An Unconventional but Successful Email Marketing Campaign (w/ opt-ins)
Cold email gets a pretty bad rep — but it doesn’t have to.
99 times out of 100, a cold email doesn’t stand a chance of getting a moment’s thought, and that’s because it looks something like this:
Here’s the service/product I’m trying to sell you
This is why it’s the best service/product that you NEED right now
Do you have some time to talk about it tomorrow?
With messages like these, it’s no wonder cold outreach gets a bad rep.
That’s why I wanted to write this article to share a cold outreach strategy we’ve been using recently that’s been received with overwhelming enthusiasm and meetings booked left and right.
Instead of focusing on the product, we decided to take more a collaborative approach that energizes people and opens the door for a great conversation.
Rather than lead with our platform, we decided to lead with an altruistic project, one that our platform facilitates and that’s true to our brand and mission: building a free hub of high-quality advice for new and aspiring entrepreneurs.
First and foremost, we felt that this would be a great cause. There are so many things we wish we knew when we started our journey, and we figured that many entrepreneurs felt the same way. We also noticed that founders are very willing to help one another, so we leaned into that founders helping founders mentality, and reached out as a founder looking to collaborate, not as a salesman looking to get you to buy a product.
So we started reaching out to founders to see if they would be willing to share the wisdom they’ve learned throughout their experience and pass that along to new and aspiring entrepreneurs, and the response was simply incredible. The majority of people who responded were overwhelmingly positive; people were not only willing to hop on a call but were enthusiastic to do so, and we received compliments on our creative outreach strategy.
The idea of contributing to a crowdsourced hub of helpful research and information turned out to be a refreshing outreach strategy that cuts through the noise. And more often than not, those who booked time with us even asked us how we were monetizing, opening the door for us to organically discuss our platform.
The lesson we learned from this approach is simple: a cold email campaign that is focused around a genuine and collaborative cause that’s on-brand and relevant to who you are reaching out to is a recipe for success.
You don’t have to shove your service or product down somebody’s throat to book meetings (and doing so is a one-way ticket to getting your emails blocked). Instead, think about your target audience and take a collaborative approach: what can you accomplish together?
We hope this helps! We’d love to hear your thoughts, and if you want to bounce around any ideas with us for your own projects and outreach, we’d be happy to chat. This post wasn’t sponsored or anything. We just wanted to share knowledge with you.
And if you’re a researcher or writer looking for a place to organize your ideas and collaborate on projects, that’s what Kahana is for!
PS: While we were writing this post, someone responded with their calendar link to set up a call (not kidding!)
Tech stack we used:
- https://www.dnb.com (building audiences)
- https://www.outreach.io (campaign sequencing)
- https://kahana.co (cloud collaboration)
