Best ways to do cold emails that get open rates to 15% with several good examples #GCabane #hypergrowth #growthtactics #coldemails #growthexpert #HarryStebbings #20VC #growthstrategy #emailstrategy #coldemail #coldemailing

There are two things that work when you try to reach out to someone that you don't know, a prospect, all right, whether it's by email, by whatever, whatever the communication channel. True value, your communication, let's call it an email, contains something that's really helpful. I can give you an example. And the second is reciprocity for humanness. They truly believe it comes from a human and thus they will feel compelled to respond because somebody else has spent some time. Let's unpack those two here. Okay. True value. Give you an example. Instagram is a support platform for merchants. Merchants sell these days a lot, of course, on TikTok, but also on Instagram. Instagram is a major platform for merchants. And what we found out is that sometimes some customers, potential customers of the merchant of the brand, posted negative comments on a brand's post and nobody took care of that. We said, hey, that's a miss from the brand, but wait, can we scrape that? Can we automate that? We found out that we could, and as we started scraping and automating the detection of negative comments on brand posts on Instagram, sending it to the brand owner, to the company owner, to the marketing leader. This is, hey, Harry, love your products, love what you do. But just letting you know, there's like a couple of negative comments here on your posts and it's been 48 hours. You haven't responded and really you shouldn't. That's it. Don't talk about gorgeous. Don't talk about the product. This works super well. Why? When it's public. I'm not doing anything like, you know, sneezy, like it's just on Instagram, like anyone can see that. True. It's public. It's true. Like you can seek and verify, you can click on the post, you will find the negative comment. You know, it's not me. And second, like it's helpful. Absolutely. You should take care about it. You should respond if you haven't. You see those three things, like the only response you can have is thanks. Thanks for catching it. Thanks. That's it. Of course, I'll follow up to that email with an ask for demo. And of course, you will be compelled to give me your time because you would really be a douchebag not give me some of your time, given that I found some mistakes that you made in your brand. Right. And you will get high response rates there. Okay. That's value. I have a million examples of that. If you can drive value about mistakes, problems of the business, you have discovered that your audience does not know, you will get engagement guaranteed. Did that scale? Absolutely. Because it's all... Instagram's big, man. Instagram is huge. But I'm saying, but that like takes a lot to craft each one, to pull in the different comments, to package them efficiently. All automated. These days, you can build scrapers and automation fairly efficiency. It's the cost of doing that is not that high. And the challenge is finding those opportunities, those pockets of opportunity and scaling those. That's a challenge for sure. Yeah. But that does actually does scale. I mean, that's much more scalable than say like paid, where you will see that. But wait, think of the cack of that. That's why I love growth. There is an upfront cost to finding that, testing it. Of course, we don't automate anything before we test it manually. We had some GM people send a couple of hundred manually to see if it works. And once we knew the response rates were huge, we then invested in doing it with our engineers. But once you've built it and you've amortized the upfront cost, the marginal cost of that email is zero. You're just running a few scripts. The acquisition cost of doing that is zero. And if your competitors are not doing it, you have this green ocean in front of you with this no competition, zero dollar cack. Are they still doing it today? I don't know that they're still doing it today. You'd have to ask them. So what was the response rate? It's like, just so I, is it like 50%? Is it like? No, it's more like 10, 12%, 10, 12%, which is about 5x the, say, standard response rate of a good cold email. Yeah. Reciprocity. The other thing that creates responses. Now, here's the thought experiment I want you and the audience to have. At home, you have a mailbox, physical mailbox. In that mailbox, you receive junk mail, right? Most of it is junk mail. You take that junk mail, you throw it away. Don't even think about it. You don't care. You have no personal feelings. You have no emotions to that junk mail. You feel maybe even lighter about throwing it away. Now, let's say you go through that junk mail as you throw it away. There's this one letter that's sealed letter. That's obviously written by a human, obviously by an old person. And there's your name, Harry on it, Harry Stemmings written on it. And there's the return address behind it. They even maybe like lick the stamp and put it on the envelope. You're very convinced it's a human. How lucky are you, Harry, to take that envelope and throw it in the trash without opening it? No. No way. No way. Right? You would be a psychopath if you did that. I tested that thought experiment at SASTR in front of hundreds of people. Not one person raised their hand. Not one. Which makes sense. But how do you do that with email? Because with physical, you can do the nice stamp, the nice textured letter, whatever it is. How do you do that with email? I'll give you an example. I always get examples. Right? We have a group targeting financial platform, targeting CFOs, notoriously difficult audience to engage with. And almost nothing we can scrape about a company or a CFO is useful. They're not posting about their financial issues on Twitter, right? On X. This doesn't happen. Right? What we did is we scraped the thing. I would love that. Wouldn't you love that? Oh, we've got so much data that we just don't know where it is. We're really missing our payments right now. This is so much better than LinkedIn. Anyone? So what we did is that we scraped very typical, their LinkedIn profile, their colleges. And here's the trick. Everyone does that. We thought about what's the commonality between CFOs. They're all well-educated. They all went to college. Like 100%. Right? Went to college. In the U.S., very specifically for the U.S., people who went to a U.S. college tend to be very passionate about their college sports team. Very passionate. Right? Look at the games, the locker. What we did is that we matched two data sets, the college where each CFO went and the upcoming games of that college against the opponent team. We then built a very simplified betting algorithm to see is the CFO's team likely to win or lose. And we send that in an email and say, hey, Harry, your team, the Sharks or whatever, is going against like the Bisons or whatever next week. And I'm ready to bet 50 bucks that your team is about to lose. If you win up on top, I'll give you 50 bucks, no question to ask. If you lose, I'll just ask for a 20-minute call. Now, that is a typical $50 for a call email, but the sophistication of the email with this upcoming game that you know about, the ability to be able to bet for free, what looks for free on sports, which people love, makes it feel so human. Nobody believes this is automated, but it is. Nobody believes it's automated. People are like, hey, somebody actually researched, somebody knows the upcoming game, somebody cares about something that I care about too. This is fun. The response rate here is 12% to 15%. About the same. No one is saying it's gorgeous. Again, for a very, very small cost and something that no one in their right mind would think of doing manually. It's very small. It's very small. That is reciprocity. You see that, you immediately believe, hey, there's a human that cares. At least I have to respond. At the minimum, I have to respond.