Last week, I started cold emailing. Almost 20% visit the page.

For the whole week, the result was 20% visits, without any paying conversion. Here are 4 things I learned:

1. Filter contacts

• I started by collecting a big list of contacts. Then learn about them online, looking for people that might need your product. For each contact, I spend about 15-25 mins (should be less). Skip if the contact doesn't fit. Then groups them (i.e by careers) for different email content.

• Useful places to learn about your contact are their social media (.ie Instagram, Behance, personal website) and blog.

2. Use mail merge

• Google Sheets and AppsScripts are great. In the sheets, I have a column called "opener", which is 1-2 sentences talked about something I find interesting about their works. The batches that I spent way more time researching have ~40% more clicks through.

• Write short emails. Because it's much easier to read. I followed the below template. I made several templates based on the contact group (in #1). I found emails with a straightforward tone have more clicks vs funny, salesy, or encouraging emails

• Warm-up email to avoid being blacklisted. It means sending less than 40 emails in the first few days. Since I spent way too much time research, it wasn't a problem anyway.

P/s: I rebuilt the AppsScripts, adding some more features (i.e check to send quota, better message template), let me know if you need them.

Email template that I followed (I can't the original post anymore)

3. Track Open?

• I'm not so sure if a track for open was necessary. I enable for half of the batches I send, but not showing much difference.

• Besides, I used AppsScripts for tracking. Somehow it only works for Gmail contacts

4. Hit send

• Most of us hate being spammed, and that made me hesitate to send sometimes. So when filter contacts, I did my best to make sure it's somewhat relevant

I didn't expect much. Except to learn about more cold emailing. Most emails won't get a reply. Sometimes, you'll get a convert. Sometimes, you might get an intro.

Next time, I might try different and better landing page for each contact group next time