Table of Content

  1. Understanding your ICP
  2. Building your User Persona
  3. How to think about your campaigns
  4. Approaches to use while writing emails
  5. How to personalize emails at scale
  6. What is not needed in your cold emails
  7. Writing good subject lines
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Writing Emails that get Replies!

Writing emails is easy however there’s a lot of stuff one has to keep in mind to prevent any spam flags from ticking off.

 

I got an email from a trusted influencer a while back, and guess why it landed in spam?

The guy basically used a link which is generally not identified by ESPs as a trusted link like youtube, calendly etc.

 

And even though the entire email is of just 2 sentences and I have opted into it, the link was enough to trigger it to the spam folder.

 

However, it’s not very hard to keep landing in the inbox if we just follow simple steps and don’t commit too many mistakes.

 

Let’s dive deep into it.

 

Intent / Relevance

 

Every email sent out should have a certain intent behind it and it should be targeted to a relevant person for it to work.

 

Example:

 

A company selling software to automate tax filings should reach out to people in the accounting department of companies in areas they service in.

 

If they are reaching out to people in the marketing department then the intent behind the email wouldn’t be justified and it would count as a non-solicited email.

 

Answering these 3 questions, would easily help you identify if the email sent by you has any valid intent behind it or not?

 

1: Who are you?

 

Here you would have to define what you are going to sell. It could be anything like a marketing service agency, revops software, ecomm clothing store.

 

2: What do you do?

 

Now you would be listing out your product specifications or services you provide. 

 

For example, as a marketing agency you could be helping brands set up and run google ad campaigns or, as a revops product you could be helping sales teams improve transparency of each reps quota.

 

3: Who can benefit from it?

 

Deciding who your product or service could be useful for is a very crucial step since this has to be accurate or else you would be constantly engaging with people who have no use for your product.

 

For example: The marketing agency that can set up and run google ads can only be helpful for companies that have an online presence and do not have an in house team of performance marketers.

 

If this agency goes to people who do not have online businesses or companies with an already established team of marketers they would have a slim chance of converting them into clients since their need is very low.

 

If at the end of question 3, it seems that the target prospects could make use of what you do then your intent is justified in sending that email 🙂

 

ICP persona building

 

With an idea of a set of people who might have some interest in your product we can easily build out a user persona which would later help us in writing emails.

 

Let’s take the example of a marketing agency specializing in helping businesses with google ads specifically and build out its user persona.

 

Intent: 

 

Reach out to decision makers in companies that run or might need help in running google ads.

 

Industries: 

 

In this case every company which is selling online or needs to have a strong presence over the web would be a fit for your services.

 

But how do we go about this at scale?

 

It’s easy, just go to the knowledge portal on apollo and copy all the industries present.

 

Now go to ChatGPT, and enter the list and ask GPT to find industries that have an online presence.

Once done, ChatGPT will return a list of industries with online presence.

 

You can check out industries that might not be a ideal target and take them out of targeting like the ones below

Decision-makers:

 

With the industries sorted out we need to find out which people we would need to target in those industries to talk to for our services.

 

Now people who would decide on Google Ads would probably be someone in marketing right?

 

NO!

 

It depends totally on company size.

 

You see smaller companies would probably not have marketing teams and the founders either themselves handle this or they outsource it to other agencies.

 

In companies with marketing teams, you would also need to reach out to branding teams, chief of strategy, revenue heads, and the CEO.

 

Ofcourse, the bigger the company the more the decision maker would most likely be the Head of Marketing.

 

So in Companies >1000 emp we should probably only target the head of marketing.

 

Job Titles to target would be:

 

Companies with <200 emp: Founders/CEO + Marketing people if any

 

Companies with 200-1000 emp: Founders/CEO + Marketing + Branding + Revenue team.

 

Companies with >1000 emp: Only Marketing team (everyone above manager level)

 

Persona building

 

Building a user persona basically means breaking down personality traits of your ideal customers to identify their pain points and different ways our offering would appeal to them.

 

In the case of a google ads agency, we sort of listed out industries and decision makers who would be an ideal fit.

 

How would we build their personas?

 

We would first of all find out use cases of google ads in an industry.

 

For instance, In the accounting industry, companies might use Google for advertisements related to loans, credit cards, insurance policies, investment opportunities, and financial planning services.

 

This helps us get a sense of what the people are looking to get out of their ads.

 

Then we would look into each of the decision maker profiles:

 

A quick look segments the decision makers into the list below:

 

Companies with <200 emp: Founder/CEO

 

Traits:

 

Direct decision maker

 

Interested in top line metrics | Revenue ($)

 

May or may not have an idea of Google Ads

 

More likely to outsource this work

 

Pain Points:

 

~ Low on execution time

 

~ Need to generate consistent outcomes from the channel

 

~ Low on budget

 

~ Channel didn’t perform as expected

 

~ Agencies didn’t deliver as promised

 

Companies with <200 emp: Marketing team

 

Traits:

 

Direct influencer in decision making

 

Interested in detailed case studies | Strategies, CPM, CPC 

 

Would at least have a working idea of the channel

 

More likely to outsource this work

 

Pain Points:

 

~ Agencies didn’t deliver as promised

 

~ Growing their TOFU

 

~ Creating high converting copies

 

~ Lowering CPC

 

Companies with 200-1000 emp: Founder/CEO

 

Traits:

 

Direct decision maker

 

Interested in top line metrics | Revenue ($)

 

May or may not have an idea of Google Ads

 

Might have an inhouse team of performance marketers

 

Pain Points:

 

~ Marketing teams not delivering quota

 

~ Channel isn’t explored yet

 

~ CAC is high

 

Companies with 200-1000: Marketing team / Branding team

 

Traits:

 

Direct influencer in decision making

 

Interested in detailed case studies | Strategies, CPM, CPC 

 

Would at least have a working idea of the channel

 

Might have an inhouse team of performance marketers

 

Pain Points:

 

~ Junk leads

 

~ High CPC

 

~ Low conversion rates

 

~ Bid/Budget optimisation

 

~ Funnel building

 

~ High converting copy writing

 

~ Media buying

 

Companies with 200-1000: Revenue team

 

Traits:

 

Indirect influencer in decision making

 

Interested in top line metrics | Revenue ($)

 

May or may not have an idea of Google Ads

 

Might have an inhouse team of performance marketers

 

Pain Points:

 

~ Need to increase MRR

 

~ Might not have explored Google Ads as a channel

 

~ Unable to extract consistent revenue from the channel

 

Companies with >1000 emp: Marketing Director

 

Traits:

 

Direct Influencer in decision making

 

Interested in detailed case studies | Strategies, CPM, CPC

 

Has an in depth knowledge of Google Ads

 

Might have worked with agencies previously

 

Likely to have an inhouse team of performance marketers

 

Pain Points:

 

~ Junk leads

 

~ High CPC

 

~ Low conversion rates

 

~ Bid/Budget optimisation

 

~ Funnel building

 

~ High converting copy writing

 

~ Media buying

 

Companies with >1000 emp: Marketing Head/ President/ VP/ Chief

 

Traits:

 

Direct decision maker

 

Interested in top line metrics | Revenue ($)

 

Has an in depth knowledge of Google Ads

 

Has worked with tons of agencies before

 

Likely to have an inhouse team of performance marketers

 

Pain Points:

 

~ Channel isn’t delivering as expected

 

~ Need more avenues of revenue

 

~ Upset with current agency or in-house team

 

~ High CAC

 

This segmentation and breaking down of each persona basically helps us point out which people we need to target and what would be ideal topics to discuss with them.

 

Campaign Design

 

With your targets defined and their pain points or interests highlighted, it is a simple process to build out ideas for your campaigns.

 

Continuing with the persona mentioned above here is how I would break down my campaign ideas.

 

Let’s see the we have data at Hand

 

~ Industry

 

~ Person Job Title

 

Where could we get more data from?

 

~ LinkedIn (Sales Nav)

 

~ Apollo, ZoomInfo etc.

 

These platforms will get us access to other filters such as,

 

~ Company Name

 

~ Company Description

 

~ Company Location

 

~ Person LinkedIn profile

 

~ Person Name

 

~ Headline

 

~ Bio

 

~ Education

 

~ Work experience

 

~ Engaged posts

 

~ Groups they are a part of

 

~ Events they are attending

 

~ Newsletters or Podcasts they are subscribed to

 

~ Technographic data

 

~ Their interests…..

 

These additional filters are great at segmenting lead lists to make targeted campaigns.

 

For the agency selling google ads, here are some campaign ideas we could use to pinpoint targets:

 

~ Group Targeting

 

LinkedIn has many groups where people talk about Google Ads.

A quick look at their members could give us tons of people who would be a right target for our services.

~ Events

 

A quick search on LinkedIn gives us 10+ events that are relevant to google ads.

From each event you can take a look at the people attending these events and filter out ideal targets.

 

~ Posts

 

If we search for relevant keywords like “Help with Google Ads” on LinkedIn we would be able to find posts that have significant interactions.

 

Following influencers in your category would easily get you some posts that have very relevant engagement that you could potentially target.

Once the target posts are jotted, you could easily take out the engagers and target them with direct relevance to the post.

 

~ Personalizing at scale using profile data

 

For a list of prospects the best way to personalize is to scrape off data pointers which are related to their company, their work experience, education or anything personal like interests etc.

 

Once we have this data it is easy to segment out large lists and build out targeted campaigns.

 

Example:

 

~ Targeting founders in New york (Your College Alumni’s)

 

~ Targeting founders (All interested in a single Google Ads influencer)

 

~ Targeting CFOs (All interested in baseball) ….. sounds weird right?

 

Here’s an email copy that has got me 10+ meetings for an HR tech SaaS software.



And the list goes on…..

 

Hope this gives you an idea of how to form campaign ideas for your emails 🙂

 

Once the list is ready we will directly target companies with creatives, case-studies which are relevant to their use-cases. This would make them feel that the email has direct value to them.

 

Writing out emails

 

Once the campaign is decided the last step is to write out the email copies.

 

Let’s write one out for the Google Ads agency.


Every email we send should have some thought behind it and at the end of the 4th one we should have covered asking each question we want to our prospect with proof that gets them interested.

 

So the sequence would look like,

 

1st Email: Broad Messaging with a result for a client

2nd Email: Would explain how we achieved it for the client

3rd Email: Refer to 2nd email + Offer a lead magnet (Free Consultation/ Document)

4th Email: Break off (Give them a step-by-step report on Google Ads etc.)

 

Now let’s write each email 😁

 

Email 1: Broad Messaging (Client + Result)

 

Subject: A/B test each

 

Meetings

{{Channel Name}}

Idea for you, {{first name}}!

 

Body:

 

Hi {{first name}},

We just helped {{Client}} generate {{X} in March {{using}} and think we can do the same for {{Company Name}}.

Can I show you how I did it?

– Deepak

 

Variants:

 

Traffic

 

We just helped {{Client}} add an extra 20k website visits in march using {{SEO/ADs}} and think we can do the same for {{Company}}

 

Conversions

 

We just helped {{Client}} generate 13 qualified sales calls in march using {{SEO/ADs}} and think we can do the same for {{Company}}

 

Email 2: Explanation on result achievement

 

SEO angle

 

Hi {{first name}},

{{Client}} in January wasn’t ranking for top-performing keywords such as {{}}.

In March these same keywords added an additional traffic of {{}} to their website 🙂

 

Here’s what they changed:

 

~ Made sure their content for all the keywords were high quality and helpful

~ Fixed duplicate content

~ Ranked in the top 100 different business listings + review sites

 

Are you looking to explore a similar process in Q2?

 

Ads angle

 

Hi {{first name}}.

 

{{Client}} in January was getting ~7-8 sign-ups for top-performing keywords such as {{}}.

 

In March they had {{}} new leads sign-up from the same keywords.

 

Here’s what they changed,

~ landing page overhaul for high conversions

~ published ads changed to convey the right message

~ optimizing bids/budget to get maximum clicks

 

Worth exploring?

 

Email 3: Offer Free Consultation

 

Hi {{first name}},

 

I mentioned how {{Client}} added {{traffic/conversions}} using {{Google ads + retargeting/Google SEO + guest posts}} in march 🙂

 

Anything holding you back from testing this?

 

{{signature}}

 

p.s. happy to evaluate your current system for potential growth areas at zero cost 🙂 

 

Email 4: Step-by-Step Guide

 

Hi {{first name}},

 

Here’s a free copy of our 10X leads report that we use to {{}}.

 

Peace 🙂

 

Let me know if you are looking for similar results. 

 

{{Signature}}

 

This is how an email campaign copy is written out. You could always add more personalisation to these copies if you have more data available to you.

 

However to prevent yourself from landing in spam, there are some rules you need to follow while writing emails, let’s take a quick look:

  1. “From” line should be edited to “First name” + “Last name” or anything you would consider professional and in line with your email.
  2. Subject line should be direct and not more than 3 words i.e. “product orders”
  3. Cold Email length should be within 50-150 words. Ideally people should be able to read it within a glance.
  4. The reading level should be at a 5th grade level so that it is easy to read.
  5. Avoid salesy or spammy stuff.

There’s a whole list of spam keywords that you have to keep out of your emails. To ensure your emails don’t trigger off spam kindly check every email you write with this tool.

  1. Do not include “You” or “I” in your emails.
  2. Keep a clear CTA.
  3. Do not include media files, links, attachments etc. in your email.
  4. Have a clear signature so that readers can know who you are.
  5. Optimize for mobile.
  6. Ask a question in your emails if possible.
  7. Do not keep long sentences in your email body.
  8. Avoid adverbs or hedge words as they weaken the email.
  9. Keep an unsubscribe link in your emails.

 

Just FYI, here’s a list of some spam keywords:

 

  1. Act now
  2. Apply now
  3. Become a member
  4. Call now
  5. Click below
  6. Click here
  7. Get it now
  8. Do it today
  9. Don’t delete
  10. Exclusive deal
  11. Get started now
  12. Limited time
  13. New customers only
  14. Order now
  15. Urgent
  16. What are you waiting for?
  17. While supplies last
  18. Winner
  19. Winning
  20. You are a winner
  21. You have been selected
  22. Bulk email
  23. Buy direct
  24. Check or money order
  25. Congratulations
  26. Cures
  27. Dear friend
  28. Hidden charges
  29. Human growth hormone
  30. Internet marketing
  31. Lose weight
  32. Mass email
  33. Meet singles
  34. Multi-level marketing
  35. No catch
  36. No cost
  37. No credit check
  38. No fees
  39. No gimmick
  40. No hidden costs
  41. No hidden fees
  42. No interest
  43. No investment
  44. No obligation
  45. No purchase necessary
  46. No questions asked
  47. No strings attached
  48. Not junk
  49. Notspam
  50. Obligation
  51. Requires initial investment
  52. Social security number
  53. This isn’t a scam
  54. This isn’t junk
  55. This isn’t spam
  56. Undisclosed
  57. Unsecured credit
  58. Unsecured debt
  59. Unsolicited
  60. We hate spam
  61. Weight loss
  62. Free
  63. OFF
  64. Discount

 

Hope this helps you understand the basics behind writing out good emails that don’t land in spam 😄