Cold email prospecting rules

- So before we jump into the bulk of the course, I wanted to run you through a handful of rules that everyone should stick to. I'll be telling you loads of tricks and tips. I'll be giving you examples that you can try yourself. I'll be telling you what's worked for me and my peers in the past. There's a lot of information to be taking on. So, these seven rules are here to work as a basic guide to keep you on track, delivering high quality emails to your prospects. Write these rules down or print downloadable that I've made and left in the exercise files of this course. That way you'll always have the reminder. So here are the rules. Firstly, send emails directly. It's easy to go to a company website and find some generic email address, usually starting with info or hello. It's also easy to call and for the receptionist to give you the same email address, instead of sharing the direct email address or the contact you want. And my advice is to not ever bother emailing that address. It won't work. It will fall into a huge inbox that nobody ever checks. Even if they say they will forward it, the receptionist will see a sales email and delete it regardless of how valuable it may be to the contact you're wanting to reach. So do not let the non decision maker be the decision maker. Put in extra effort and find that direct email address of your contact so you know they received it personally. There are tools out there for finding and testing those. Just give it a quick online search. Secondly, don't be too salesy. We'll talk about this more later on, but remember, this is a human to human email. It's easy to fall into the norm and want your emails to be professional and corporate, but that can often end up making them salesy and uninspiring. So write like a normal human being and write as you speak. Thirdly, keep the emails clean. You want to catch your prospect's attention, but do not use multicolor texts, change fonts throughout the email, change the size of the text and so on. Keep the email clean, understandable and straightforward. You wouldn't email a colleague or a friend would say, oh, it was messy, so why do it to a prospect? Fourth, and it's amazing how many people don't do this, have everything in your email signature. There's no point doing all that hard work just for them to not be able to reach you. Remember, you can hit reply to an email easily, but what if the email has been forwarded on? What if the chain has been broken and they can't just hit reply? What if you sent a great email and they share it online? You need to keep your contact details on there and clearly. Fifth, show some flair. Any personality or humor will shining through the boring business emails they receive everyday. Don't be another boring robot just going through the sales motion, be an interesting person that they will want to engage with. Then finding out more about your product or service will come second taking the pressure off. So remember, selling is just making friends and helping them. And nobody wants to be friends with someone they find boring and personality less. Sixth, keep it short. Nobody likes to read an essay especially when they've already got to do lists right down to the floor. Your prospects are busy, so respect that and don't waste their time. There's a ton of research to show that shorter emails are much more effective in getting opened and driving engagement. So let's not ignore that fact and let's plan our email around that simple rule. I'll go through this more later but general guidance is this, your email shouldn't be any more than five sentences long, and if you can, no more than 70 words. The prospect should be able to tell immediately that this email isn't going to take too long to read. Finally, and maybe most importantly, seven, it's not about you. This one seems crazy, right? You are emailing them about your product so they can buy from you. Surely it's about you. No, it's not. It's about them, and how you can help them, and how they can benefit from your product or service, or what pains that they are experiencing that you can remove. So remember to say you at least twice as much as you say I. Make the value about them and how you can change their lives. So, like I said, make sure you've got those rules noted down or you've got my downloadable printed, and let's jump into the rest of the course. Starting with how we can lay our bait and get our prospects to at least open our emails.