A Cold Outreach Process That's Earned Hundreds of Thousands

I rely on cold outreach to get my first customers for the products and services our team builds. Cold outreach has helped me to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for various products and services. I’m not sure where I’d be without it.

In this guide, I’ll share my approach to how I use experimentation to build scalable campaigns by explaining several steps:

• Define my target customers

• Build a target customer lists

• Write compelling copy (and offer value)

• Measure what worked and what didn’t

• Double-down on what’s working

What Is a Good Cold Outreach Response Rate?

My response rate varies on the campaign. But, I aim for 50%. I’ve had particularly well-targeted campaigns yield 80% (and even 100% every so often).

Before building any product or service, I focus heavily on understanding my target customer and what I want to help them to achieve.

If you’re a founder who has a product or service with a well-defined customer and value proposition, this article’s for you.

If you’re a startup founder who hasn't defined their customer and value proposition, I’d love to help you to get started.

Providing Context With a Maine Startup

For the sake of specificity, I’ll share how a Maine startup we work with has used cold outreach quite effectively to drive sales.

Tree Free Fire is a Maine-based startup that sells portable campfires. Tree Free Fire's primary wholesale customers are boutiques, gift shops, natural food stores, and businesses that want customized gifts for clients and employees.

Build a Target Customer List

I begin all campaigns with defining target customer groups and building outreach lists. With the Tree Free Fire cold outreach campaign, I targeted several customer groups in Maine:

• Natural food stores

• Gift shops

• General stores

• Patio stores

• Brands with custom gift needs

I usually try to find 25 target customers from each target customer group. This seems to be enough messages in order for me to understand whether a customer group cares about the product or service I’m selling.

Building target customer lists can be tedious, which is why I always start my search by looking for a “target customer gold mine”. A target customer gold mine is place where I can find the names and email addresses of a lot of target customers at once. It's usually a nicely organized list or database.

Finding a target customer gold mine saves me a tremendous amount of time. A quick Google search led me to find a variety of natural food store lists and databases for my Tree Free Fire campaign. This particular target customer gold mine resulted in dozens of new customers and tens of thousands of dollars in sales.

Tools That Help Me Build Target Customer Lists

I hope that you found this introduction to be interesting.

I'd be delighted if you read the rest of my article.

Just click here.