Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #63: Is Cold Email Dead or Just Getting Started?

Michael Utley: Hey everybody. This is Michael and Chris. Welcome to episode 63 of the Dodgeball Marketing podcast.

Chris Raines: Yo. How're you doing? I interrupted you with the yo.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: My apologies.

Michael Utley: Yo to you as well. And yo be with you.

Chris Raines: May the yo be with you.

Michael Utley: Yes. So, today episode 63, what we're going to talk about is cold email dead or just getting started.

Chris Raines: And the answer is it's dead. So that's the end of this podcast.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Hit the timer. Fastest episode ever.

Chris Raines: Thanks for watching.

Michael Utley: Long story short, it's not dead. So if you saw a recent blog post you'll see kind of some good notes on this topic, but yeah, we want to kind of dig into this. There's a real weird thing going on with email right now. And we want to sort of put email into two categories for everybody and talk about how that works.

Michael Utley: We would call one group maybe newsletters or pure opt-in email, and then the other is cold email. So it's sort of like cold calling. We call it cold emailing.

Chris Raines: Yeah. It's the digital version of cold calling.

Michael Utley: Yeah. So Chris, get us started here. What is it? How do you compare the two? What are these two? How are they different?

Chris Raines: Yeah, excuse me. I think you just said it. An opt-in email is something where someone gives express permission to be emailed. So that could either be they opt in on a form on a website, or in the checkout process they check the little button says, yes, I'd love you to send me more emails about deals and sales and stuff. Or it could be, Michael, you were talking about before with your company. If you engage in a sales process, it might be part of the sales process. Like, Hey, we're going to sign you up for emails.

Michael Utley: Yeah. We do that. When we're talking to somebody, we say, yeah, you know, we'll stay in touch. Part of what you get when you work from us is we'll let you know when new podcast episodes are out. Well, that's an email newsletter.

Chris Raines: Yeah. That's more of like, a personal opt-in. And cold email is exactly kind of what it sounds like. If you go and purchase a list from a broker and you put those into an email system and that person has not taken any action toward you positively to say we want emails from you. So that's what cold email is. So it's basically the digital version of cold calling.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: When you cold call people, they didn't ask for you to call, but you're calling them anyway. So cold email can be an effective tactic. You have to do it the right way. So that's what we're going to talk about here. But before we talk about that, I throw this to you, Michael, like is kind of a legal question, right? Is it even allowed to buy a list and then email that? So let's talk about that.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Let's talk about that. So next topic here: is it allowed, is cold emailing allowed? A lot of people might remember when the United States Congress passed the CAN-SPAM act.

Chris Raines: A thousand years ago.

Michael Utley: Yeah. And I'm not a naturally sort of cynical person, but I was responsible for implementing CAN-SPAM legislation to a half-billion-dollar company. So I thought through it very carefully and in reality, the CAN-SPAM act did nothing to reduce spam.

Michael Utley: I can articulate very succinctly what it did, but it does not do anything that says you can't email people. So what CAN-SPAM did is it required that anybody sending email do it in relation to a known entity related to a real physical postal address. So that was a very different approach that Congress took than they could have, which would've been to control the sending domain, for example. But they said, Hey, you have to say who you're sending from. And you have to have it associated with a real postal address.

Michael Utley: And then the big one was you have to offer the ability for people to unsubscribe from what they've subscribed to. And what they were really trying to infer there, or get, was that people had to subscribe to email to receive it. But that wasn't really in the law. What was in the law was the requirement of a physical address to be associated with the sender, and the ability to opt out.

Michael Utley: And so that really threw everybody off because people thought that CAN-SPAM was going to can the spam, that it was going to reduce the spam. And it really did nothing. Now they did go after some of the massive senders, but really what ended up happening that changed the consumer experience and really became more effective was that email clients took responsibility for the spam problem. When Google changed their inbox layout to take promotional messages and basically offload those to either a spam folder or a promotional message tag and offer a pre-filtered inbox. That's what changed the massive amount of behavior that was happening out there.

Michael Utley: Now, there was also at that time some federal prosecution of sort of the most notorious spammers, but those were all prosecuted based on criminal and fraudulent behavior in the emails, not actually the act of emailing. So what this did is it kind of threw people off the scent of using cold email for, I don't know, 10 years. But then everybody said, oh, you know, why don't we just take personal emails and streamline that and make it scalable. And so that's really what cold email is. It's like a cold call.

Michael Utley: The problem with emails is that it's so easy and cheap to send millions of them. The good thing about email is it's so easy and cheap to send millions of them. And so the recommendations we have and the way we think about it is to move way down that spectrum toward it being a personal email and away from the cheap and easy to send millions. So that's kind of what we're getting into today. But is cold emailing legal? A hundred percent.

Chris Raines: Yeah. So let's talk about the platforms that enable marketers to use cold email. Now there's two different kinds, I think Michael, two different kinds of platforms here. You've got one that I would call the one too many platform. So that would be your Constant Contact, your MailChimp, your... Help me out here with those. Klaviyo is a big one in the e-commerce world. So one too many, and that's kind of people get signed up and you send, maybe, the same email to a lot of different people and you do it all at once.

Michael Utley: And maybe it's personalized.

Chris Raines: Maybe it's personalized. And then you've got platforms. I know the one you like is HubSpot. There's other ones called Hunter.io, Woodpecker, SmartReach. There's dozens of these platforms out there. And those are more geared toward this more cold email, cold personalized email approach. Right? So that's kind of the platforms you want to be on.

Chris Raines: What you don't want to do when you engage in personal email, or I'm sorry cold email, is to go out and buy a list of 5,000 people and load them all up into your Constant Contact and blast them out with a message. What's going to happen there.

Michael Utley: I would call that spam.

Chris Raines: That's for sure spam.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And what's going to happen. You're going to get in a rough situation because all of the email providers, and Constant Contact, and the end providers like Gmail and Outlook, they look at what sending domains are getting flagged as spam and getting unsubscribed. Your email provider will note how many people are unsubscribed. And what could happen is if you do that is your sending domain, the domain of your website, could get flagged by email service providers. And then future emails that you send, no matter what platform you use, might get thrown in the spam folder. So it's really, really important that you use a platform that's geared towards cold email, the ones we listed here.

Michael Utley: Yeah. That's a huge difference. The throttling is a different technology that's used and the way you're selecting what domain you're going to be sending from is a huge commitment. You can kind of poison a domain.

Chris Raines: A lot of times it's a good idea if you're going to do a lot of cold emailing, is at actually spin off a different domain. Go get a different domain as the sending domain. That way if for some reason it gets flagged with spam by too many people, you don't pollute. Because what you don't want is your main website domain to get flagged for spam, because then you're going to be kind of in a pickle.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Yeah. So what platform you use is pretty important. And we talked about this in kind of our show prep. This is kind of an area that I think is really exploding in popularity right now in the B2B space. I don't know so much about B2C, but I know that in B2B personal cold emails, highly personalized, thoughtful, well crafted.

Chris Raines: I get 10 or 12 of them a week.

Michael Utley: Yeah. It's exploding. There are a lot of platforms. So I think there's going to be a lot of consolidation in that space. So we gave a few names here, but there are actually tons of other ones, and there are ones that we were talking about a year ago that are not even out there anymore.

Chris Raines: Sure.

Michael Utley: And so yeah, there's going to be a lot of consolidation in this space. HubSpot of course is a bigger kind of animal.

Chris Raines: They're the elephant.

Michael Utley: So it'll be around for a while. And Hunter.io you mentioned. SmartReach, Woodpecker. Those are some that are maybe a little more staying power. But I would say be careful, look. If you get into one of these platforms, do a lot of set-up, don't be surprised if they go away in six months or a year. Not those that I mentioned, but a lot of the other ones.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: So next up, what are the risks of doing personalized cold email?

Chris Raines: We just talked about one, your domain.

Michael Utley: Yeah. We talked about one big one, the domain. If you're sending and you're not thoughtful in how you structure your content, your appeal, you're going to find that this is more going to do more damage to you than good.

Michael Utley: A really good cold email is going to be a sequence of, I think, three to five emails. A lot of people will say five to 10. And I think sometimes that can be too many if you're targeting really well. Five to 10 is when you haven't targeted well, and you just want to make sure you kind of catch everybody you can.

Michael Utley: But yeah, I think if you're targeting really well, you really want to have as close to a good initial encounter as possible with the right offer, the right messaging. It could be that you're offering a free assessment to someone. It could be that you're saying, Hey, you and I know, or you and I are both working on the same problem. Here's what that problem is. I'm looking to get 30 minutes of your schedule. It has to be something that's, this is a weird word, but intimate. Using someone's name in the way you address them is fine.

Michael Utley: But be careful. Because GoEpps it uses my middle name, Epps. On my LinkedIn profile I am Michael Epps as my first name. I did that just to tuck my middle name in there in the full name. Well, anytime I get LinkedIn prospecting it's Hey, Michael Epps, like it's my first name. So clean your data. Read it. Think about it. If someone uses, for example, all lowercase in their name on a platform or a list, and you've stuck that in and you don't clean it up, they can tell right where you came from and it's very offputting.

Michael Utley: Another thing is how you frame up. And we talked about this in our pre-show, but how you frame up the ability to opt out. I would really avoid in a cold email series, giving people the ability to unsubscribe. They didn't subscribe to anything. Marketing's about establishing trust. And if you're doing cold contact with somebody, that's the hardest thing for establishing trust. You want to think about every pixel in that email. You don't want something that makes them think they subscribed or they think you think you can make them be a subscriber. That's gaslighting.

Michael Utley: So the language that you use, you do have to include the ability to opt out of future contacts. So I would make it natural language. I would say, "Hey, John, if you don't want to hear from me on this, just give me a heads up, hit this button. And I won't bother you anymore." That kind of natural language, I think works really well.

Chris Raines: That's admitting to them, hey, I got your list from somebody else. I know I wasn't invited. So if you don't want me in your house, like, dude, just show me the door. No worries. It's your house. Like that's kind of what-

Michael Utley: Yeah. I think when big corporate entities are too scripted and too fake, and use too many hand gestures and have a robot delivery, it comes off as very sort of forced. Well, you can do that in email too. If you go too far with, "Hey John, I was just spending time on your website. I fell in love with your story about whatever." You've got to be really good at making that kind of connection with somebody.

Michael Utley: I lean in the direction of the more personal, the more thoughtful, but also the more direct and authentic and real the better. So I would lean toward fewer emails rather than more emails, and each one of them being well-crafted. And wherever you can tuck in a real personal connection, both of you knowing the same person, having a mutual shared interest in something that you know that person's passionate about. Not in a way that's sort of pandering, but in a way that's really authentic and holds up to what they can know about you, then that's a good way to go.

Chris Raines: Yeah. That I would say that's a little bit harder to scale and send a lot at a time.

Michael Utley: Oh, yeah.

Chris Raines: You have to be thoughtful. So that would be like for lists of under a hundred. You could really take the time with each one for high value targets. And say, "Hey, I noticed you went to UT back in '84. I graduated in '90." Really make it personal like that. But there are other ways you can do. Let's move on to our next one here.

Michael Utley: We've done that in data sets with hundreds of rows. And honestly it took a lot of work. We paid the tax. We did the work to make an authentic connection, and we've gotten sales from that approach.

Chris Raines: Yeah. It takes longer. It's risk reward. Like it takes longer to compose the message and, I think what you're going to say, but it's also a greater reward because it's connects more to that person.

Michael Utley: Yeah. That's actually a good segue to our last one. Chris, take us out of here. What does it look like when it's done well?

Chris Raines: So cold email done well. Let's talk about it. There's an effective message. It's very targeted and very personal. So I think that all goes back to how you segment your list. So if I was to do cold email for my company, I would want to go, okay, who are we targeting? We're not targeting small businesses, or we're not targeting local business. We're going to target physical therapy practices. And I'm going to have a row in my data set for name of practice. And when I send it out, the subject line's going to say, "Does (insert name of practice) need help with leads?" Something like that. So they're going to see the name of their practice. Each email's going to see the name of their practice in the subject line. And then I'm going to say, "Hi (name) this is Chris with Buller Media. We're taking..." I'm trying to think off the top of the head. But really make it specific. And it's important that this email is going directly to them, that they should feel like as much as possible that you composed an email directly to them, for them.

Chris Raines: And so don't send it to a giant list, segment them some way. Usually if it's B2B it's by industry, maybe by state region, something like that. Business type. So that's how you get targeted. And then the messaging flows from your targeting, right? So if you're targeting a specific type of customer, you're not going to want to use general language. You're going to be like, "Hey, we help physical therapy practices become less reliant on doctor referrals and build their customer base organically," or whatever it is your message is.

Chris Raines: And so effective messaging, targeting. Message comes from targeting. Very personal. And then use cold email software, not email marketing software, just like we talked about a few points ago. And that's what effective cold email looks like.

Michael Utley: Yeah. I think it's a good thing to do when it's done well, because when it's done well, it's not going to be too big of a data set. It's going to be carefully crafted, and it's going to come across as authentic.

Chris Raines: Yeah. The personal part, I think, is probably the most important one. Don't sound like a robot.

Michael Utley: And don't pander.

Chris Raines: Right. Don't pander them. Just act like a person. Act like you're sitting at your email, your personal email, typing something out. Just because you're using software doesn't mean you remove that personal connection.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Act like a person's always good advice.

Chris Raines: Act like a person.

Michael Utley: Always remember to turn on the emotion chip.

Chris Raines: Just get the software upgrade on the emotion chip and deploy it.

Michael Utley: Yep. All right. Hey, thanks everybody. This has been episode 63 of the Dodgeball Marketing podcast. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn. Please follow. And as always send your questions to us and drop your comments here so that we can cover the topics that you want to learn more about. Thanks so much.