Here’s Jacky Chou’s strategy for cold outreach specifically for rank and rent businesses. (He also shares an example of how he pitches sponsorships for his newsletter.)
The key steps include:
- Get a domain: Buy a new domain separate from your main domain to avoid risking your main domain’s reputation. For my domain I’d go with something like trymarktingbaby.com or getmarketingbaby.com.
- Create email accounts: Set up 3 email accounts under this domain. E.g. mark@trymarketingbaby.com, marc@marketingbaby.com, mk@marketingbaby.com (Don’t set up more than 3.)
- Technical Setup: Implement email forwarding and add necessary DNS records like DMARC and DKIM (just google how to do this, it’s quite easy)
- Finding Leads: If you’re just starting out, you typically don’t need to subscribe like a premium solution like Apollo or ZoomInfo. Use tools like Outscraper to gather emails, especially targeting specific niches or areas (e.g., scrape all real estate businesses or realtors in Vancouver). If you have a more specific buyer persona you want to target (e.g. only VP Marketing at AI companies with more than 50 employees or something like that) you can also just go on Fiverr or Upwork and get someone to generate the lead list for you based on your specific criteria. You’ll end up with thousands of emails that you can load into your cold outreach software.
- Email Content: Write strong, personalized email copy. The content should be brief and compelling, avoiding generic greetings. Use a lot of spintax to prevent being flagged as spam. (See a screenshot of the subject line and email body he shared below.) Keep it short and succinct—most people write way too much in their cold emails.
- Follow-up: Always send at least two follow-up emails to increase the chances of a response.
- Using Email Software: Load your setup into cold email software like Lemlist or Instantly (which is what Jacky uses himself) for bulk emailing. (Or if you’re on a budget, check out appsumo and type in lemlist and there will be some alternatives coming up that offer great deals.)
The cold email example he shared:
He got a 2% response rate for his intial outreach email (he sent it to 2579 recipients and got 26 replies), which generated 3 opportunities.
They’re selling each spot for $1k a month, so if he closes just one of these opportunities that’s already $1k in recurring monthly revenue from this one email.
He also shared another example where they did outreach to AI companies selling sponsorships for their MarketingLetter newsletter. 6780 emails sent, 2.3% reply rate (157), 16 opportunities created, 3 deals closed (again $1,000 each, so that’s $3,000), and pretty much on autopilot. Interestingly, for the AI companies they had more success with LinkedIn automation than with cold email.
Cold email example he shared for the marketingletter outreach:
