. So this is actually an interesting one that a lot of people ask me. They want to know when it's appropriate to use emojis exclamation points and smiley faces. So when it comes to thes things, most of the emails, the code emails that you send out you actually don't need them. Ah, lot of times they don't necessarily add any value and don't really increase the odds of someone taking a meeting with you. Like think about it just because you use emojis. How is that going to encourage someone to want to email you back? It probably isn't. One thing I also add is also depends on the context of the situation Now, even though most people most emails don't really need it. If you did want to use it, you really have to think deeply on whether or not the prospect finds it appropriate. Like, for example, if there are young startup high growth and they just want some type of award and you know that whoever you're emailing is also young, they might be a lot more receptive to an emoji, especially if they won an award you could use, like money, science of money, emojis or trophy emojis, and they may actually like it. But it really depends on the context. And if you're going for speed, just don't even use it because it doesn't necessarily help that much. But if you do use it, even Smiley faces to don't use to many, I would probably just limit it to one emoji or exclamation point slash smiley face per email. Because if you get a email with a ton of emojis in it, it's hard to take it seriously in this day and age at this time. Overall, my recommendation is probably not used it off, but if you do, just limited to one per email. 9. Attachments, jargans, & Punctuations: use a deal when it comes to attachments using jargon and punctuation for attachment specifically, basically, you do not want to add any attachments to a cold email, so some examples would be a pitch deck or any type of white papers any type of additional information you do not want to add. And that's because if you give too much information, you're not inspiring curiosity. So in the email, you just want to keep it short, sweet and just make it so that the person wants to take a meeting with you to learn more. But if you add a pitch deck or a white paper, it basically gives too much information. And from my experience as a sales person and entrepreneur, nobody really reads pitched X or Y papers, especially if they have no idea who you are now. Jargon don't use any type of vocabulary that your prospects may not understand and some example of bargains and technology World is, you know, using a P I Switches application program interface, or cess that, and SAS stands for software as a service. If you use like these words that people don't really understand, they're not going to relate to you, and they're not going to respond to your email. So what you want to do is just explain things in plain English like you would a friend or your parents and assume that they don't understand what all these technical terms are and inspire curiosity for them to want to learn what these things are now. Punctuation. What you want to do. It is limit the amount of bolding, italics and all caps that you use in any type of email. And the reason is because you just want to keep the email really casual, like if you are emailing a friend, it's very unlikely that, you know you may not use all caps or voter attacks. Just use plain tax and plain English and make it as relatable as possible to a human being . And that's going to increase the odds that someone will respond to you. 10. Avoid Hard Time Commitments: Okay, so we're gonna talk about one of the biggest and most common mistakes I see entrepreneurs and salespeople make. And that's putting down a hard time commitment when they are sending their cold emails. Okay, so let's to go ahead and talk about what these kind commitments actually mean. So when you're asking for a meeting, you do not want to suggest a specific time. For example, tomorrow at 1 p.m. Or Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. The reason is because you have no idea what this person is scheduled is like they might be extremely, extremely busy. And if you suggest the time where they have an important meeting, they're definitely going to say no and they're not going to reschedule their schedule just for you. So that's why you want to avoid those specific time commitments. Now, there's gonna be a lot of stuff on the Internet that will suggest that you do do that. It doesn't work, and I've tried it myself. And basically, if they do want to take a meeting with you and you suggest a specific time, they can't actually take the meeting at then there's gonna be a lot of back and forth ends really annoying and to reiterate you don't know the prospects schedule. So it's just really unproductive to make any type of assumptions on whether or not somebody can commit to a certain time. And so the solution to this problem is instead of asking for a specific time on when you guys should have a meeting, what you want to do is just ask the prospect when they are available, and by doing this you are respecting their time. And of course, this might make it a little bit difficult for you because you have to rearrange your schedule based on you know what time they come back with. But as a sales person or entrepreneur, that's just the game, because you want to respect their time and you want to be there when they're ready, especially when it's going to be an important company or really big company that can give you a lot of business. You just want Teoh a bend a little bit so that you work with their schedule and you know the winner goes to the person that could be most flexible in this situation. So overall, don't commit to hard time commitments. Don't ask for them as the prospect when they are available or when they have time for a meeting. 11. 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