How To Convert Customers With Cold Emails | Startup School

Whether it's for sales, recruiting or making new connections, cold outreach is a necessary tool for helping build your startup. But as you probably know, most cold emails either are ignored or end up in the trash. So what can you do to make sure your emails break through the noise? In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Aaron Epstein shares expert advice on how to write cold emails that have all the right ingredients to get noticed and convert new customers.

00:00 - Intro
01:47 - Map your funnel
07:49 - Finding emails
09:52 - How to get more responses?
22:12 - Examples
30:59 - Final thoughts

[chapterme]

Chapters (Powered by ChapterMe) -
00:00 - Intro
00:17 - All-time best email outreach hack
00:36 - How to get warm intros?
01:16 - Cold emails are unavoidable, but most are ineffective.
01:47 - First focus: Map out your funnel.
02:31 - Work backward from your goal to build your funnel.
03:59 - Begin manual, personalized emails before automation.
05:10 - Expect conversion rates to drop as you scale.
06:19 - Screen recipients will see
07:49 - Finding stranger's email
08:48 - Early-stage outreach relies on your personal brand.
09:52 - How to get more responses? 7 principles of effective email copy
10:12 - Keep emails focused on a single, clear outcome.
11:14 - Be human
13:44 - Personalize
16:19 - Keep it short
17:03 - Establish credibility
18:10 - All about the reader, not you
20:01 - Have a clear call to action
20:50 - Summary
21:21 - One email is not enough: Follow-up
22:12 - Let's see some examples - Not effective
22:37 - Example 1
23:35 - Example 2
24:41 - Example 3
25:46 - Good examples
27:17 - Example 2
29:12 - Example 3: Before and After
30:59 - Final Advice
32:29 - Outro

[chrismarin]

Ran an outbound agency for 10 years - here’s the checklist you can use:

-Run manual outreach until you book 10 meetings
-Offer up something interesting (see donuts example)
-Keep it short and personal (emotional)
-Monitor if your emails are getting replies (shoot for 1-10% reply rates)

[justin_pryor]

Sent a dozen cold emails before this video: got 0 responses.

Sent a dozen cold emails after this video: got 4 responses

Once again, THANK YOU YC!

[alexeykardo]

OMG I love studying at the YC academy
This is what it feels like when we re watching your videos
Thank you!
Can't wait to start doing right away!

[viktorfromsales]

All-in-all good video but have to add some corrections:

1. don’t use those subject lines. They get archived instantly. Keep to 2-5 words that sum up what the email is about.

Sometimes an empty subject line helps as well because it not only shows more of the email preview, it draws the recipient’s attention to that empty line in their inbox.

2. If it’s a cold email, keep the first email to plain text. Any links, images or gifs risk landing in the spam folder.

3. Personalisation at scale is just clustering prospects based on similarities. Sending emails that feel personal because they’re highly targeted/segmented.

[mrPCoding]

If you are getting ZERO resonses read this!

This is great but there is alot of very important points missing from this.
1. You can't send hundreds of cold emails from one address that is not warmed up and expect not to end up in spam.
2. You can't have anything but text in cold emails expecting not to end up in spam. (making anything bold/italic, adding links, images or anything else will make the email HTML and not text)
3. If you get flagged as spam, you will be flagged for 2 weeks or more unless you have a good warm up system.
4. If you are scraping emails, there is something cold spam traps that you need to know about. If you email them your email is marked as spam for the foreseeable future.

Let me know if you want all my notes from over 1 000 000 cold emails.

[danielr]

The cold emails I write get a 30 or even 40% response rate.

The quick and short of it:

1) Have a sense of humor in your cold email
2) Tell people the genuine reasons why they should not reply, and then find unexpected upsides to them
3) Think of the traditional cold email styles and break as many rules as you can

Most startup founders don't have the guts to experiment like this. I don't expect a single person to see this and think "yeah, good idea." Well, have fun sending your 800 emails per customer, I'll send 3 or 4 and call it a day:)

Edit: I actually got positive responses ... for some reason. Anyone interested can drop me an email in the replies and I'll send them templates that have worked.

[qet-lab]

YC startups are killing it on Product Hunt.

[ZachBoughaffour]

literally the exact video i needed today

[lnplum]

Sending 50 emails a day and sending personalized handwritten emails based on networking and deep research sounds a bit unlikely, especially when you're doing more than just sales.

[dineshvarma]

Dear Aaron Epstein,

Thank you for sharing your valuable insights on cold outreach. Your experience will undoubtedly benefit countless startups.

I watched your entire video with great interest and have a question. To maximize results, is it advisable to send the same email to the same person multiple times in a day? If so, what is the optimal frequency for email outreach?

Let me know if you have any thoughts on this.

[manuelchabierescolaperez]

Is it possible to find the podcast in a platform where you can just listen to it? I used to follow it in Spotify but no podcasts have been uploaded in the past months. Thank you!

[Astro_Tutor]

Subject: Thank you for your Informative Video on Cold Emailing:)

Dear Aaron Epstein,

My name is Hayden from Toronto, Canada, and I just wanted tell you thanks for your informative video on the Y Combinatoor YouTube channel. I promise I'll work on improving my emails to people!!

Warmest regards (because it's cold up here🍁),

Hayden Helin

[in-motion]

Super valuable content! What is the best way to track and measure?

[betafishie]

Why not automate cold emails? Sorry if this is a bad question.

[zachomis]

Awesome presentation. You reaffirmed a lot of what I already do, and gave me more precise reasons for some of my habits.

[RicardoSeixas]

Fastest way to get deleted: “Quick question”

[eahefnawy]

I can't imagine writing 800 emails manually. Each would probably take me at least 10 mins to research and personalize. If I spend 6 hours every day sending cold emails, it'd take me 22 days to close a single customers. Not to mention the time spent prospecting, sourcing and targeting. Am I missing something?

[eahefnawy]

If I'll be sending emails manually just using my email client, how do I track each step of the funnel? I wish you mentioned some tools you use for that.

[andrewmoffat]

Send hundreds of emails to day, but make them all feel personalized and friendly, so the person doesn't feel like they're 1 of 100s of emails per day, because then they know you don't really care about them, which you don't.