Cold email course

Open a spreadsheet and start typing in the data about your prospects. Keep in mind what custom fields you’re going to put in your copy.

Be sure to include the person’s first and last name, company name and domain - you’ll need them to find their email address - and any other contextual information that you plan on using.

If you’re thinking this process is time-consuming, you’re right :) But if you do it yourself, you get to know your target group well, and this will pay you off..

If you don’t have the time to spend on this or the sheer thought of it makes your skin crawl with anxiety, there are other ways of building a prospect list, e.g. outsourcing it to someone or ordering it from a list building company.

Whatever you do, don’t buy a ready-made list. You know which ones I’m talking about, the “100k contacts to marketing VPs at IT companies” kind of ones.

Why is buying a ready-made list a bad idea?

Because:

• You can’t possibly know if the list includes valid email addresses. And if you send to invalid ones, you get a hard bounce.
• If you get many bounces - which can easily happen if you’re sending to thousands of email addresses - your email provider might take you for a spammer and block you from sending any further emails, and even put you on a blacklist.
• Also, you’ll know squat about your prospects, which will make it impossible to create a well-targeted and personalized email.
• Some of these addresses might be spam traps as well. A spam trap is an email account set up solely for the purpose of catching spammers red-handed. They aren’t being actively used, but the organization or company that set them up is keeping an eye on them. So if you send to these email addresses, you risk being taken for a spammer.
• And finally, think about how many people already bought and used the very same list. Do you really want to send your emails to people who will probably ignore you or worse, get enraged that yet another impersonal email has fallen into their inbox, and mark your message as spam?