What’s the difference between cold-email prospecting and opt-in email lists? In this episode, Joe and Tami go over what cold email prospecting is, what opt-in based emailing is, examples of each, how their strategies differ, how to create lists for each, how to leverage both to grow your business, and more!
Episode 25 Transcript:
Tami: Welcome to High Energy Marketing, a podcast with us the digital marketing agency Ajax Union, where we interview our CEO Joe Apfelbaum, on key marketing topics and we share everything you need to know to properly Grow Your Business Online.
This is a question-and-answer podcast where I asked Joe questions about different topics and trends in marketing, based on his book, High Energy Marketing, you can get the book at Ajaxunion.com/book to follow along with us.
This is the 25th official episode of our podcast about high energy Marketing. And today, we’re going to discuss cold email prospecting versus opt-in email lists.
First, a little housekeeping, go ahead and rate us on Apple podcasts you have that purple icon on your phone, give us a five-star rating leave a review, and let us know if you’re enjoying the podcast that really helps. Time for an inspiration minute.
Joe, do you want to hit us with a quick inspiration minute before we get started?
Joe: I’d love to hit you guys up with an inspiration minute.
Today I want to talk about how people are like mirrors. When we spend time with people, we naturally reflect back on what we see in them. It’s our nature to imitate and mirror other people, which is why people often end up looking and acting like those that we spend the most time with.
So let’s take a moment and think about who we’re spending time with.
Are they people who uplift us, encourage us, and help us grow?
Or do they bring us down and fill our minds with negativity and fear?
You see, many times our life is entrenched in fear, this fear can be contagious. It might be unconsciously trying to pull us into that state of being.
Remember that you have the power to choose who you want to mirror by choosing who you spend the most time with. So seek people who are full of gratitude, full of positivity, full of empowerment so that you can feel more inspired, and take your life to the next level.
Tami: Amazing! Thank you so much, Joe. That is such great advice and so very true.
Jumping right into our topic of the day, we have a couple of questions for you.
First, what is cold email prospecting? And what are some examples?
Joe: When you send an email to a contact and they didn’t request that email, that’s called a cold email. It’s cold because you weren’t given permission to email the contact directly. We call this email prospecting because prospecting is the first step in the sales process.
On the other hand, permission-based email lists mean that people opted in to get emailed. There are laws that governments created to combat spam and these laws keep changing. So before you run an email campaign, make sure you understand the risks. Both opt-in lists, and cold email work really well when done correctly but they are very different in nature, and they should have a separate strategy.
Tami: Amazing. So given that it should have a separate strategy and that it is a totally separate thing. What is permission-based emailing with some examples separate from cold email prospecting?
Joe: When you send out a weekly or monthly newsletter to a list of people, it’s usually people that asked for that newsletter, people who opted in, people who gave you permission, they wanted to get some information from you.
It’s a great way to stay top of mind with those people. We have a list of 1000s of people that get a weekly LinkedIn tip every Tuesday.
Tami, you know what we call that?
Tami: Tip Tuesday?
Joe: That’s right. We don’t randomly just add people to the list. People go to our landing page, and they subscribe to the list. Or, they join a webinar and get added to our list.
We also have daily emails that go out to lists of people who watch webinars and subscribe to our podcast. People enjoy being on email lists.
And guess what?
It also generates revenue for our business. Sending regular emails is very valuable because we’re staying top of mind with a trusted group of people that can refer business and do business with us.
On my personal website, Joeapfelbaum.com, I have a newsletter that I write every Sunday that goes out to people who want to read my thoughts, ideas, and what I’m up to.
I’ve sent this email for five years.
People on that list often say that they very much appreciate those emails because I send them really thoughtful things like things that are going on in my life.
Even people that stopped me on the street that I don’t often recognize are like, “I get your email, I love it very much.” Very powerful.
Tami: Yes, it is very powerful. So, how do you craft a cold email strategy versus crafting an opt-in email strategy, like you were just talking about?
Joe: Crafting the cold email strategy has to do with first identifying your target market, and making sure you’re really, really clear with who you’re sending a message to. Because if it’s cold, you don’t want to send a generic email to somebody.
Say your clients are CFOs of midsize companies and you make a list of 50 of those CFOs. You get their emails from a tool like Hunter.io. We like using Apollo or ZoomInfo.
You craft the perfect email introducing yourself, and you send it to each CFO.
The question is, will they respond or not? It depends on your strategy.
If you’re emailing a CFO an email that’s not relevant to them, they will 100% delete the email, or worse, they’ll complain that it’s spam and it can hurt your email address reputation.
So the best way to send a cold email is to create a short punchy subject line that will make the person opening up the email curious enough to click and open it.
CFOs don’t know this Mike. You know, so like you’re talking to Mike, or Jack, or David or Sarah, or Sally, or Lizzie.
Or you can open up a subject line with “I don’t know you,” or “I didn’t know you were a CFO.” Or “Congrats, Mike, I know you can do it,” or “Secrets of CFOs”. Or “Did you see it?” “Did you accept it?” Or “Why didn’t you accept that?”
Creating creativity, curiosity, and getting people to want to open the email is the first step. It all depends on what you want them to think.
Keep in mind that people will look at the name of the sender before they actually look at the subject line. I find myself doing this all the time. So it’s preferable to make sure that it’s your name and that you’re connected to them on LinkedIn or that you comment on their LinkedIn posts.
Familiarize yourself with the people that you’re emailing and make sure that they’re familiar to you. That way you know who they are and you start building a relationship.
The body of the email will also be a deciding factor in whether or not they will respond.
So the subject line is about opening the email and the body is about getting people to respond.
Most people need a few follow-up emails to get a response out of them.
If you open an email from a stranger, and you didn’t reply, even if it’s totally relevant, maybe it’s not customized or it’s not timely.
For example, “Mike, I read your LinkedIn post, and I realized that weren’t connected yet. Are you open to connecting on LinkedIn?”
That’s a beautiful cold email. Would you answer that email from a stranger? I might.
Too many people go straight to let’s talk on the phone without building enough trust.
Learn how to properly communicate with people via cold email and you will start getting record responses.
For some of our clients at Ajax Union, we get an 80% response rate on a series of five cold emails.
You can also automate your responses you can create sequences. We use tons of tools for our clients that help us get them to connect with their ideal audience.
Using cold email can be a great strategy. But make sure that you’re doing it correctly because a lot of things can go wrong.
One of the things that I like to tell our clients is to go for smaller groups of people. Smaller groups of people that are more customized, and more personalized, will get you better responses. That works every time with cold email.
Tami: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Joe.
So transferring back over to opt-in email lists. How do you craft an opt-in email list strategy? How do you get those subscribers? What are ways that people are subscribing to opt-in to email lists?
Joe: We’ve spoken about lead magnets and funnels in the past. Those are ways to get people to go into opt-in lists. If you’re doing a webinar, if you’re adding some value in some way, want to get people to give you their email in order for them to get value.
So that is the number one way to do that.
A lot of people don’t have a lightbox on their website.
If you’re selling something, maybe you want to have a coupon code, give people a reason to give you their email address, and it’ll be much more likely that people will give you their email.
For example, we’re promoting our AI prompts guide now. And we’re getting record email addresses from our Facebook ads. Those people are going into our AI list and we’re going to be building that up.
Could you imagine just paying Five cents, or three cents for a qualified lead to give you their email that you could nurture later, and it costs you nothing to nurture that, except for the cost of the technology? That’s powerful.
Tami: Yeah, amazing.
So, that’s about it with cold email versus opt-in email unless you have some final thoughts. I will wrap up this podcast.
Joe: I would recommend segmenting your list by Title, Location, gender, and even engagement level.
I like to invite people to events, I get over a 70% response rate after sending at least five emails to people who don’t respond right away.
So think about using cold email if you want to go deep, and think about using permission-based emails if you want to go wide and stay top of mind.
Thank you very much for listening. I really appreciate doing this with me. And we hope to get feedback from you guys. And if you need more support, Ajax Union’s a great digital marketing agency that can help you take your business to the next level.
Tami: Thank you so much, Joe. That was amazing information. We hope everyone listening got as much out of this as we did.
On next week’s episode, we’ll be talking about retargeting to your ideal clients. So make sure to hit that subscribe button to catch the next episode.
You can follow us on Instagram at @AjaxUnion and follow Joe on all social media platforms at @JoeApfelbaum. And follow him on LinkedIn at Joelinkedin.com.
If you didn’t catch that, you can check our description for all our social media links, or go to Ajaxunion.com/podcast. If you have questions, you can shoot us an email at Amazing@AjaxUnion.com.
Our music is by Michael Suarez. This podcast is produced by Sarah and Shannon. Thank you so much and we’ll catch you next time. Bye!
