I'm so sad that this post is illustrated with stardew valley screenshots. I imagine this could be exactly the type of pain the protagonist lives everyday in the intro...
Most cold emails are terrible. However when done well it can lead to interesting results. Spam/scams is different from having a real product or service in which people you reach out to might be genuinely interested. By definition it doesn’t scale all that well. If what you send is truly great then you will stand out
I'm in the position of needing to do a lot of outreach to find our first customers. If this is actually what I have to do, I refuse. I'm sure there's some good advice in here, but most of it seems gross. I don't want to send "Personalized Outbound at Scale".
Let's not beat around the bush; mass cold emails are SPAM with another name.
I receive about 10 cold emails a week, and most senders never give up on sending follow-ups. Those AI emails get worse every day, and the follow-ups become more and more passive-aggressive: "I guess you are not the person who can make this decision. Could you forward me to..." No, I am not doing your job for you. They try to make you angry to chase a reply at every cost.
Here is a tip for people on the other end of this madness: If you receive Spam, mark it as such to blacklist the sender from Gmail and help others because Google is losing the war against Spam like they are with the SEO. Let them hang with their own rope.
Its great, because it validates my new and innovative* principle of simply rejecting all mail of the [known]suffix.tld and prefix[known].tld sort. Not sure if microsoftstore.com was ever legitimately used for mail. Most of the other "wait thats a real company" cases were of the "but we don't want their mail anyway" sort.
*) Of course, the "new and innovative" part was a lie. Its old and dead simple. I had many years ago been inspired by a well known large online payment provider deliberately sabotaging full-domain-keyed antispam measures. As far as I can tell they have discontinued playing around with domains indistinguishable from common phishing. I am assuming because phishing got out of hand and it is difficult to blame customers for not knowing the difference between ads@legit-brand-secure.example versus ads@brand-secure-phish.example.
Deliberately circumventing email security controls, automation detection, and abuse prevention systems of email service providers constitutes a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030 (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). When done as part of a business operation with intent and at scale, this behavior meets the criminal threshold of intentionally accessing protected computer systems without or in excess of authorization and impairing their integrity and availability. Anti-abuse mechanisms are security controls under CFAA. Knowingly subverting them is criminal, not civil.
I don’t know who runs “za-zu.com”, but they may wish to take down their handbook lest they capture the interest of law enforcement agencies who are working with Google and others major email services ongoingly to locate and take down spamming groups.
The vast majority of commenters are being negative about this essay, and I agree with the negativity, because _automated cold emails_ are awful. (As are sequences, and mail merges.)
However!
_Bespoke cold emails_ are I think, a dying/lost art. I want to give an example of two cold emails that I (manually!) send a few times a month. (I run Buttondown, which is an email SaaS — think similar to Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc.)
---
The first is to folks who have the following criteria:
1. they hit the front page of HN
2. they have a personal blog that isn't tied to a platform (e.g. they're using jekyll or something similar)
3. they have RSS enabled
4. they do _not_ collect email addresses
The thrust of the email is this:
```
Hi! I'm the founder of Buttondown, a newsletter tool for technical blogs. I'm reaching out because:
1. You just hit HN front page! (Congrats and/or my condolences.)
2. You've got an RSS feed but are not capturing emails.
My proposal: I set you up with a free (for life!) Buttondown account seeded with your blog's RSS feed. All you do is drop in a form tag or an iFrame in your blog and folks can sign up with their email address and get an email whenever you publish something new. I can handle the setup and then hand it off to you for perpetuity.
If this is something you're at all interested in, please let me know! (There's no catch, and this isn't an automated email, so please — I'd love to hear why not, even if the answer is simply "shove off, I don't care about collecting an audience, Twitter and Mastodon are sufficient").
```
(I tweak the language based on their own voice, mention what in particular I like about their blog, etc.)
---
The second is to folks who fit the following criteria:
1. they're a technical newsletter publishing programming-related content
2. they're using a platform that I know to be particularly expensive relative to me (Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign are the two big culprits here)
```
hi there! I run Buttondown — you may have heard of us, we're used by RELEVANT_CUSTOMER_1 and RELEVANT_CUSTOMER_2. I see you're using OTHER_PLATFORM; is there anything I could do to get you to switch to [us](https://buttondown.com/pricing?count=7500)
(btw, this is a real email, not a marketing campaign. it's still early days for us, so tbh you telling me why you're _not_ interested is just as valuable as getting to call you a customer :)
```
Small sample size for both genres — I've probably sent them a total of ~fifty times — but the response rate is around 80% and conversion rate (though granted for the first genre "conversion" is more of a second-order effect, since I'm offering them a free account!) is ~25%.
I say all of this because, as someone who a priori _hated_ outbound and "sales stuff", I learned that at least for me and my business both the most palatable _and_ most effective method was just being earnest and helpful. It has been the single most useful non-technical skill I've gained over the past few years.
There is a lot of great content here though I worry some of it is quickly becoming outdated. Every three months google has been updating their spam filters and making it harder and harder deliver sales emails at scale.
As evidence of this, look at Rift.com a YC/Sequoia-backed sales email tool that closely followed this same playbook but was forced to kill their service as Google made it increasingly difficult to deliver sales messages at scale.
Conversion rates use to be 1-10% from email to meeting booking. Now I believe most teams are seeing significantly below 1%.
I'm so sad that this post is illustrated with stardew valley screenshots. I imagine this could be exactly the type of pain the protagonist lives everyday in the intro...
Most cold emails are terrible. However when done well it can lead to interesting results. Spam/scams is different from having a real product or service in which people you reach out to might be genuinely interested. By definition it doesn’t scale all that well. If what you send is truly great then you will stand out
Spam from a company teaching you how to spam.
I'm in the position of needing to do a lot of outreach to find our first customers. If this is actually what I have to do, I refuse. I'm sure there's some good advice in here, but most of it seems gross. I don't want to send "Personalized Outbound at Scale".
Let's not beat around the bush; mass cold emails are SPAM with another name.
I receive about 10 cold emails a week, and most senders never give up on sending follow-ups. Those AI emails get worse every day, and the follow-ups become more and more passive-aggressive: "I guess you are not the person who can make this decision. Could you forward me to..." No, I am not doing your job for you. They try to make you angry to chase a reply at every cost.
Here is a tip for people on the other end of this madness: If you receive Spam, mark it as such to blacklist the sender from Gmail and help others because Google is losing the war against Spam like they are with the SEO. Let them hang with their own rope.
Its great, because it validates my new and innovative* principle of simply rejecting all mail of the [known]suffix.tld and prefix[known].tld sort. Not sure if microsoftstore.com was ever legitimately used for mail. Most of the other "wait thats a real company" cases were of the "but we don't want their mail anyway" sort.
*) Of course, the "new and innovative" part was a lie. Its old and dead simple. I had many years ago been inspired by a well known large online payment provider deliberately sabotaging full-domain-keyed antispam measures. As far as I can tell they have discontinued playing around with domains indistinguishable from common phishing. I am assuming because phishing got out of hand and it is difficult to blame customers for not knowing the difference between ads@legit-brand-secure.example versus ads@brand-secure-phish.example.
> The inbox, though, is still at least a little bit sacred.
> Email is still your own little corner of the internet.
I love that the author can say something like this and then provide a guide for ruining the last sane piece of the internet any of us have left.
Deliberately circumventing email security controls, automation detection, and abuse prevention systems of email service providers constitutes a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030 (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). When done as part of a business operation with intent and at scale, this behavior meets the criminal threshold of intentionally accessing protected computer systems without or in excess of authorization and impairing their integrity and availability. Anti-abuse mechanisms are security controls under CFAA. Knowingly subverting them is criminal, not civil.
I don’t know who runs “za-zu.com”, but they may wish to take down their handbook lest they capture the interest of law enforcement agencies who are working with Google and others major email services ongoingly to locate and take down spamming groups.
The vast majority of commenters are being negative about this essay, and I agree with the negativity, because _automated cold emails_ are awful. (As are sequences, and mail merges.)
However!
_Bespoke cold emails_ are I think, a dying/lost art. I want to give an example of two cold emails that I (manually!) send a few times a month. (I run Buttondown, which is an email SaaS — think similar to Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc.)
---
The first is to folks who have the following criteria:
1. they hit the front page of HN
2. they have a personal blog that isn't tied to a platform (e.g. they're using jekyll or something similar)
3. they have RSS enabled
4. they do _not_ collect email addresses
The thrust of the email is this:
``` Hi! I'm the founder of Buttondown, a newsletter tool for technical blogs. I'm reaching out because:
1. You just hit HN front page! (Congrats and/or my condolences.) 2. You've got an RSS feed but are not capturing emails.
My proposal: I set you up with a free (for life!) Buttondown account seeded with your blog's RSS feed. All you do is drop in a form tag or an iFrame in your blog and folks can sign up with their email address and get an email whenever you publish something new. I can handle the setup and then hand it off to you for perpetuity.
If this is something you're at all interested in, please let me know! (There's no catch, and this isn't an automated email, so please — I'd love to hear why not, even if the answer is simply "shove off, I don't care about collecting an audience, Twitter and Mastodon are sufficient"). ```
(I tweak the language based on their own voice, mention what in particular I like about their blog, etc.)
---
The second is to folks who fit the following criteria:
1. they're a technical newsletter publishing programming-related content
2. they're using a platform that I know to be particularly expensive relative to me (Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign are the two big culprits here)
``` hi there! I run Buttondown — you may have heard of us, we're used by RELEVANT_CUSTOMER_1 and RELEVANT_CUSTOMER_2. I see you're using OTHER_PLATFORM; is there anything I could do to get you to switch to [us](https://buttondown.com/pricing?count=7500)
(btw, this is a real email, not a marketing campaign. it's still early days for us, so tbh you telling me why you're _not_ interested is just as valuable as getting to call you a customer :) ```
Small sample size for both genres — I've probably sent them a total of ~fifty times — but the response rate is around 80% and conversion rate (though granted for the first genre "conversion" is more of a second-order effect, since I'm offering them a free account!) is ~25%.
I say all of this because, as someone who a priori _hated_ outbound and "sales stuff", I learned that at least for me and my business both the most palatable _and_ most effective method was just being earnest and helpful. It has been the single most useful non-technical skill I've gained over the past few years.
Would anyone like to share cold email war stories of success?
There is a lot of great content here though I worry some of it is quickly becoming outdated. Every three months google has been updating their spam filters and making it harder and harder deliver sales emails at scale.
As evidence of this, look at Rift.com a YC/Sequoia-backed sales email tool that closely followed this same playbook but was forced to kill their service as Google made it increasingly difficult to deliver sales messages at scale.
Conversion rates use to be 1-10% from email to meeting booking. Now I believe most teams are seeing significantly below 1%.
1. Don't fucking do it
2. See #1
Not sure why cold emails are hated by some people. But this is the most comprehensive and actionable cold outreach techniques I've seen.