Cold email is a quick and cost-effective way to get new clients for your agency. You can easily set up and start a cold email campaign in a single day. All you need to do is find prospects and create a contact list, write an outreach email, and start the campaign.

Cold email is also a very affordable solution for generating new business for your agency. You can send unlimited emails and generate hundreds of leads by spending just a couple hundred dollars a month.

Sounds good? We’ll guide you through starting your first cold email campaign and generating new clients for your agency.

Find prospects

The first thing you’ll need to do is find prospects so that you can create a contact list for your email campaign. Depending on the type of businesses you’d like to target, there are plenty of places where you can find prospects. Here are just a few:

Job boards – Websites such as Indeed and We Work Remotely are filled with job postings from companies that are your potential clients. Since these companies are already looking for help with what you’re selling, it will be much easier to convert them into clients.

Directories – Directories such as Clutch and Capterra list plenty of companies that you can contact to offer your agency’s services. If you’re looking to sell your services to startups, check out AngelList. If, on the other hand, you’re interested in selling your services to local businesses, you can use Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Google Maps to find prospects.

LinkedIn – The business-oriented social network is perfect for finding leads. It allows you to search for prospects based on the company they work at, their job title, and more.

Wavo – Apart from running an amazing cold email platform for agencies, we also create custom contact lists at very affordable prices.

While finding prospects’ email addresses can sometimes be a time-consuming process, you can speed it up by using a tool such as Clearbit Connect or Hunter.io. Alternatively, you can hire a virtual assistant to help you gather all the information you need to create your contact list.

Write a great outreach email

The success of your cold email campaign will depend, for the most part, on your outreach email. This is why it’s crucial to take the time to make it just right. The four main things you’ll need to pay attention to when writing your email are personalization, the subject line, email length, and the call-to-action (CTA).

Personalization is key

The key to writing great cold outreach emails is personalization. Personalized emails have a higher open rate than non-personalized ones, and have shown to result in improved click-through rates and conversions.

Try to include 2-3 personalizations per email. Anything more than that would make your prospect feel uneasy.

Vague, impersonal emails will very rarely generate any significant results. That’s why you need to find ways to personalize your outreach for each prospect.

Here are some ways to personalize your emails:

Find shared interests

People are more likely to trust those they consider similar to them, so finding something that you share with your prospect is a great way to personalize your outreach.  Perhaps you went to the same school or attended the same conference. Check out your prospect’s LinkedIn or Twitter account and see if you share any interests that you could mention in the email.

Use mutual connections

A great way to get in touch with your prospect is to have a mutual connection introduce you. If you share any connections with your prospect, ask your mutual acquaintance to introduce you by sending the outreach email for you and including you on the CC line.

The prospect is more likely to trust you and be open to your suggestions if they’re introduced to you by an acquaintance.

Use the prospect’s name

Start your email by addressing the prospect by their name. Use their name in the email multiple times. Apart from using the prospect’s name in the email, you can also mention their job title or role, company name, or industry data.

Your subject line matters

Your email’s subject line will be the first thing that the prospect notices about your email. You should use it to let your prospects know that your email is not spam and that you know who they are and what their business does.

Your subject line also needs to be compelling enough to make prospects open your email. Remember, your email will be competing for attention with potentially hundreds of other emails in the prospects’ inbox.

The best way to find the perfect subject line for your campaign will always be to test many different subject lines until you find the best-performing one. However, there are certain best practices that you can use to help you.

You should keep your subject line fairly short, at around 4 to 5 words and consider adding a form of personalization such as your prospect’s name or company name. Write as you normally would and avoid using cliches or slogans.

Keep it short and focus on the CTA

Most people don’t have time to read long emails. That’s why you need to make sure to get to the point as quickly as possible. Try to keep your emails under five sentences.

Finally, if you don’t tell the prospect what you want them to do, how can you expect them to do it? It’s crucial that you let the prospect know what the next step is at the end of the email.

The call-to-action in your email’s closing line is the most important part of your email. It will have the greatest impact on your click-through and reply rates.

Remember to split test your emails

We’ve mentioned some best practices regarding cold emailing throughout this guide, but in the end, you’ll certainly need to split test your emails to find out which ones will provide you with the best results.

The three metrics you’ll want to focus on include:

Open rate – The percentage of sent emails that were opened by prospects. To improve your open rate, you should focus on tweaking your subject line.

Click-through rate – Indicates the percentage of people who’ve opened your email and clicked on a link. A low click-through rate usually means that you need to work on your email copy.

Reply rate – The percentage of people that replied to your email. While your entire email copy will influence your reply rate, the CTA is what will be making the most impact. If you’re getting a lot of opens and click-throughs but very little replies, try changing up your CTA.

Always split test one thing at a time. If you’re testing different subject lines, make sure to keep the email body and CTA identical across all emails. This will allow you to pinpoint the changes that made a difference in your results.

Once you find the best subject line, start split testing different versions of email copy and CTAs until you find out which combination of subject line, copy, and CTA gives the best results.

Make sure to follow up

Your prospects are probably getting at least 20+ emails every day, and it’s hard for them to reply to everyone on time. If you don’t get a reply in a few days, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not interested.

You should always send a follow-up email to see if the prospect is indeed interested. When writing a follow-up email, make sure to add some new information instead of repeating what you said in your initial message.

Try to provide value to your prospects with each follow-up email you send. Use your follow-up emails to gain credibility, show empathy and understanding, or put a smile on your prospect’s face. Consider your prospect’s pain points and challenges and let them know how you can help them.

Stop at two follow-ups if the prospect never replies. If, on the other hand, you get a reply and the prospect shows some interest, keep following up until you get a Yes or a No. It’s important to be persistent with prospects who show interest because it’s been shown that it can take 9 follow-ups or more to get a reply from a prospect and close a deal.

Cold email templates

We’ve listed our two favorite cold email templates below to help you get started. Please note that you shouldn’t copy these templates word-for-word. Most prospects can spot templated emails from a mile away. These templates should simply serve as inspiration and a starting point for crafting your own cold emails.

Template #1

Why it works: This email checks a lot of boxes: it’s personalized (by using the prospect’s first name), it shows that you’ve researched their company (mentioning their Yelp rating), includes a potential benefit of working with your company (increase revenue by 50%), and promises additional free value (in the form of a guide on how to increase revenue).

Template #2

Why it works: Apart from personalizing the email and introducing yourself and your company, this template lets the prospects know about other businesses in their industry that have had success with using your services. If you’re able to point the prospect to case studies you’ve done featuring businesses in their industry, that would be even better.

Looking for more templates? We’ve prepared a collection of 10 cold email templates that can help you generate more clients for your agency. You can download them here.

Use Wavo to get more clients for your agency

Are you ready to use cold email to get new clients for your agency? You can start today by using Wavo, our cold email platform for agencies. Get your free 7-day trial and start generating new clients now!

Are you looking into how you can start selling lead generation services? We’ve created a guide to help you get started with generating leads and selling them to your clients with Wavo.

First, let’s look into why you should be offering lead generation services to your clients.

Why you should consider selling leads

A lead generation service can be an excellent addition to your service offering. It can help you:

● Differentiate your agency – In a world full of SEO and PPC agencies, offering lead generation services will help your agency stand out.

● Improve customer retention – Generating leads for your clients will have an almost instant impact on their bottom line, ensuring that they’ll stay with your agency for a long time.

● Expand your pool of prospects – Since all businesses need leads, providing a lead generation service will help you target a wide variety of companies that need your services.

● Create a recurring revenue stream – A lead generation service is an excellent way to build recurring revenue for your agency since satisfied clients will keep purchasing leads from you every month.

How to price your services

How much you’ll be able to charge for lead generation depends on your clients’ industry. Financial services leads are valued differently from web hosting leads, which in turn are valued differently from SaaS leads. In general, the three main pricing models that you’ll need to decide between include:

● Pricing per contact – You can charge clients for each contact reached. Depending on the industry, you can charge anywhere between $1.5 to $5 for every contact you reach.

● Pricing per warm lead – Another way to price your lead generation service is to charge for each warm lead that you generate for your clients. Most companies that use this model charge between $50 and $200 per warm lead.

● Hybrid pricing – You can also opt for charging a fixed per-lead rate along with a 10 to 25 percent commission on every generated sale.

How to generate and sell cold email leads with Wavo

We’ve prepared a step-by-step guide to help you get started with selling leads. First, let’s talk about how to pitch your new lead generation service to your clients.

Pitch lead generation to clients

Clients might not be open to a lead generation service from the start because it might seem unfamiliar or risky to them. You’ll need to educate them on how lead generation works and how it can benefit their business. You should focus on the following features of lead generation:

● Instant results – Lead generation can provide results within a single day. Let your clients know how quickly you can generate leads for them, and they’ll be thrilled to use your service.

● Hands-off – Explain that your service requires very little input from the client and that you’ll be able to generate results without taking too much of their time.

● Transparent process and results – Make transparency one of your main selling points. Being completely transparent about your process, pricing, and the results you can generate will help to develop a trusting relationship with your clients.

● Excellent ROI – Email lead generation is one of the most cost-effective ways of generating leads for businesses. Make sure to demonstrate this to your clients by demonstrating the math behind the process with the help of captivating visuals in the form of infographics, videos, or presentations.

Acquire contact list

After you’ve agreed on generating leads for a client, you’ll need to acquire a contact list. There are many different ways that you can acquire contacts for cold email lead generation. Here’s a list of services that can help you:

Clearbit Connect – An extension for Gmail and Outlook, Clearbit Connect can help you find email contacts at any company. You can search for contacts by name, title, and job role. Clearbit Connect also allows you to find out more information about your leads, including their location and social media profile links.

Hunter.io – You can use Hunter.io to search email addresses by domain. Hunter’s Domain Search allows you to list email addresses of all people working at a specific company. Its advanced filtering features can help you extract just the contacts you need for every campaign. Hunter.io will also verify all the email addresses for you so that you can be certain that your emails won’t bounce.

BuiltWith – BuiltWith allows you to build lists of websites built on a specific technology (e.g., Wordpress or Shopify) as well as categorize the websites by industry. Along with websites, BuiltWith will also provide you with contact details for each website, including phone numbers and email addresses.

Wavo – We offer custom contact lists containing email contact information based on specified location, industry, or role. You can find more details about our data packages here.

Acquire and warm up email account

You’ll need to ask your client to provide you with an email account that you’ll use to reach out to contacts. However, you can’t just start sending hundreds of emails from a single email address on day 1.

You’ll want to warm up your email address before starting your campaign. To warm up your account, start by sending just a few messages every day, and then slowly start increasing your send rate over the next couple of weeks.

Create a new client

Once you get an email account from the client, you’ll need to log into your Wavo account and create a new client. If you don’t have a Wavo account yet, you can create one here.

In the Wavo dashboard, click on the Clients link in the main menu.

On the next screen, click on Add Client.

Enter the client’s name and the number of email accounts you’d like to assign to the client. Click on Submit.

Add an email account for your client

Now that you’ve created a new client inside Wavo, you’ll want to add an email account for them. Click on Email Accounts in the main menu. On the next screen, click on Add Email Account.

Enter the email address, and the first and last name you’d like to use with the account. Finally, choose the client and the server type for your email connection. Depending on the email server you use, you might need to enter some additional information, such as your password or IMAP details.

Create a new campaign

Once you’ve added an email account for your client, it’s time to create the campaign. Click the Campaigns link in the main menu. On the next screen, click on Create Campaign.

Enter a name for your campaign, choose a client, and click on Create.

Add contacts

Next, you’ll be presented with the Campaign Details screen. Now it’s time to add contacts to your campaign. Click on the Contacts link below the main menu.

On the next screen, you have the option to add a single contact or upload a CSV containing a list of contacts.

Create an email sequence

Once you’ve added your contacts, click on Email Sequence on the Campaign Details screen.

Click on Add Sequence Step and then on Add Email Version to create your first email. Click on Edit to edit the email copy.

Craft email copy

Now it’s time to write the email copy for your campaign. The elements you’ll want to focus on include:

Subject line – This will be the first thing prospects will notice about your email so make sure to pay special attention to getting it right. In most cases, you should try to keep your subject line fairly short (5 to 6 words) and personalize it for each recipient.

Body – The main part of the email. Try to say everything you need within 4 to 5 sentences. Anything longer than that and prospects won’t bother reading your entire email.

CTA – The most important part of your email copy, the CTA (call-to-action) serves to let the prospect know what you want them to do once they finish reading the email. Decide on a single action that you want your prospects to complete and clearly ask them to do it.

Wavo also allows you to use merge fields such as FIRST NAME, LAST NAME, or COMPANY to personalize your email copy. These fields can be automatically populated with data imported from your .CSV file.

By default, Wavo sends emails between 9 AM and 5 PM. You can also set a custom delivery window.

Once you’re done editing the email, simply click on the X at the top. Wavo will automatically save your email.

Repeat this process until you add all the emails for your sequence.

Start generating leads

Once you’re ready, go to the Campaign Details page and click on Start to start your campaign.

Wavo will now start sending your emails. You can view all the replies and new leads on the Inbox page.

Report results

Make sure to research the client’s competition and market extensively. This will allow you to show your client that you understand their specific market and needs as well as that you’re willing to go the extra mile for them and do extensive research even before signing a contract.

Rinse & repeat

That’s it! You’ve successfully started generating leads for your client. Now work on signing new clients and repeat the entire process to generate more recurring revenue for your business.

Start selling cold email leads with Wavo

Cold email lead generation is an easy way to create a recurring revenue stream for your agency. You can get started in less than 30 minutes. It’s simple, just create a Wavo account and start building your first lead generation campaign today!

A cold email lead generation service can be an excellent addition to your agency’s service offering. Offering such a service can help you differentiate yourself from the thousands of other agencies out there. It can also help you create recurring revenue and grow your business.

Have you recently considered offering cold email lead generation services to clients? If you have, you’re in luck because this type of service is one of the easiest to pitch and sell to clients.

We’ve prepared seven tips to help you improve your pitch and sign more contracts for cold email lead generation.

A cold email lead generation campaign can be set up in one day and can provide results within a week. The entire process consists of four steps:

1) Create email sequence – You’ll create the email sequence that will be used to generate leads and have it approved by the client.

2) Find prospects – You’ll gather a list of prospects that you’ll use for your lead generation campaign.

3) Send emails – The next step involves using Wavo or a similar service to run the campaign.

4) Deliver leads – Finally, you’ll deliver warm leads to the client’s inbox so that their sales team can take over and convert the leads.

Make sure to specify that you’ll be providing them with warm leads that are interested in what the client has to offer and that these leads can be converted more easily than leads from other sources such as social media or content marketing.

Explain to the client that they will get a positive return on their investment within the first month of using the service and demonstrate to them how much profit you could generate for them just within the first month.

Most businesses have many things going on at the same time, and they’re rarely looking to purchase a service that needs a lot of input or effort on their part. That’s why it’s important that you explain to the client just how low-maintenance your service is.

The less effort your service requires of the client, the easier it will be to sell it. Make sure to let the client know how your cold email lead generation service requires no input from them. In essence, the client only needs to do two things:

1) Approve email sequence – After you create an email sequence, the client will need to review and approve it to make sure that it fits their brand voice.

2) Provide email address – Cold email lead generation works best if the email sequence is sent from the client’s company email address. Your client will need to provide you with an email address tied to their domain (e.g., outreach@companyname.com).

Explain that you’ll be relieving them from having to generate leads themselves, allowing them to focus on providing their customers with the best product or service they can.

Agencies lack transparency and try to obscure how they do what they do. Try to be different by being completely transparent about your process, results, and pricing.

Let the client know how you’re going to generate leads and exactly how much you’re going to charge them for the service. You should provide an insight into everything you’re doing for the client. This will be very easy to do if you’re using Wavo’s white label dashboard.

When it comes to pricing, you should consider charging a fixed per-lead rate so that clients can know what to expect when it comes to paying for your services. You can also opt for charging a monthly retainer fee. Whichever type of pricing you choose for your service, make sure to be completely transparent about all the associated costs.

Clients are mostly interested in how much money you can make for them. Thus, you should focus on showing clients how much profit they can make by using your service.

Create a video or a presentation to demonstrate just how much return on their investment you can provide. Take into account the average lifetime value of the client’s customers and compare it with how much you’re charging them for a lead to make them understand how much profit they can expect from using your cold email lead generation service.

Compare the ROI of other services such as SEO or social media marketing with the average ROI generated by cold email generation to help your client understand how using your service is a better investment. Show them how much more profit they could generate if they invested more of their marketing dollars into cold email lead generation.

Many agencies fail to back up their claims and results with concrete data. To convince your clients of the profitability of your service, you need to provide data on how many leads you can generate, and at what rate you expect the leads to convert.

If possible, show the client related case studies or industry reports to help them understand how much leads generated through cold email are actually profitable.

To gain their trust, be completely upfront about all the results they can expect and don’t try to present a false picture of how your lead generation efforts will perform.