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How We Got 31 Product Demos Scheduled With This Cold Email

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In this post, I will be explaining how we got 31 product demos scheduled with a single email template. The good news is — this strategy can be replicated by anyone.

If you are having trouble getting early traction for your startup or want to boost your growth, you have come to the right place!

Here is broadly how it works:

So, what’s the big deal?

This might look like just another outbound funnel to a casual observer but you should note the following points before you pass it off:

  • This was run over a cold email list.
  • In order to do this at scale, everyone (all 324 leads) was sent the exact same emails with very basic personalisations (using SendX’s personalisation capability)

Making it —
“A very healthy funnel achieved at scale for cold emails”

How Did We Do This

Get contact details of your target customers: This might be lot easier than what most people think. There are a lot of tools (both free and paid) available in this space that can make your job easy.

We used Hunter, to get email ids from LinkedIn. Hunter is simple and easy to use. Please note that with Hunter the email address provide is not necessarily accurate. There are a bunch of other tools and hacks which you can use to find email ids.
Using this we prepared a CSV file having 324 Names, Emails and Company Names details of our target customers.

Reminder — Having a laser focussed targeting is very important for high conversions. Cold untargeted emails can harm your reputation.

Schedule An Email Campaign (Drip Sequence) For All Leads

We created relevant email drip campaign for the leads. We scheduled the drip to run at 9AM on a Monday.

Reaching out early morning works best and we see a very high open and response rates. We scheduled it on a Monday so that we have full 5 days of uninterrupted time to follow-up, schedule a demo and get them on trial by end of the week.

Now the magic Email that worked for us:

Few Things To Note About This Email

It has a tailored, partially revealing subject line asking a question. These type of email subjects get very high open rate. Read more about email subject lines here.

Email immediately acknowledges the recipient and his company, followed by a brief personal intro.

Asks permission for sharing the details rather than sending it.

Pro tip — Always ask for recipient’s permission before sending involving details.

Finishes with a very clean and low threshold call-to-action. He just has to reply with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

The P.S. is a polite note with a request.

We did A/B testing with a lot of other email templates but this one worked the best for us.

Here are numbers of how this email performed:

# Emails Sent — 324
# Unique Opens — 185
# Unique Clicks — 71
# Unique Replies — 52

After two days, a follow up email (2nd drip email) was scheduled be sent to the folks who did not reply to 1st email. We used SendX’s reply automation capability.

This email was a gentle reminder to folks who were wanting to reply back (but forgot to).
Here is how the 2nd email performed:


# Emails Sent — 272
# Unique Opens — 195
# Unique Clicks — 33
# Unique Replies — 35

Engage With Leads Who Replied Back

We typically got 2 types of responses here — Either they responded with a Yes in which case we followed by asking for their contact details and scheduled a call with them.

Here is an example of such an email thread:

In the second case, they asked for more details about SendX and we sent the product information. Post this the idea was to get them on the phone.

Schedule A Demo

We scheduled a 30 min demo. After a brief 1 minute intro about us, we asked more about their challenges and based the demo on that. Last 10 mins are usually QA. We ensured that they created a trial account on SendX and tried using it during or post the call.

So, within a few days, we were able to convert around 10% of cold leads. Also, we successfully introduce SendX to 327 contacts who had not heard of us.

[This post by Mayank Agarwal first appeared on Medium and has been reproduced with permission.]

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.

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