{"id":956,"date":"2015-09-17T15:35:25","date_gmt":"2015-09-17T15:35:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodpecker.co\/blog\/?p=956"},"modified":"2025-01-21T10:28:20","modified_gmt":"2025-01-21T09:28:20","slug":"self-service-cold-email","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodpecker.co\/blog\/self-service-cold-email\/","title":{"rendered":"Self-Service in Cold Email — What Shouldn’t We Expect from Our Addressees?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What can we ask our addressees for? What next steps can we plan for them to take after reading our message? What can we expect from them to do, and what would be too much? The CTA<\/a> should be the final part of our message, but we should ask all those crucial questions even before we get about the copy. Here are some guidelines on how to find the answers to those questions.<\/p>\n

Of course, it would be wonderful if people were just flocking in their thousands to try our product or service.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s usually not the case.<\/p>\n

One email from a complete stranger may not be enough to click the link and sign up for a trial. We have to get into our prospects’ shoes for a moment and realize that.<\/p>\n

And we need to realize that being empathetic, tactful, and considerate in our emails will get as further than expecting our prospects to start serving themselves after\u00a0our first outreach.<\/p>\n

What can we ask our addressee for?<\/h2>\n

In the CTA of our cold email<\/a>, we may ask our addressees for many different things. Each option has its pros and cons, and we have to decide which way to go, having in mind all the pros and cons, but above all \u2013 having in mind our prospects.<\/p>\n

So what can we ask them for in our CTA?<\/p>\n

1. Ask them to follow a link?<\/h2>\n

That seems very convenient to us. We think to ourselves it\u2019ll go like this: 1. we send an email with a link inside, 2. we ask the addressee to follow the link (and probably sign up somewhere), 3. the addressee follows the link and signs up for our free trial. Sounds perfect, doesn\u2019t it? Well, it\u2019s not a perfect solution.<\/p>\n

Whereas steps #1 and #2 happen very often, step #3 will hardly ever take place. Why? Well, probably because only a handful of our prospects will be ready to start using our solution 5 minutes after we sent them a link to a free trial. At best, they will be interested in more information. They will ask themselves:<\/p>\n

Do I need it?<\/p>\n

Why would I need it at all?<\/p>\n

Is my current solution not enough?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They will also have dozens of questions to us considering the very solution. They will have doubts.<\/p>\n

But in our email, they won\u2019t see an invitation to contact us and get answers to all those questions. They will see a link. Most of them will probably let the doubts and too many unanswered questions take control.<\/p>\n

Most of them will ignore the message. Some of them might think we sent them some stinky link and they will be afraid of clicking it. Some of them encouraged by our pitch will follow the link, but the doubts will eat them when they’ll be exploring our site.<\/p>\n

They won’t\u00a0reply to our email, because that\u2019s not what we asked them to do.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And thus, we won\u2019t be able to start a valuable relationship with them. So, why did we send the cold email for again..?<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong, I don\u2019t say it won\u2019t work at all. It might work for some prospects. But it won\u2019t work very well. And it\u2019s not what I merely assume \u2013 we checked that in our own cold email campaign.<\/p>\n

What we’ve discovered about links in cold emails<\/h3>\n

At our previous project, we\u2019ve been sending a cold email starting a conversation \u2013 no links, just a simple CTA: “If you’re interested, drop me a line”<\/em>. And it brought us some amazing effects.<\/p>\n

Then, we changed the email \u2013 mainly because we started working on\u00a0Woodpecker<\/a>, and didn\u2019t have time to carry on with all the conversations we had started. So we simply put a link in the email, and asked the addressees if they would be interested in what we have. We had some sign-ups, but it was far, far less effective than the previous email in terms of conversion. There were no conversations, and there were just a few new sign-ups.<\/p>\n

So how to get our prospects into a conversation?<\/p>\n

2. Ask them for a phone call?<\/h2>\n

That\u2019s what most companies do in their cold emails. They ask for a good time for a phone call, which is usually not a bad idea because it\u2019s an invitation to a conversation. That approach has some undeniable advantages, but it has some drawbacks as well.<\/p>\n

Pros<\/h3>\n

The main advantage is what I described in the previous section about providing a link, namely: if we talk on the phone, we can answer all the questions our prospect has about our company and product or service.<\/p>\n

We can discover all the doubts they have about our solution, and we can immediately react to all these doubts. Additionally, we can get to know them better by asking them some questions about their needs and pain points.<\/p>\n

Cons<\/h3>\n

The drawback of asking for a phone call is that we will need a person, or ideally a whole team of people, who will actually talk with the prospects. That is we need a sales team \u2013 and having a sales team\u00a0is not always the case in early-stage start-ups.<\/p>\n

Usually, there is one or two people responsible for contacting the potential customers \u2013 and at the same time responsible for a dozen of other tasks in the company. So if we have a sales team, we can definitely go for setting up phone calls. At least from our own perspective.<\/p>\n

Oh wait, but\u00a0what about the prospect\u2019s perspective on a phone call?<\/h4>\n

As always, very much depends on who we are addressing in our outreach. But\u00a0as we work within the B2B domain \u2013 usually we address busy people. And find me a single entrepreneur who is not busy…<\/p>\n

Busy people have tens of phone calls and meetings scheduled for each and every day. Often\u00a0it\u2019s really difficult to fit into their schedule. And a cold email from a stranger may not suffice to get them cancelling some of their important meetings in order to get on the phone with us\u00a0\u2013 a total stranger.<\/p>\n

I mean that asking for a phone call in a cold email may be, in many cases, asking for too much in advance. And as Lincoln Murphy<\/strong> rightly points out in his famous 7 Sanity Checks article<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 we should make sure that in our email we don\u2019t ask for too much.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

So what should we ask our prospects for instead?<\/p>\n

3. Ask them to answer a question?<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s called Call-to-Action<\/a>. So we should ask our prospects to take some kind of action\u2026 or shouldn\u2019t we? Well, yes. But we may be more intriguing than just saying, ‘please do this and that’, like:<\/p>\n