If you test enough targeting/messaging combos you’ll 100% find a combo that works or you’ll find out there’s no product-market fit.

If you don’t have product-market-fit and are testing out a new offer it’s especially important to test out tons of angles.

Instead of giving you 1 strategy, we're going to give you multiple different strategies so you will always have things to test.

For some offers we found a working campaign after 3 tries, for others it took 3 months and 40 campaigns.

You need to get into the habit of testing new things daily and weekly.

And this is the bare minimum, there’s many good variables we can add like case studies but this is a good starting point for every niche and then we can start experimenting with adding sentences.

Personalized lines could be created either manually or using an automated tool. We have found that manually created first lines work the best for improving reply rates and positive reply rates. However, it’s a matter of prioritizing time over quality and vice versa.

The easiest way to manually create personalized first lines is to compliment people or businesses on their recent achievements, blog posts, product releases or experience. Here are examples for each of these categories:

1) Complimenting achievements: “I loved reading your story on Impact Innovation! It is impressive how you've grown from £6m to £19m!”

2) Complimenting blog posts: “I love the blog on your website, especially the post about seasonal skincare tips! I will certainly try a few of them!”

3) Complimenting product release: “Wow! The new Skeleton Band looks amazing, it will certainly be super successful!”

4) Complimenting experience: “Already in business for 35 years? That’s honestly super impressive in such a competitive field!”

5) Complimenting impressive case studies or clients: “Love the campaign you guys did for Nike, looks super fresh.”

It has been shown in studies that 47% of people prefer to open emails based on attractive opening lines, which can be seen under the subject line without even opening the email. This has been proven time and time again by our own data - emails with personalized first lines see a 2x improvement in reply rates and a significant boost in open rates across all industries and offerings.

And Instantly.ai makes it super easy to integrate first lines in your outreach campaigns.

This is how you can send out personalized emails at scale with Instantly.ai

Step1) Prepare a lead list in Google Sheets or Excel and add a column named Personalization.

Step2) Write your personalized lines manually or use an AI generator

Read $100M Offers By Alex Hormozi to create a no-brainer offer.

Only work with clients with proven offers and if you’re creating your own offers make sure it resonates with your target audience and there is a big problem you’re solving for them.

Strong Call To Action will definitely improve your response rate. Here are some options for you to test.

Obviously ideally you would want the prospect to book in a meeting straight from a Calendly link, but this is the lowest response rate strategy we’ve tested.

People are busy, even selecting a time from a Calendar link or proposing times for you might be too much. Make it as simple for your prospects as possible.

And instead of asking for a call straight away, we recommend asking for a lower friction action first.

Example:

I like to think of subject lines like the notifications you get on your phone from friends or apps. What kind of short message will get you to open your phone and check it out?

99% of the times you want to personalize it and have their name or company name in the subject line.

Best cold emails make your prospects feel understood.

You want to resonate with your audience and make them go “damn this dude seems to know what they’re talking about”.

You will make them feel understood by knowing industry specific insights and then tying it together with your offer.

For example if you’re contacting Ecom stores, most of them are focusing on increasing their Conversion Rate and AOV. If you mention this in your emails - it will resonate.

If you’re contacting SaaS companies, their main KPIs are MRR and Churn.

If you’re an agency - create an onboarding form which your clients will fill out based on the information they have about their targets. This will save you some time.

The goal is to find as many variables as possible that will resonate with the target audience. The more resonating variables we have - the higher the chance of getting a response. Your email will be more personal, segmented and will stand out from all that generic crap that 99% of people are sending. People just want to feel understood.

Vs if you say: “We help female founders in LA grow their sustainable make-up brands while putting the planet and people first.”

Fill the sheet for your own agency as well and use it for your own outreach.

As an alternative to writing fully personalized lines about a specific person you can also use more general but still personalized first lines. These can be about their location, weather, fun facts or just general pattern interrupt openers that will make you stand out from people that don’t use them. You can send the same line to 1000s of people while it still seems personalized to them.

The more specific you can get - the more personalized your approach will look. Instead of targeting the entire US or California - target Los Angeles. See all examples below.

Love the (niche) insights you’ve been posting on Twitter. Finally someone who actually knows what they’re talking about! I thought I’d reach out because we helped another (target group),

If you’re tired of not getting any responses to your emails LISTEN UP. The secret to the universe (and cold emailing) is simple - you get what you put in. So the more effort you put into researching your niche, their business, their personal life and childhood achievements, the more responses you’re going to get. See Nardwuar shocking rappers or Sean Evans surprising his quests with their deepest darkest secrets.

If you create 100% customized emails then you could possibly get close to 100% reply rate, but in terms of creating cold email campaigns at scale here’s exactly what you got to do. I’m going to give you our formula first, then an example outreach email and then we’re going to dissect every line.

This is the main template we use and just change up the offers and CTA’s to find out what works best for our target group.

Example for offering Lead Gen to TikTok Marketing agencies:

Hey Tom,

Just saw that you helped Nike get 1M views with your latest TikTok campaign - that’s amazing!

I wanted to reach out because we connect ecom focused TikTok agencies in LA like yours with low-ticket Ecom stores perfect for TikTok ads that are already making over $100K/mo and looking to grow with TikTok Ads. Just helped Dormify book 17 meetings.

I would love to show you my plan of getting you 50 meetings with ecom stores like that (we work mostly on performance btw).

Do you have any time this week for a quick chat?

Cheers,

Alex

You want to go through your prospects website or LinkedIn and pick out something unique about them and write a quick and sweet compliment for that. This is the only manual part of the email and will take 30-60 seconds, the rest of the email is targeted but not customized.

My favorite and usually the fastest way is to find their success stories and pick out something you like.

“Just saw that you helped Nike get 1M views with your latest TikTok campaign - that’s amazing!”

Here’s where you can brag about what you do best. Don’t hold back and put your best foot forward. Make it as specific to your target audience as possible.

You want to be as specific as possible. Instead of Ecom stores you want to call them out as much as you can - Luxury watch stores in NYC. The more specific you get the more it will resonate with the audience. We want to make them think “damn, that’s me!” and “if they did it for this very similar company, they probably can do the same for me.”

“ecom focused TikTok agencies in LA”

Most cold emails just mention the target niche, but we’ll go a step further and show our prospects we actually know what their goal is. Instead of saying we just help you connect with Ecom stores, we can tell them we help low-ticket (best price for TikTok agencies) and are already making over $100K/mo (no new stores, stores that have the marketing budget).

“low-ticket Ecom stores perfect for TikTok ads that are already making over $100K/mo”

Now let’s take another step deeper into showing how well we know our audience by calling out their value prop too. This is what they help their customers do.

“looking to grow with TikTok Ads”

Now let’s get bold and put our money where our mouth is. Show your prospects that you are the man by having a plan or a presentation ready for them. Tell them you have a money back guarantee or performance based pricing model. Tell them you’ll send them a burger with UberEats if they don’t find a call with you valuable. Make it interesting and as much of a no-brainer as possible to get them on a call with you.

“I would love to show you my plan of getting you 50 meetings with ecom stores like that (we work mostly on performance btw).”

End your email with a clear Call To Action. Either ask them straight up for a call or if it’s okay for you to send them a personalized video or a proposal.

“Do you have any time this week for a quick chat?”

Instead of pitching your offer straight away, ask your prospects if they'd be willing to answer a few questions for a research you're doing.

Most people would love to answer relevant questions. And later once you've already talked with the prospect and it seems like a good fit you can pitch your offer.

Instead of pitching straight away, ask for the right person in the company to talk about your service.

For example if you’re selling app development to Fitness Trainers you could have an app design mockup and then change the pictures for the influencers you’re reaching out to.

For example in the example above you could change out the name “Chuck Johnes” and the image for each new fitness trainer you’re reach out to.

Instead of pitching them with text, send them a Loom video or ask if it's okay to send them a Loom video showing how you can help them.

The biggest objection to overcome with cold prospects is trust. Guarantees help people trust you more because you have some skin in the game. figure out the best guarantee you can offer (it doesn't have to be a money-back guarantee).

If you’re struggling to close, make it a no-brainer offer for them (more skin in the game). If you already are closing nicely, you can focus more on making it a no-brainer for you. Don’t make your life miserable on purpose.

Lil sneaky method, but if you don't want to create a customized video for every prospect and only create videos for people who respond do this:

I created a quick loom video here: loom.com/fdfsjfhjhejf(something random)

When they click on the link - it doesn't work. So they will reach out and tell you the link is broken. Once they do that - record a video and send the correct link.

It's counter-intuitive but sometimes being vague is better than being very specific.

If your offer is something that people have heard 100 times, they might be allergic to it even when you can actually help them.

People might also be biased because of bad experiences with other similar offers.

So for example if you help Saas companies with SEO, don't tell them you offer SEO (they've heard it 1000 times before), tell them you have strategies to increase their MRR.

This might pique their interest more.

Most cold email copy sucks because you can understand straight away that it’s a template sent for 1000s of people.

To get around this when you’re sitting down to write your first copy - imagine that you just found your prospects website, clicked “email us” and now are writing the email right then and there.

Don’t edit the email or keep the editing to a minimum. Editing will remove a lot of the things that make it seem like it was written on the spot.

It will be a little bit more sloppy, but it will come off as more authentic. I like to use words that “expert copywriters” would tell you to remove. For example the word “so”.

So I was just searching for Ecom Stores..

If this would be a template you wouldn’t say “so” in that sentence, it’s more of the way people talk not write. But because of that it will come off less like a template.

I also like to use “btw”, “lmk” and anything else people use to write with their friends in chat.

With this kind of an email - don’t use fancy signatures, keep it simple.

Remove all stylings, images, gifs, fancy fonts, colors and signature. Just send a simple plain text only email which has the highest deliverability compared to emails that have images in them.

We don't recommend sending links without asking permission first. And if you're getting low deliverability you can try removing all links from your emails to see if it will help.

If you're using multiple different sending accounts with different names, use {{Sendingaccountname}} variable in the sign-off to have that specific sending account name show up.

Use variables like {{firstName}} and {{companyName}} in your emails to make it more unique and customized.

Experiment with different variables available in your data like location, job position etc.

Instead of pitching your offer straight away - ask your prospect something they're passionate about.

For example, if you're targeting book authors you can ask them a question about their book.

Instead of boring formal and professional emails break the norm with a little bit of more energy

Damn, when I saw your (their content) I wanted to reach out straight away!

Wow your product images look so good an appetizing I wanted to hit you up :D

Stop saying things like we'll skyrocket your sales in record time.

I even don't like saying very technical things that you wouldn't say in a normal conversation. Especially if it's the first time you message prospects.

Spintax is used for creating variations of sentences or words is pretty straightforward and can help you generate even more diverse email bodies for your leads.

Mention your prospects' main competitors in your email to resonate with them and show them that you've done some research and aren't blindly blasting everybody with your emails.

Rework sentences so all the "I" and "We" are replaced with "You". Everybody wants to hear about themselves, not you.

Instead of saying: "I can get more sales with our Fb Ads strategies"

Say: "Have you used (specific offer) to get you more sales?"

If you have any insights or deep domain expertise that most people don't know - teach it to your prospects.

It can be even as simple as showing them how to install a FB pixel or telling them they should fix the links on their blog for better SEO.

Add relevant or funny gifs to your emails to stand out from the crowd and increase your reply rates. We're seeing really good responses in adding gifs to our follow-up emails.

We don’t really use long follow-up sequences and usually end at 4. Feel free to experiment and test out longer or shorter sequences. You never know what’s going to work in your niche.