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Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for VC Firms in 2023
02/8/2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for VC Firms in 2023

Clay Team
8
 min.

Lead generation is a crucial aspect of sales and marketing for venture capital firms. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski shares his tips and frameworks for lead generation through cold emails. By following his strategies, you can secure new investment opportunities, generate high-quality leads, and reach your target audience effectively. This post covers topics such as the importance of personalization in cold emails, the role of a clear call-to-action (CTA), defining your value proposition and marketing angle, and tips for crafting an effective cold email sequence.

Subject Line Matters for Lead Generation

The subject line is the first impression of your cold email and plays a crucial role in lead generation. It should be compelling and entice the recipient to open your email, capturing their attention and making them want to learn more about your offer.

Personalization is Key

To make your cold email copy compelling and increase your chances of lead conversion, it's essential to personalize your emails. Write like a human and provide context that resonates with your potential investment partners.

Focus on Response, not Sales

Lead generation is a process, and it takes time to convert a cold lead into a warm investment opportunity. The goal of your first cold email should be to secure a response and start a conversation with the recipient.

Include a Compelling CTA

Provide value to your potential customers and make it easy for them to take the next step in your sales funnel. Highlight your competitive advantages, showcase how your firm can solve pain points, and include a clear call-to-action (CTA).

Emphasize Your Value Proposition

Communicate how your firm can help the recipient achieve their desired outcome and emphasize the end goal they will be able to achieve with your investment.

Be Concise and Straight to the Point

Your prospects are busy, and your emails are an interruption in their day, so keep them brief and to the point. Limit your emails to under 75 words and ensure that you fully understand your target audience and your firm's value proposition.

Limit the Number of Follow-Up Emails

Based on data from SalesLoft and Gartner, it's best to send about four follow-up emails over six weeks. If you haven't received a reply, move on to new prospects and avoid sending too many emails, which may lower your open rates.

Define Your Value Proposition and Marketing Angle

To communicate your offer effectively, you need a clear and concise value proposition. The most effective value propositions are focused on increasing profitability, saving time, or reducing risk. Create a marketing angle that resonates with your prospects, keeping in mind what they are most concerned with: maximizing profits, minimizing risk, or something else. Consider using cold email templates to maximize the success of your lead generation campaign.

By following these tips, you can improve your lead generation process and increase the conversion rate of your marketing and sales campaigns. Utilize social media platforms such as LinkedIn, as well as email marketing, content marketing, and webinars to reach your target audience. Utilize lead generation tools such as Hubspot, a CRM, and SEO to track and manage your leads in real-time. Consider lead scoring, A/B testing, and the use of lead magnets, white papers, and email lists to generate qualified leads and fill your sales pipeline with new leads.

Subject lines

Try to write subject lines that could’ve been sent to your readers by their own customers or colleagues. Make sure to keep them short (2-3 words) and casual (no formal language, not capitalized). ‍Example (good): monthly SEO analyticsExample (bad): Don’t hire your next sales development representative until you do this!(Tip: listicle-type headlines that work well for SEO articles never work well in emails).‍Needless to day, never bait-and-switch people in your subject lines. (Don’t pretend that you have a customer for someone and then pitch lead generation services.) Make sure that your subject lines are connected to your message.‍

Line 1: Why you’re reaching out

In the first line of your email, describe the reason that you’re reaching out. Did you notice an announcement about your prospect’s company? Did you just read their LinkedIn post? Show that you’ve done homework to ensure that the connection is relevant.‍A useful template for this is: It looks like your company is [experiencing an event], and from my experience, this means [insight].‍Example: I was looking into your company, and I used the SimilarWeb Chrome extension to see that your web traffic has been declining in the last three months.

Line 2: How your product enables them to do better

Now, it’s time to describe a problem you noticed that your prospect might have and how your product can help them solve it. ‍Example: Your web traffic might be declining for many reasons, but one big factor may be that you don’t have enough content on your site. I noticed that your last blog post was from three years ago.

Line 3: Social proof

Then, give your reader social proof to show them that you’re reputable and have past experience helping companies with similar problems.‍Example: I just helped [X company relevant to your prospect’s industry and size] increase their search traffic by 250% in six months through SEO-optimized content.

Line 4: Interest-based call to action

Finally, give your recipient a way to engage with you. Your biggest goal is to get an email in response. A good template for this final call to action is: if we could help you with [problem], would that be useful to you?‍Let’s put all our learning together in this example of a cold email from an external sales team to a financial services company:‍

Hi [X],

I noticed that you're in the financial services industry and you've got a company with 15 employees. From my experience, I assume that you’re keeping a lean sales and marketing team. I’m currently working with [a financial services company similar in size to the prospect] on a campaign that is getting their sales team 2-3 interested leads a day. We’re targeting people who’ve recently changed jobs to see if they’re doing their rollover correctly. If I could help you connect with potential customers like this, would that be helpful to you?

Cheers,[Y]

Overall framework for an entire email sequence

In the previous section, we shared a framework for your first cold email. To recap, your first email discusses how you noticed a company, how you can solve their problems, and how you’ve done this in the past. Now, let’s go over the rest of your email sequence.‍

Email 2: Additional context

Email 1 was meant to succinctly communicate that your product could help your prospects solve important business problems. Email 2 is meant to add more detailed context on how. This is the place to add more information about product features or the transformation you’ll enable for your customers.‍Here’s an example using the financial services company we pitched above:‍

Hi [X],

I previously mentioned that I’ve been helping [X company] find customers by contacting people who’ve recently changed jobs to see if they need help with new benefits packages or rollover plans. For a bit more context, we do this by constantly monitoring LinkedIn Sales Navigator for people who are changing jobs. When they change jobs, we reach out on your behalf to see if they need your services.We have the copy ready and I have a video that can show you how to build this kind of list. Would that be interesting to you?

Cheers,[Y]

Email 3: Angles

If your prospect still hasn’t replied, you should try using a different angle. Your first two emails, e.g., may have emphasized that your product would help your reader earn more revenue. But what if driving more revenue isn’t their biggest priority? ‍Email 3 gives you the chance to change your angle. Perhaps, instead of emphasizing that your product can help someone make more money, you can emphasize how it can help them save time. ‍

Email 4: The breakup email

In your final email, ask your prospect if there's somebody else at their company you should speak to. ‍Example: I noticed that [your company] has 255 employees. Perhaps this isn't your area of focus. Is there somebody else that I should be speaking to? Data indicates that people respond to breakup emails more often than they respond to the other emails in a sequence. If you remain available to connect while offering to route yourself to a more relevant person within their organization, you will increase your chances of getting a positive reply.By now, you have a framework to use to write effective cold email sequences. This is a simple baseline that you can supplement with many different kinds of marketing tactics (LinkedIn, cold calling, ads, etc) to strengthen your results. If you have any suggestions or questions, please reach out to Eric!

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Mar 2023

How IntroCRM cut its prospecting data budget by 65% and built better lead lists lists with Clay

My company, IntroCRM, is a fractional sales agency that helps small sales teams excel with email deliverability, list building, and messaging. Clay is a critical part of how we help our customers generate, qualify, and book time with leads. In this blog post, I’m going to describe our life before Clay, why and how we use it today, and show you an example of a creative prospecting campaign that we ran for a client.

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How To Get More Customers By Using Outbound Sales - A Complete Guide

Clay Team

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Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for Private Equity Firms in 2023

Clay Team

Private equity firms often seek out new investment opportunities and are always on the lookout for promising startups. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski provides his tips and frameworks for launching successful lead generation strategies using cold email campaigns to target potential customers and qualified leads. The topics covered in this post include: the critical importance of the subject line, personalizing your cold email approach, focusing on getting a response instead of a sale, including a compelling call-to-action (CTA), emphasizing what your firm enables, keeping your emails short and sweet, limiting follow-up emails, defining your investment offer and marketing strategy, and utilizing cold email templates.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for VC Firms in 2023

Clay Team

Lead generation is a crucial aspect of sales and marketing for venture capital firms. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski shares his tips and frameworks for lead generation through cold emails. By following his strategies, you can secure new investment opportunities, generate high-quality leads, and reach your target audience effectively. This post covers topics such as the importance of personalization in cold emails, the role of a clear call-to-action (CTA), defining your value proposition and marketing angle, and tips for crafting an effective cold email sequence.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for Recruiting Agencies in 2023

Clay Team

As a recruiter, having a well-rounded lead generation strategy is essential for reaching potential job candidates and securing new clients. In this post, we will go into detail about the key elements that can help optimize your lead generation and increase the chances of making a sale. The topics covered will include lead generation through cold email outreach, leveraging social media, the importance of having a sales team, creating landing pages, lead scoring, lead generation tools, and much more.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for Marketing Agencies in 2023

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Cold emails are a crucial component of lead generation for marketing agencies looking to expand their customer base and drive sales growth. In this post, we will highlight the key elements of a successful cold email marketing strategy, including optimizing subject lines, utilizing personalized email templates, and measuring metrics for lead generation optimization.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for SAAS Companies in 2023

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Cold emails are a crucial aspect of a successful b2b sales and lead generation strategy for SAAS Companies. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski shares his tips and techniques for crafting personalized and effective cold emails that can generate new customers through a cold email outreach. Key topics discussed include optimizing cold email subject lines for better open rates, crafting compelling email body and email signature, tracking metrics, and identifying pain points to drive lead conversion.

Feb 2023

11 AI Prompts to Automate Your Prospecting Research

Eric Nowoslawski

Open AI has taken the world by storm with their generative image and text capabilities. The use cases in Sales and Marketing seems almost infinite. From coming up with ideas, writing customer facing copywriting, and automating customer support, every business can leverage AI in some way to boost their productivity.

The ‘job to be done’ for us is to prompt AI correctly to give better answers than what a person could write on their own.

I like to say, “Open AI is wildly powerful but it’s like a five year old at a bowling alley. On their own, the odds of getting a strike are zero. With bumpers, bowling ball ramp and some heavy direction, they can get a strike every time.”

When creating your own prompts, remember to be specific and feed as many details and examples into the data as you can.

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With love from the Clay team

Why should you do outbound sales?

You need to prove/disprove your hypothesis about the market.

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You get more control than you would with marketing.

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21 Tips for Keeping Cold Emails Out Of Spam in 2023

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Get Mobile Phone Number

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Hey friend,

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Mar 2023

How IntroCRM cut its prospecting data budget by 65% and built better lead lists lists with Clay

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Mar 2023

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In this post, we’ll go over how we automated six different outbound cold email campaigns using a single Clay table. Follow along step-by-step in our video.

In this campaign, we were selling sales engagement tools to marketing leaders in American B2B companies with under 100 employees. At a high level, we started with just a broad list of prospects’ names and emails from Apollo. From there, we used Clay to sort prospects into the following buckets: management consulting, recruiting, or financial services.

Mar 2023

Troubleshooting outbound sales and prospecting: a comprehensive guide

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Nailing your outbound sales and prospecting process can help you generate leads, acquire customers, and drive revenue growth. In this guide, we’ll share a step-by-step approach to troubleshooting each stage of your outbound sales campaign—whether you’re a new sales professional or a seasoned team leader.

We’ll cover how to check early campaigns, identify quality prospects, analyze insights from metrics, double down on well-performing sequences, and more, with detailed examples from our own experiences. You can use the table of contents to easily navigate to the areas that are most relevant to you.

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Mar 2023
Mar 2023
Mar 2023

Merge Column

Clay Team

Blog

Get access to our community's favorite templates. Clay gives your prospecting superpowers! 🧙

Blog

Get access to our community's favorite templates. Clay gives your prospecting superpowers! 🧙

Up next!

Updates on feature releases, product improvements, and our roadmap as we keep molding Clay.

← Back to all posts
February 8, 2023
Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for VC Firms in 2023
02/8/2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for VC Firms in 2023

Clay Team

Lead generation is a crucial aspect of sales and marketing for venture capital firms. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski shares his tips and frameworks for lead generation through cold emails. By following his strategies, you can secure new investment opportunities, generate high-quality leads, and reach your target audience effectively. This post covers topics such as the importance of personalization in cold emails, the role of a clear call-to-action (CTA), defining your value proposition and marketing angle, and tips for crafting an effective cold email sequence.

Subject Line Matters for Lead Generation

The subject line is the first impression of your cold email and plays a crucial role in lead generation. It should be compelling and entice the recipient to open your email, capturing their attention and making them want to learn more about your offer.

Personalization is Key

To make your cold email copy compelling and increase your chances of lead conversion, it's essential to personalize your emails. Write like a human and provide context that resonates with your potential investment partners.

Focus on Response, not Sales

Lead generation is a process, and it takes time to convert a cold lead into a warm investment opportunity. The goal of your first cold email should be to secure a response and start a conversation with the recipient.

Include a Compelling CTA

Provide value to your potential customers and make it easy for them to take the next step in your sales funnel. Highlight your competitive advantages, showcase how your firm can solve pain points, and include a clear call-to-action (CTA).

Emphasize Your Value Proposition

Communicate how your firm can help the recipient achieve their desired outcome and emphasize the end goal they will be able to achieve with your investment.

Be Concise and Straight to the Point

Your prospects are busy, and your emails are an interruption in their day, so keep them brief and to the point. Limit your emails to under 75 words and ensure that you fully understand your target audience and your firm's value proposition.

Limit the Number of Follow-Up Emails

Based on data from SalesLoft and Gartner, it's best to send about four follow-up emails over six weeks. If you haven't received a reply, move on to new prospects and avoid sending too many emails, which may lower your open rates.

Define Your Value Proposition and Marketing Angle

To communicate your offer effectively, you need a clear and concise value proposition. The most effective value propositions are focused on increasing profitability, saving time, or reducing risk. Create a marketing angle that resonates with your prospects, keeping in mind what they are most concerned with: maximizing profits, minimizing risk, or something else. Consider using cold email templates to maximize the success of your lead generation campaign.

By following these tips, you can improve your lead generation process and increase the conversion rate of your marketing and sales campaigns. Utilize social media platforms such as LinkedIn, as well as email marketing, content marketing, and webinars to reach your target audience. Utilize lead generation tools such as Hubspot, a CRM, and SEO to track and manage your leads in real-time. Consider lead scoring, A/B testing, and the use of lead magnets, white papers, and email lists to generate qualified leads and fill your sales pipeline with new leads.

Subject lines

Try to write subject lines that could’ve been sent to your readers by their own customers or colleagues. Make sure to keep them short (2-3 words) and casual (no formal language, not capitalized). ‍Example (good): monthly SEO analyticsExample (bad): Don’t hire your next sales development representative until you do this!(Tip: listicle-type headlines that work well for SEO articles never work well in emails).‍Needless to day, never bait-and-switch people in your subject lines. (Don’t pretend that you have a customer for someone and then pitch lead generation services.) Make sure that your subject lines are connected to your message.‍

Line 1: Why you’re reaching out

In the first line of your email, describe the reason that you’re reaching out. Did you notice an announcement about your prospect’s company? Did you just read their LinkedIn post? Show that you’ve done homework to ensure that the connection is relevant.‍A useful template for this is: It looks like your company is [experiencing an event], and from my experience, this means [insight].‍Example: I was looking into your company, and I used the SimilarWeb Chrome extension to see that your web traffic has been declining in the last three months.

Line 2: How your product enables them to do better

Now, it’s time to describe a problem you noticed that your prospect might have and how your product can help them solve it. ‍Example: Your web traffic might be declining for many reasons, but one big factor may be that you don’t have enough content on your site. I noticed that your last blog post was from three years ago.

Line 3: Social proof

Then, give your reader social proof to show them that you’re reputable and have past experience helping companies with similar problems.‍Example: I just helped [X company relevant to your prospect’s industry and size] increase their search traffic by 250% in six months through SEO-optimized content.

Line 4: Interest-based call to action

Finally, give your recipient a way to engage with you. Your biggest goal is to get an email in response. A good template for this final call to action is: if we could help you with [problem], would that be useful to you?‍Let’s put all our learning together in this example of a cold email from an external sales team to a financial services company:‍

Hi [X],

I noticed that you're in the financial services industry and you've got a company with 15 employees. From my experience, I assume that you’re keeping a lean sales and marketing team. I’m currently working with [a financial services company similar in size to the prospect] on a campaign that is getting their sales team 2-3 interested leads a day. We’re targeting people who’ve recently changed jobs to see if they’re doing their rollover correctly. If I could help you connect with potential customers like this, would that be helpful to you?

Cheers,[Y]

Overall framework for an entire email sequence

In the previous section, we shared a framework for your first cold email. To recap, your first email discusses how you noticed a company, how you can solve their problems, and how you’ve done this in the past. Now, let’s go over the rest of your email sequence.‍

Email 2: Additional context

Email 1 was meant to succinctly communicate that your product could help your prospects solve important business problems. Email 2 is meant to add more detailed context on how. This is the place to add more information about product features or the transformation you’ll enable for your customers.‍Here’s an example using the financial services company we pitched above:‍

Hi [X],

I previously mentioned that I’ve been helping [X company] find customers by contacting people who’ve recently changed jobs to see if they need help with new benefits packages or rollover plans. For a bit more context, we do this by constantly monitoring LinkedIn Sales Navigator for people who are changing jobs. When they change jobs, we reach out on your behalf to see if they need your services.We have the copy ready and I have a video that can show you how to build this kind of list. Would that be interesting to you?

Cheers,[Y]

Email 3: Angles

If your prospect still hasn’t replied, you should try using a different angle. Your first two emails, e.g., may have emphasized that your product would help your reader earn more revenue. But what if driving more revenue isn’t their biggest priority? ‍Email 3 gives you the chance to change your angle. Perhaps, instead of emphasizing that your product can help someone make more money, you can emphasize how it can help them save time. ‍

Email 4: The breakup email

In your final email, ask your prospect if there's somebody else at their company you should speak to. ‍Example: I noticed that [your company] has 255 employees. Perhaps this isn't your area of focus. Is there somebody else that I should be speaking to? Data indicates that people respond to breakup emails more often than they respond to the other emails in a sequence. If you remain available to connect while offering to route yourself to a more relevant person within their organization, you will increase your chances of getting a positive reply.By now, you have a framework to use to write effective cold email sequences. This is a simple baseline that you can supplement with many different kinds of marketing tactics (LinkedIn, cold calling, ads, etc) to strengthen your results. If you have any suggestions or questions, please reach out to Eric!

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Mar 2023

How IntroCRM cut its prospecting data budget by 65% and built better lead lists lists with Clay

My company, IntroCRM, is a fractional sales agency that helps small sales teams excel with email deliverability, list building, and messaging. Clay is a critical part of how we help our customers generate, qualify, and book time with leads. In this blog post, I’m going to describe our life before Clay, why and how we use it today, and show you an example of a creative prospecting campaign that we ran for a client.

Mar 2023

Automate 6 cold email campaigns in a single Clay workflow

Clay Team

In this post, we’ll go over how we automated six different outbound cold email campaigns using a single Clay table. Follow along step-by-step in our video.

In this campaign, we were selling sales engagement tools to marketing leaders in American B2B companies with under 100 employees. At a high level, we started with just a broad list of prospects’ names and emails from Apollo. From there, we used Clay to sort prospects into the following buckets: management consulting, recruiting, or financial services.

Mar 2023

Troubleshooting outbound sales and prospecting: a comprehensive guide

Stefan Kollenberg

Nailing your outbound sales and prospecting process can help you generate leads, acquire customers, and drive revenue growth. In this guide, we’ll share a step-by-step approach to troubleshooting each stage of your outbound sales campaign—whether you’re a new sales professional or a seasoned team leader.

We’ll cover how to check early campaigns, identify quality prospects, analyze insights from metrics, double down on well-performing sequences, and more, with detailed examples from our own experiences. You can use the table of contents to easily navigate to the areas that are most relevant to you.

Feb 2023

B2B Sales Prospecting: 15 Strategies to Drive More Conversions

Clay Team

When it comes to B2B sales, one of the biggest challenges is identifying potential customers and transforming them into qualified leads. However, by utilizing effective sales prospecting methods and tools, you can achieve more conversions and grow your business. In this ultimate guide to B2B sales prospecting, we'll delve into the most effective techniques, tools, and strategies to help you generate more quality leads, build a strong sales pipeline, and close more deals.

Feb 2023

How To Create Your Own Sales Prospect List in Minutes

Clay Team

Sales prospecting efforts can be a time-consuming and challenging task for any business. Finding the right prospects and gathering the necessary information to approach them can often feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. You may spend hours scouring various sources such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and company websites, only to come up with a fragmented and incomplete picture of your potential customers. The process of aggregating this information and organizing it into a usable format can take even more time and effort. However, what if we told you that you could create a sales prospecting list in just a few minutes? With Clay, an in-depth  sales prospecting tool, you can quickly and easily import prospects from multiple sources and enrich them with valuable information. You can also export this data to your preferred platform such as a CRM, saving you time and allowing you to focus on what you do best - closing deals!

Feb 2023

How To Get More Customers By Using Outbound Sales - A Complete Guide

Clay Team

In today's fast-paced and highly competitive business landscape, it's more important than ever to have a solid sales strategy in place. While inbound sales and social media marketing can be effective in attracting potential customers, outbound sales is still a crucial component of any successful sales plan. Outbound sales refers to the process of actively reaching out to potential customers through methods such as cold calling, email marketing, and cold outreach. In this blog post, we'll explore the benefits of outbound sales, the types of businesses that can benefit from it, and how to execute a successful outbound sales strategy.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for Private Equity Firms in 2023

Clay Team

Private equity firms often seek out new investment opportunities and are always on the lookout for promising startups. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski provides his tips and frameworks for launching successful lead generation strategies using cold email campaigns to target potential customers and qualified leads. The topics covered in this post include: the critical importance of the subject line, personalizing your cold email approach, focusing on getting a response instead of a sale, including a compelling call-to-action (CTA), emphasizing what your firm enables, keeping your emails short and sweet, limiting follow-up emails, defining your investment offer and marketing strategy, and utilizing cold email templates.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for VC Firms in 2023

Clay Team

Lead generation is a crucial aspect of sales and marketing for venture capital firms. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski shares his tips and frameworks for lead generation through cold emails. By following his strategies, you can secure new investment opportunities, generate high-quality leads, and reach your target audience effectively. This post covers topics such as the importance of personalization in cold emails, the role of a clear call-to-action (CTA), defining your value proposition and marketing angle, and tips for crafting an effective cold email sequence.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for Recruiting Agencies in 2023

Clay Team

As a recruiter, having a well-rounded lead generation strategy is essential for reaching potential job candidates and securing new clients. In this post, we will go into detail about the key elements that can help optimize your lead generation and increase the chances of making a sale. The topics covered will include lead generation through cold email outreach, leveraging social media, the importance of having a sales team, creating landing pages, lead scoring, lead generation tools, and much more.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for Marketing Agencies in 2023

Clay Team

Cold emails are a crucial component of lead generation for marketing agencies looking to expand their customer base and drive sales growth. In this post, we will highlight the key elements of a successful cold email marketing strategy, including optimizing subject lines, utilizing personalized email templates, and measuring metrics for lead generation optimization.

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for SAAS Companies in 2023

Clay Team

Cold emails are a crucial aspect of a successful b2b sales and lead generation strategy for SAAS Companies. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski shares his tips and techniques for crafting personalized and effective cold emails that can generate new customers through a cold email outreach. Key topics discussed include optimizing cold email subject lines for better open rates, crafting compelling email body and email signature, tracking metrics, and identifying pain points to drive lead conversion.

Feb 2023

11 AI Prompts to Automate Your Prospecting Research

Eric Nowoslawski

Open AI has taken the world by storm with their generative image and text capabilities. The use cases in Sales and Marketing seems almost infinite. From coming up with ideas, writing customer facing copywriting, and automating customer support, every business can leverage AI in some way to boost their productivity.

The ‘job to be done’ for us is to prompt AI correctly to give better answers than what a person could write on their own.

I like to say, “Open AI is wildly powerful but it’s like a five year old at a bowling alley. On their own, the odds of getting a strike are zero. With bumpers, bowling ball ramp and some heavy direction, they can get a strike every time.”

When creating your own prompts, remember to be specific and feed as many details and examples into the data as you can.

Feb 2023

A 7 Step How-To Guide: Successful Outbound Sales Campaigns

With love from the Clay team

Why should you do outbound sales?

You need to prove/disprove your hypothesis about the market.

Outbound sales is beneficial if you have hypotheses but need more certainty about who must have your product and why. It enables you to quickly create, test, and validate these hypotheses with real potential customers.

You get more control than you would with marketing.

Marketing allows you to get content in front of groups of people, but you have far less control over the exact people who will see it. In contrast, outbound sales allows you to pick the specific people that you want to target. This level of control removes the uncertainty of "did the people I want to test this with actually see my message?"

Feb 2023

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks and Best Practices for 2023

Eric Nowoslawski

Cold emails are one of your most powerful tools for landing new customers, but a few factors can determine whether your messages get trashed or earn replies. In this blog post, we take a look at cold email copywriting tips and frameworks from our resident expert Eric Nowoslawski, who has helped companies with cold email and outbound marketing. We'll cover what to keep in mind before you start an email sequence, how to write your offer and marketing angles, a framework for an effective initial cold email, and how to structure a complete cold email sequence.

Feb 2023

21 Tips for Keeping Cold Emails Out Of Spam in 2023

Eric Nowoslawski

Mastering the art of sending relevant and effective cold emails is crucial for any sales team that wants to convert new customers. The email deliverability landscape, however, can be overwhelming, with hundreds of strategies to consider amidst a constantly changing set of rules and red flags. In this post, we'll share our 21 best tips to help you land cold emails in prospects’ inboxes and acquire customers in 2023. Our guide includes mastering the basics, like setting up essential authentications, cleaning lists, and following sending limits, as well as creative techniques like how to use personalizations and spin taxes. No matter what the tip is, our overall philosophy is simple: whatever spammers do, try to do the opposite. 

Feb 2023

How to Use OpenAI To Write the Perfect Cold Email from Scratch

Eric Nowoslawski

Effective cold emails are critical for any business, but they’ve been extremely time-consuming to write—until now. Instead of spending hours reading LinkedIn bios and company websites, you can use OpenAI with Clay to quickly mass personalize your email outreach with the click of a few buttons. In this post, we’ll show you how to use OpenAI to write personalized outreach emails from scratch based on someone’s LinkedIn bio, company description, and more.

Jan 2023

How to Use Formulas in Clay

Eric Nowoslawski

When building a Clay table, the sources, integrations, and CRM plugins can accomplish the goals of most users. Sometimes, there is a need for some data merging, splitting, or otherwise clean up that is needed in your table. This is where you can use Formulas to accomplish your goals!

In this blog, we are going to first go over how to think about formulas using the AI formula generator and then we will go over common formulas that you can write yourself in your Clay table.

Jan 2023

Optimize your Credit Usage in Clay

Eric Nowoslawski

Clay is a spreadsheet that fills itself with data from many data providers across the internet. We partner with data providers on your behalf to bring lots of different data sources — like job listings, tech stacks, news and more — into your workflows.

In this blog, we will go over a couple of functions in Clay that can will help you optimize your credit usage in Clay. There are many ways to optimize credit usage in Clay that the team has built into the product that we will go over in this blog. We will cover formulas that optimize your workflows and some features that are often overlooked that can help keep your credit usage down.

Here are 3 ways to optimize your Clay credit usage

Nov 2022

Basics of Google search operators

Eric Nowoslawski

Getting started with Google's Search Operator to creatively find new leads

Sep 2022

Lead scoring in Clay

Varun Anand

Welcome to the second post in our series on how to use formulas in Clay!  We’re going to walk you through prioritizing your lead list using scoring formulas in Clay 🌶️

Aug 2022

Formulas in Clay: conditional statements, waterfalling data and qualifying leads

Varun Anand

Ever wanted to learn formulas in Clay but didn't know where to start? Join the club. Just kidding. Read this and you'll be well on your way to mastering the basics of formulas.

Jun 2022

How to prioritize your waitlist

Matt Maiale

If you’re an early stage startup, you’ve probably built a waitlist (or are considering one). And for most startups, it makes a lot of sense.

Nov 2021

🧙‍♀️ The many lives of spreadsheets

With love from the Clay team

Ever wondered how many people use spreadsheets? Some estimates say around 800 million people use Microsoft Excel, and another 160–180 million use Google Sheets. Not bad for a tool that started as a basic visual calculator.

Mar 2023
Mar 2023
Mar 2023

Merge Column

Clay Team
Mar 2023
Mar 2023

GPT-4

Clay Team
Mar 2023

Scrape Website

Clay Team
Mar 2023
Feb 2023
Feb 2023

Find A User's Recent LinkedIn Posts

Clay Team

We hope you're having a wonderful Valentine's Day! On a day filled with love and joy, we thought we'd give you something close to our hearts- new Clay features 💝

Get ready to fall in love 👇

Jan 2023

Get Mobile Phone Number

What's new at Clay

Hey friend,

New Year, new features! 🎊 We've been working hard on building out new integrations to give your teams superpowers for 2023.

We're also super pumped to announce that we've been selected as a finalist for the Golden Kitty Awards! We would love your help by upvoting us here.

Now for the good stuff!! 👇

Aug 2022

Using Google As A Source

Matt Maiale

As you're getting ready for your wonderful Labor Day Weekend break, we're pumped to share some exciting updates to our sources and integrations within Clay 🧚

Aug 2022

Salesforce Integration

Matt Maiale

We hope you're staying cool with your Birkenstocks, bucket hats, and wonderful office AC. We're so pumped to share some new features and updates from Clay.

Dec 2021

Closing out the year with Clay

With love from the Clay team

As we wish this year farewell, we're excited to share some of the bells, whistles, and magic the Clay team is building for you. We're forever in awe of each of you, and can't to see all you'll build in the new year 🎊

Nov 2021

New features, documentation series, and sneak peeks of Clay!

With love from the Clay team

As we get closer to releasing Clay to a larger community, we're excited to share some new features and improvements with you 🤩. With some big features right around the corner, this month we're focused on making all of your interactions in Clay, big and small, absolutely delightful. Check out some of our recent updates:

Oct 2021

Life is getting easier with Clay

With love from the Clay team

We have a couple of new features up our sleeve, but before sharing those with you we are laser focused on making your time in Clay a little more magical - from duplicating tables, to smoother keyboard interactions, record counts and more.

Sep 2021

HTTP API

Matt Maiale

In Clay 2.0, you can now source leads directly from Linkedin within the table. Our 'Clay Find People' source takes queries such as location, title, company, experience, skills, and more to search LinkedIn and add matches to your table.

Sep 2021

Introducing Clay's New Interface

With love from the Clay team

While we'll be migrating all of our users over the fall, we're jazzed to be currently onboarding teams that have ✨ a waitlist to enrich and prioritize✨. This use case is ideal for those with a product in beta, whose signups are feeling unruly (don't be shy if that's you - that was us, too).

Jul 2021

Join our Clay 2.0 beta

With love from the Clay team

We are looking for users interested in testing our revamped UI! We've been teasing our revamped UI and are excited to get you in as soon as humanly possible 🏃.

This month we're prioritizing waitlists in the new UI. You would be a great fit for our beta if you need to better understand people and prioritize sign ups. Shoot us over a note if this sounds like you!

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Mar 2023

How IntroCRM cut its prospecting data budget by 65% and built better lead lists lists with Clay

My company, IntroCRM, is a fractional sales agency that helps small sales teams excel with email deliverability, list building, and messaging. Clay is a critical part of how we help our customers generate, qualify, and book time with leads. In this blog post, I’m going to describe our life before Clay, why and how we use it today, and show you an example of a creative prospecting campaign that we ran for a client.

Mar 2023

Automate 6 cold email campaigns in a single Clay workflow

Clay Team

In this post, we’ll go over how we automated six different outbound cold email campaigns using a single Clay table. Follow along step-by-step in our video.

In this campaign, we were selling sales engagement tools to marketing leaders in American B2B companies with under 100 employees. At a high level, we started with just a broad list of prospects’ names and emails from Apollo. From there, we used Clay to sort prospects into the following buckets: management consulting, recruiting, or financial services.

Mar 2023

Troubleshooting outbound sales and prospecting: a comprehensive guide

Stefan Kollenberg

Nailing your outbound sales and prospecting process can help you generate leads, acquire customers, and drive revenue growth. In this guide, we’ll share a step-by-step approach to troubleshooting each stage of your outbound sales campaign—whether you’re a new sales professional or a seasoned team leader.

We’ll cover how to check early campaigns, identify quality prospects, analyze insights from metrics, double down on well-performing sequences, and more, with detailed examples from our own experiences. You can use the table of contents to easily navigate to the areas that are most relevant to you.

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Mar 2023
Mar 2023
Mar 2023

Merge Column

Clay Team

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks for VC Firms in 2023

February 8, 2023
Clay Team

Lead generation is a crucial aspect of sales and marketing for venture capital firms. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski shares his tips and frameworks for lead generation through cold emails. By following his strategies, you can secure new investment opportunities, generate high-quality leads, and reach your target audience effectively. This post covers topics such as the importance of personalization in cold emails, the role of a clear call-to-action (CTA), defining your value proposition and marketing angle, and tips for crafting an effective cold email sequence.

Lead generation is a crucial aspect of sales and marketing for venture capital firms. In this blog post, our expert Eric Nowoslawski shares his tips and frameworks for lead generation through cold emails. By following his strategies, you can secure new investment opportunities, generate high-quality leads, and reach your target audience effectively. This post covers topics such as the importance of personalization in cold emails, the role of a clear call-to-action (CTA), defining your value proposition and marketing angle, and tips for crafting an effective cold email sequence.

Subject Line Matters for Lead Generation

The subject line is the first impression of your cold email and plays a crucial role in lead generation. It should be compelling and entice the recipient to open your email, capturing their attention and making them want to learn more about your offer.

Personalization is Key

To make your cold email copy compelling and increase your chances of lead conversion, it's essential to personalize your emails. Write like a human and provide context that resonates with your potential investment partners.

Focus on Response, not Sales

Lead generation is a process, and it takes time to convert a cold lead into a warm investment opportunity. The goal of your first cold email should be to secure a response and start a conversation with the recipient.

Include a Compelling CTA

Provide value to your potential customers and make it easy for them to take the next step in your sales funnel. Highlight your competitive advantages, showcase how your firm can solve pain points, and include a clear call-to-action (CTA).

Emphasize Your Value Proposition

Communicate how your firm can help the recipient achieve their desired outcome and emphasize the end goal they will be able to achieve with your investment.

Be Concise and Straight to the Point

Your prospects are busy, and your emails are an interruption in their day, so keep them brief and to the point. Limit your emails to under 75 words and ensure that you fully understand your target audience and your firm's value proposition.

Limit the Number of Follow-Up Emails

Based on data from SalesLoft and Gartner, it's best to send about four follow-up emails over six weeks. If you haven't received a reply, move on to new prospects and avoid sending too many emails, which may lower your open rates.

Define Your Value Proposition and Marketing Angle

To communicate your offer effectively, you need a clear and concise value proposition. The most effective value propositions are focused on increasing profitability, saving time, or reducing risk. Create a marketing angle that resonates with your prospects, keeping in mind what they are most concerned with: maximizing profits, minimizing risk, or something else. Consider using cold email templates to maximize the success of your lead generation campaign.

By following these tips, you can improve your lead generation process and increase the conversion rate of your marketing and sales campaigns. Utilize social media platforms such as LinkedIn, as well as email marketing, content marketing, and webinars to reach your target audience. Utilize lead generation tools such as Hubspot, a CRM, and SEO to track and manage your leads in real-time. Consider lead scoring, A/B testing, and the use of lead magnets, white papers, and email lists to generate qualified leads and fill your sales pipeline with new leads.

Subject lines

Try to write subject lines that could’ve been sent to your readers by their own customers or colleagues. Make sure to keep them short (2-3 words) and casual (no formal language, not capitalized). ‍Example (good): monthly SEO analyticsExample (bad): Don’t hire your next sales development representative until you do this!(Tip: listicle-type headlines that work well for SEO articles never work well in emails).‍Needless to day, never bait-and-switch people in your subject lines. (Don’t pretend that you have a customer for someone and then pitch lead generation services.) Make sure that your subject lines are connected to your message.‍

Line 1: Why you’re reaching out

In the first line of your email, describe the reason that you’re reaching out. Did you notice an announcement about your prospect’s company? Did you just read their LinkedIn post? Show that you’ve done homework to ensure that the connection is relevant.‍A useful template for this is: It looks like your company is [experiencing an event], and from my experience, this means [insight].‍Example: I was looking into your company, and I used the SimilarWeb Chrome extension to see that your web traffic has been declining in the last three months.

Line 2: How your product enables them to do better

Now, it’s time to describe a problem you noticed that your prospect might have and how your product can help them solve it. ‍Example: Your web traffic might be declining for many reasons, but one big factor may be that you don’t have enough content on your site. I noticed that your last blog post was from three years ago.

Line 3: Social proof

Then, give your reader social proof to show them that you’re reputable and have past experience helping companies with similar problems.‍Example: I just helped [X company relevant to your prospect’s industry and size] increase their search traffic by 250% in six months through SEO-optimized content.

Line 4: Interest-based call to action

Finally, give your recipient a way to engage with you. Your biggest goal is to get an email in response. A good template for this final call to action is: if we could help you with [problem], would that be useful to you?‍Let’s put all our learning together in this example of a cold email from an external sales team to a financial services company:‍

Hi [X],

I noticed that you're in the financial services industry and you've got a company with 15 employees. From my experience, I assume that you’re keeping a lean sales and marketing team. I’m currently working with [a financial services company similar in size to the prospect] on a campaign that is getting their sales team 2-3 interested leads a day. We’re targeting people who’ve recently changed jobs to see if they’re doing their rollover correctly. If I could help you connect with potential customers like this, would that be helpful to you?

Cheers,[Y]

Overall framework for an entire email sequence

In the previous section, we shared a framework for your first cold email. To recap, your first email discusses how you noticed a company, how you can solve their problems, and how you’ve done this in the past. Now, let’s go over the rest of your email sequence.‍

Email 2: Additional context

Email 1 was meant to succinctly communicate that your product could help your prospects solve important business problems. Email 2 is meant to add more detailed context on how. This is the place to add more information about product features or the transformation you’ll enable for your customers.‍Here’s an example using the financial services company we pitched above:‍

Hi [X],

I previously mentioned that I’ve been helping [X company] find customers by contacting people who’ve recently changed jobs to see if they need help with new benefits packages or rollover plans. For a bit more context, we do this by constantly monitoring LinkedIn Sales Navigator for people who are changing jobs. When they change jobs, we reach out on your behalf to see if they need your services.We have the copy ready and I have a video that can show you how to build this kind of list. Would that be interesting to you?

Cheers,[Y]

Email 3: Angles

If your prospect still hasn’t replied, you should try using a different angle. Your first two emails, e.g., may have emphasized that your product would help your reader earn more revenue. But what if driving more revenue isn’t their biggest priority? ‍Email 3 gives you the chance to change your angle. Perhaps, instead of emphasizing that your product can help someone make more money, you can emphasize how it can help them save time. ‍

Email 4: The breakup email

In your final email, ask your prospect if there's somebody else at their company you should speak to. ‍Example: I noticed that [your company] has 255 employees. Perhaps this isn't your area of focus. Is there somebody else that I should be speaking to? Data indicates that people respond to breakup emails more often than they respond to the other emails in a sequence. If you remain available to connect while offering to route yourself to a more relevant person within their organization, you will increase your chances of getting a positive reply.By now, you have a framework to use to write effective cold email sequences. This is a simple baseline that you can supplement with many different kinds of marketing tactics (LinkedIn, cold calling, ads, etc) to strengthen your results. If you have any suggestions or questions, please reach out to Eric!

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