@jesika_haria definitely not. Cold email outreach is just very hard and complex. You need to invest in 3 main areas - leads, email deliverability+scaling email volume and the email copy. First, you need to have a good lead list, which takes time to assemble from sources like Apollo and you also need to validate the email addresses to ensure your bounce rate is close to 1%. High bounce rate leads to poor deliverability as it signals to Google you're most likely doing cold email outreach. Next is email deliverability. From DNS records, ensuring you only sending 50emails/day/inbox, excluding spam words, and doing email warm-up are critical to success among a few other things. Last but not least, if you're using templates, it negatively impacts your deliverability, so it's important you personalize your email body not just for email deliverability's sake, but also to improve reply rates. You either could use spintax to rotate/randomize parts of your email content or the best case would be to leverage AI. There are many tools out there just for writing emails using AI. Here at salesforge.ai we can help with email deliverability/scaling + personalizing emails at scale.

@profy17 Love this! What's considered a good benchmark for open and positive reply rates?

@jesika_haria the industry average is about 1%-3% email reply rate where most have bad or average email deliverability and sending mainly only email templates. Around 20%-40% are positive replies out of total replies. But Jesika, do take this with a pinch of salt as this highly depends on the niche you're in and your cold email outreach setup. I can tell you that cold email can do wonders for you and if it's too hard to figure it out on your own, just use a cold email outreach agency. There are so many of them out there and would recommend having looking at Clutch agency listings to pick a few and have a chat.

@shaaay hey, what is your product? Are you trying to convert them via inbound or outbound? Which channels are you using right now? Have you been exploring lifetime deals platforms like Appsumo, Rockethub or Pitchground?

@profy17 hey it's Zapmail, an email platform for teams. Currently via outbound marketing. Mostly going through direct referrals and also leads from ads through our website. We've applied to Appsumo, other two, nope haven't checked it out yet.

@shaaay you really need to get on something like Appsumo to jumpstart your growth and get a 2nd order effect: word of mouth kicking in, lifetime users buying more of your product = subscription revenue. As to outbound, did you check your email deliverability and have you done good segmentation on your leads? Did you maybe try and personalize email content even through one-liners to increase the reply rate? The big question is why you over anything else that's out there - what should hook them to get onboard with you and switch from one of your competitors.

@anuwen Hey Andrew, yes you can hack together one liners / icebreakers using say GTP for Sheets and then inserting your OpenAI key to then personalize against LinkedIn URLs of the person's profile. An alternative to Google Sheets, would be to use Clay or Lyne, which produce one-liners and then you can upload those into your email tool. If you're looking for something significantly more scalable and hassle-free, that's where we come in. Imagine connecting 100 inboxes to the software and sending 3k personalized emails daily. If you're keen to be an early adopter, just sign up to the waiting list on the website and I will notify you once we're live. We're currently onboarding closed BETA clients to iron out bugs to be ready for launch.

@senthil99nathan I would try and figure out who are the best paying / stickiest clients from the existing customer base and then go after the lookalikes. Your product is important at a specific point in your prospect's journey and it's important to engage with them at that point (Intent signal). To me, the only way you can actually really scale your offering to go after brands & creators is by creating major lead lists from various B2B databases and engage via cold email outreach (10-100 mailboxes and sending at least 1k emails/daily). Connecting on social is all good, but doesn't scale well. Secondly, you're going up against your competitors which are Slack communities, Facebook groups and Circle. What does your content marketing look like for that? I would expect really powerful blog posts about having you compare yourself to say Slack as a good alternative and similar to that have also strong YouTube channel and videos.

@profy17 , that's great to hear. While we're already incorporating a few things you said like creating lead lists, intent signal, etc, I'll definitely look into other aspects you said like content marketing and all that. Thank you.

@gapostolov any links, video or otherwise, in the first email is a no-no as it hurts email deliverability. Some email service providers my class as phishing attempt as the user clicks out. It's fine to include links in the 2nd email though. The goal on outbound is to start a conversation with a prospect or hook them into seeing a demo / jump on a call. ILDs are significantly more powerful for inbound motion. I would send a video as a follow up showing first their LinkedIn Profile and talking about them and then transition briefly over to the product in less than 60 seconds.

@clarencet_88 did you use ChatGPT to write that comment? :D

@amy_doyle I would say 5%-10% heavy concentrated at the top-mid funnel. Even though there's AI hype, the implementation and transition take time across the industry. Long term though 20%-30%. There's still so much to do in this space.