Today's newsletter is a continuation of last week's Cold Emailing Masterclass Part 1; if you haven't read it yet, then please do so.

Before I go into today's edition, first, I would like to welcome 70 new subscribers to the Fresh Salmon community since the last week.

This newsletter has now garnered over 3000 views in its first 42 days. I started writing this newsletter with zero audience and no existing email list. The newsletter subscribers are well spread across 33 countries with the most subscribers coming from the United States, Great Britain, and India.

Most of the new subscribers came from the Indiehacker’s community, thanks to getting published in one of their daily newsletters last week. 

I will be writing about how my newsletter is growing down the line, but today it’s still about cold emailing. So, let’s get going . . .

How to Implement Scalable Cold Emailing Strategy?

If you have set up your technical infrastructure as discussed under Deliverability in my last week’s newsletter, you are now ready to implement and execute a sustainable and scalable cold emailing strategy.

The 4 Stairs Framework

Cold emailing strategy is best implemented using what I call: The 4 Stairs Framework. They are as follows:

1. Email Lists

2. Segmentation

3. Automation Tool

4. Reporting

Before we get into each one of them, please keep in mind that it took me many months of testing to really understand and formulate a sustainable framework. 

Cold emailing is really hard to scale especially when you are sending out thousands of emails per week. 

There are not only infrastructural challenges that cause domains getting marked as spam or losing complete deliverability, but also negative impact on your brand.

You still want to leave a good impression, this is why a holistic strategy pays attention to not burning the bridges between the company and the prospect. 

Cold Emailing could be a blessing or a curse, but depending on how you execute your cold emailing programs you end up in one of those buckets.

This is why it all boils down to execution.

Building Email Lists

Cold emailing begins with building an email list of your target audience. Cold email is not for you if you do not have an email list. 

There are two sources that you use to build your email lists:

Buying lists from a data vendor: 

This is a really good option for bulk buying. However, it is expensive, and most of these vendors don’t have good emails. As a result, sometimes you end up buying email lists that have less than 50% email deliverability success rate. 

I learned from my experience that certain data vendors work well for certain industries.

From my experience selling a SaaS product to medical practices in the US, I found Exact Data to be a good fit for healthcare contact lists. In case you're wondering, I have no affiliation with this company, just sharing my experience.

Buying lists from a data cleansing and enrichment company: 

These companies enrich existing lists or lists from other sources on-demand.

In general, these companies are very hands-on when it comes to data cleansing and enrichment, and it does take some time to generate an email list. This is also why these vendors are limited to 1K-1.5K contacts per week at most.

Finding these companies is also very challenging. Additionally, the cost of generating these lists differs greatly between the US and developing countries. 

Initially, I used a vendor from the US. Because of the lower volume, I needed fewer email contacts and could test out cold emails more quickly. Approximately $4 was charged per contact, along with 15 prospect-related data points. The cost was high, but the delivery rate was high. 

At one point, we nailed a 82% Open Rate on a cold email sequence.

We later looked for a data enrichment vendor in India as we scaled. The quality was a little lower, but they worked well too. Still, it's pretty good overall.

Nailing Personalization With Segmentation

The key to personalizing at scale is segmentation and then further separating target personas by job titles. 

When you are building your email sequence, you want to cater to only one very specific audience, which can only be achieved by breaking your target segments into very specific groups. Ideally, I recommend grouping prospects by job title within a target segment.

Let me give you an example of why this is so important.

For instance, your primary target audience is enterprise companies in health technology and pharmaceuticals.

At Health-tech companies, you want to sell to two target personas: VPs of Engineering and VPs of Product. 

Your target personas at pharmaceutical companies are: Compliance VPs.

You need to create three separate email sequences for each of your target personas in the health-tech and pharmaceutical sectors based on their primary selling points.

The messaging is different for different target personas, therefore, breaking down into separate groups while crafting cold emails is essential.

Automating Cold Emails

Selecting a tool that can help you automate sending your email sequences without jamming your inbox is super important. 

You can use a lot of different tools in the market, here are a few that you may consider:

1. Reply.io

2. Mailshake.com

3. Salesloft.com

4. Boomerangapp.com

5. Yesware.com

6. Mixmax.com

7. Groove.co

8. Outreach.io

It's worth noting that half of the tools on this list have now transformed into enterprise solutions, so they may not be good for small businesses. But there are other good vendors on this list as well.

Among the tools mentioned above, Reply.io is one of my favorites. Again, I'm not affiliated with any of the tools mentioned above, including Reply.io, nor do I get paid by any of them.   

Many of these tools are capable of connecting to your Gmail accounts, and I have done this when sending cold emails.

With these tools, you can set custom schedules for sending emails based on the recipient's time zone, and throttle the emails throughout the week so they don't clog your inbox.

I won’t go into each and every feature that these tools provide, but I can assure you pretty much everything you wish for already exists.

Data Analysis Done Right

I briefly touched upon the key metrics to measure when sending cold emails in my last email. You optimize cold emailing for four key metrics:

1. Send Rate

2. Open Rate

3. Reply Rate

4. Get Back Rate

Send Rate is most affected by deliverability.

Open rates are affected by timing and subject line.

Reply Rates are affected by email copy and follow-up within an email sequence.

The Get Back Rate of a prospect is affected by whether you don't burn bridges, and whether you don't get marked as spam.

The success lies in optimizing for your key success metric. Of course, the next step is to look at meetings booked, sales opportunities created, and then finally, deals won.

There are analytics in most of the tools I mentioned, but you should dig deeper with your numbers. My own tracker helped me keep a tight eye on all the numbers on a weekly basis. An example of a tracker with cooked data is shown below:

For your convenience, I have made the tracker template public. To copy the Google spreadsheet, you can click on the button below.

A final piece of advice: Do not stop comparing results from each batch you send out, and keep repeating what's working. Period.