How to Use Cold Email to Drive More Free Trial Signups

Nikki Elbaz:
Hey, everyone, thanks for joining. This presentation is based on a pretty radical idea. Cold pitching at its core is engineered for results. Now, if you're thinking that your cold pitches are not getting results and they definitely don't seem to be engineered for results, then you're in the right place. I'm Nikki Elbaz, I create email sequences for SAS brands with my company, Nikki Elbaz. I recently landed the title of email specialist for the Copyhackers agency. I landed this job by... You guessed it, sending a cold pitch, so I've seen with my own eyes, how effective cold pitching can be, and I know it can be effective for your product as well. So, let's get into why you should be sending cold pitches to drive more product signups, and how to do it so that you actually get those free trial signups.

Nikki Elbaz:
Here we go. How do use cold email to drive more free trial signups. First step of everything always; strategy. Let's talk about why I say that cold pitches are engineered for results. Well, the reason they are is a copy principle called the rule of one. The rule of one is basically that the best marketing materials are written with copy that uses these four principles. We won't get into all the four principles. We will focus on the idea of having one reader.

Nikki Elbaz:
Every piece of copy that you create should have one intended reader. Every sales page, every email, every Facebook ad. Most emails are sent to a mass list, they're still super effective. Email is high touch, people's inboxes are almost sacred, and you can do all sorts of cool things with segmentation and personalization. But the fact remains that when you send a good cold pitch, you're sending it to one person. While the rule of one is to pretend you're talking to one person, with a cold email, you're actually talking to one person. You can get hyper specific, you can get hyper persuasive, so you get hyper results. Now the caveat is that cold email takes time and effort, and you're only sending it to one person. You need to take a leaf from Drift's book quite literally, and do things that don't scale, because in this case you don't need scale. You need results that then scale.

Nikki Elbaz:
Successful cold pitching to drive more free trial signups is a sort of two step process. You pitch one person who has an audience of many, you piggyback on their list. I'm not suggesting you cold pitch the actual people you want to sign up to your free trial. For cold email to effectively drive more sign-ups, you need to pitch one influential person who can then collaborate with you and give you more subscribers. What do I mean by this? Well, you could pitch potential affiliate partners. You could offer to give content to a person's list. That could be a webinar, an ebook, a blog post, and finally, maybe you just want an influencer to use your product, because they talk about what they love to their audience.

Nikki Elbaz:
Cold pitches are engineered for results, because it's a one-to-one personalized communication. It's perfectly customized to its recipient. Now you might be thinking this, "Most cold pitches are one of the above, all of the above, annoying, disruptive, rude, irrelevant." Most cold pitches are really bad, but what makes them so bad? Why do they fail? Well, here's another copy of principle taken from a world of good old direct response, the 40/40/20 rule. For a marketing effort to succeed, it needs to be built on three things, a good list; who you're sending it to, a good offer; what you're sending, and a good piece of copy; how it's presented. When cold emails fail, they're often missing one or more of these three components.

Nikki Elbaz:
Let's get real with some cold pitches that I received. When is the best time? "Hey, Nikki, as you remember, blank was featured in the blank ebook." No, I actually don't remember, "Blah, blah, blah. Also, I was on your online store nikkielbaz.com, a few days back, and I really liked the design and feel of it. But..." Are you about to insult me? Okay, what's wrong with this one aside from the insult? She has the wrong list. If she had actually gone to my website, like she said she did, she would have seen that in my site, in no way, shape or form can be misconstrued for an e-commerce store. She has the wrong list. I'm going to delete the email.

Nikki Elbaz:
Next, request to connect. "Hi, Nikki, I sent you a LinkedIn invitation a few days ago and just wanted to follow up directly. My name is..." I don't need any of this stuff, I don't need software development, I don't need staff augmentation. He has the right list, I am interested in cool collaborations with cool people. I am living in Israel right now, but the offer is wrong. I don't need the things that he is offering me. Despite the cliche of copywriters turning into martech founders, I'm going to delete this email because he has the wrong offer.

Nikki Elbaz:
Graphic design. "Hi, I'm [Karly 00:05:56], currently a graphics director at a marketing agency, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 10 years experience." I do often need small-design projects. I love one-off designers who don't have huge wait lists or project timetables, so she got the list right, and she got the offer right. But her copy's wrong, she's totally unconvincing. Because she has more time I should hire her? There's nothing here that's convincing me that she understands my business, that she can boost my bottom line. There's nothing here that's propelling me to say yes. I'm going to delete that email.

Nikki Elbaz:
Now, we can get nitpicky, we can talk about the lazy subject lines. We could talk about the BCC blast in this one, the insults and the first one, the wimpy language in the second one. But, at the core, what's really stopping me from accepting any of these three cold pitches, is the list, the offer or the copy misfit. We've cleared up that we need to make sure that our list, offer and copy are spot on. Let's execute in getting those elements right.

Nikki Elbaz:
Oops. We will start with my favorite, the copy. How to get an email read and responded to. Well, you need three things, you need to make it intriguing, enticing and incredibly easy. How do you make it intriguing? Well, use proven copywriting formulas that tap into human psychology. How do you make it enticing? You use persuasion principles that also tap into human psychology. And how do you make it incredibly easy? You optimize your CTA.

Nikki Elbaz:
Let's talk about formulas and making your email intriguing. Now, I find these three formulas to work best for email, and the first two are especially good for cold pitches. We don't have time to go through each of them in-depth. There are blog posts aplenty that talk about each of them, but I'll just tell you what they stand for. PAS is pain, agitation, solution. AIDA is attention, interest, desire, action. PPPP is picture, promise, prove, and push.

Nikki Elbaz:
What do I want to take you to take out from here? Less so, which formula you choose, how closely you follow the formula, but more that you realize that each of these formulas follows a storyline. You want to make sure that your email has a structure that pulls the reader in, that tells them the story and then convinces them that your solution is the one. The last thing you want to be doing is writing exactly why you're offering something, and what it is that you're offering. That's not compelling, and it's also very me-focused, which doesn't show the reader why they should care. When you use a formula, you avoid all of those things.

Nikki Elbaz:
Okay, you've got them intrigued. Now you need to pull some levers to get them to say yes, and that means persuasion principles. If you haven't read this book yet, go put it on your Kindle. It's super important for sales, but it's also a super fascinating read. Robert Cialdini found seven principles, some people say six. I want you to layer three of them into your whole pitch. Likeability, scarcity and my secret sauce, commitment. Likeability; we do business with people we like, so if you throw in some flattery or some commonalities, which we'll get into in a minute, your pitch is all that more enticing.

Nikki Elbaz:
Scarcity; why is scarcity so important? Well, decision deference. We humans hate decisions, it's so much easier for us to just let something go, push off making the decision, than it is for us to say yes, or even no, to something. The worst thing that can happen is for your cold pitch to get deleted, but almost as bad, is for it to get shoved down a super full inbox, never to be thought of again. If you give people a deadline or a limited slots left, they can't just defer the decision. They know that by giving the decision time, it means they're essentially saying no, so they need to decide if they want to say no or not.

Nikki Elbaz:
There are some caveats to using this principle. You need to be careful that you are not too limited in your scarcity. They may need time to decide and think things through, because they don't know you. But more than that, the actual solution that you're offering them might be something that they didn't even know that they themselves needed. Your urgency, your scarcity needs to walk the fine line between giving them a reason to make a decision and giving them time to make a decision. The next caveat; don't lie. You need them to trust you, so don't be sleazy and say, "There are limited slots left," if that's not true.

Nikki Elbaz:
Okay, my favorite persuasion principle; commitment. This principle is based on the fact that we humans like to follow through with what we believe about ourselves, and with what we claim to others. We like to look at ourselves as consistent to what we committed to. So, if you open your email with a statement that they can get behind really easily, and then you close your pitch with an offer that supports that statement, they need to say yes to your offer, to, "Prove to themselves" that whatever they agree to is true. Now, I know this sounds a little obscure, but it's very powerful.

Nikki Elbaz:
I want to give you an example. Let's say you have a proposal software and you are pitching Copyhackers to present a tutorial to craft the perfect freelancer proposal. You can open your email with something like this, "Joe, from watching your tutorial Tuesdays, it's clear to me that you really value your audience's time and put in a lot of effort to give them content that they can implement right away," and then you close the email with something like this. "This tutorial will give your audience three concrete tactics they can implement right away. It will position you as a provider who really values her audience's time, who cares enough to put in the effort to only provide highly tactical content." Do you see how you're tying the two and two together? Most everyone will agree with the first statement because there's no risk, it's just a compliment. But, when they get to the pitch, they need to continue that story of them being caring and conscientious. That means they almost need to take you out on your offer.

Nikki Elbaz:
Now it's time to make things incredibly easy, and that means one call to action. Just one, because more than one, encourages distraction and decision deference. But not only that, your one action needs to be easy. It needs to be easy to understand, easy to agree to and easy to set up. Easy to understand means clarity. You don't say, "How about we talk soon?" What does that mean, talk soon? Are we talking by phone? By zoom? In person? What's soon? And how long are we talking for? There are just so many questions, it's too vague. You need to be decisive and offer an option. That's clear.

Nikki Elbaz:
Easy to agree to; it means you're not asking too much of them when they're not even fully committed yet. What is the minimum viable step you need from them? Is it a response? A seven minute chat? For them to talk to their editor? Think logically and ask them to do something simple, but easy to set up. You want to take the weight of responsibility off their shoulders. Don't ask them to book a date on your scheduling software, ask them to send you theirs. Think from their perspective. It's easier for them to get a booking, than for them to compare calendars and choose a time. That's just one example. Whatever it is that you're asking them to do, make sure it's something that they can very easily say yes to doing.

Nikki Elbaz:
Okay. Let's move on from copy. I could spend all day talking about copy, but there are these other two problems, and the list and the offer. Let's start with offer. What is your offer? What do they stand to gain from taking you up on your pitch? It's not about you when you're writing your pitch, it's never about you. You want to be telling them what they get out of the partnership. Once you have that round down and you can present it to them, first, you want to optimize your offer. Let's say you're pitching an affiliate partner, can you offer them a lifetime subscription to your products? Or let's say, you're pitching an ebook, can you offer to have it designed for them as well as writing it? Whatever you can do to make your offer so tantalizingly compelling that they can't say no, add those things in.

Nikki Elbaz:
Finally, your list in this case, it's one person, and because of that, this step is super crucial. Remember, this isn't one to many, it's time and effort to one person who will then provide you with lots of people. So, you need to choose your one person really wisely, so your time and effort pay off. What should you be thinking about? The person's clout, does he have a nice-sized list that's engaged and willing to try out what he recommends to his audience? Accessibility; is she the CEO of a huge public company who has no time for you and never even checks her own email. It's probably a better idea to try a lower level executive who still has clout, but whose day to day activities are tied to whatever outcome it is that you're promising.

Nikki Elbaz:
Finally, relevance, this ties into your offer. You need to find someone who has an audience that cares about your offer. Once you found your recipient, you do the step that every good copywriter does; research. Essentially, there are two layers to your pitch; the logical side and the emotional side. For the logical thought side of things, you're researching this person's needs. This ties back to your offer, but you want to gather some data on why your offer is relevant to them. You want to poke around their site, their social profiles, their membership groups. What is missing for them as a business? Getting data points on this and putting the data points in the email will help you build a compelling logical argument.

Nikki Elbaz:
Then there's the emotional side of things. Yes, it's the benefits. Yes, it's all the emotional stuff that's under the logical stuff, but there's a hidden emotional side that you can tap into that most people don't do. Remember that you are talking to a real human, not just a person who has a role in a company, but a human who has a life. Remember that persuasion principle of likability? Here's your opportunity to find things that you have in common with this person, to subtly weave in some likeability.

Nikki Elbaz:
Now, the caveat is that you shouldn't be creepy. These things need to be subtle. Are they someone who uses gifs a lot? Well, then throw in a gif. Do they have very polished language? Make sure your language is very polished. If they're a gif person, and you also noticed that they're always posting pictures of their cat, well then make sure your gif is a cat gif. You're not being creepy, you're being relatable. You're not saying, "Hey, I saw your cat, Lily. I have a cat, Philly." You're just layering in some commonality.

Nikki Elbaz:
Okay, amazing. We have solved for list, offer and copy, and now it's time to work on optimizing. Optimizing is twofold. It's working on follow-ups, and it's also working on future emails to new potential collaborators. Obviously, you need to follow up aggressively, but don't follow up like a secretary. "Hey, did you get a chance to think about this? Or any updates on this?" Instead, you need to follow up like a copywriter. Every followup is an opportunity to sell yourself again. Go back to the copy principles, make sure you're being intriguing, enticing and making things incredibly easy.

Nikki Elbaz:
If you need some help optimizing each step of your email, how you should be making it more intriguing, enticing, or incredible, you can grab my checklist, my optimizer email checklist. You could get it @nikkielbaz.com/pas, and it will run you through all the elements that you can use to diagnose the problems within your email. For example, if you see that they didn't open the email, then you need a better subject line. It will walk you through each step of the email. It's all there in the checklist, go grab it @nikkielbaz.com/pas.

Nikki Elbaz:
Here's one last step to optimizing, and this is a deep step; gathering feedback. You want to send a survey, because you have guilt on your side. People who haven't responded to a respectful cold pitch often feel guilty for ignoring you, so you can send them a super short one-question survey. "What prevented you from saying yes?" "What prevented you from going ahead with my offer?" It's one question. This data can give you amazing ideas of how you need to be optimizing your pitch, but remember you need to make it super easy.

Nikki Elbaz:
As much as we all love type form, you need a platform that will integrate directly into your email. They might feel guilty, that might push them to answer your question, but they don't have time to click a link to help you out. So, use something like Foureyes. Get Foureyes.com, I think is the URL, and even Google forms, so that they can fill that out directly in the email. You also, by the way, might want to test your response rate. If you offer multiple choice or long form answers. Once you get your responses in, you optimize your email based on the information that they give you.

Nikki Elbaz:
Let's review. Congratulations, you learned cold pitches can be amazingly effective, because they epitomize the rule of one. You learned how to base your cold pitches on the 40/40/20 rule. You also learned how to layer important things in your copy so that you're being persuasive. Finally, you're going to grab that checklist @nikkielbaz.com/pls, and make sure you're optimizing your emails for each new cold pitch opportunity that you have.

Nikki Elbaz:
Thank you so much for joining me. If you have questions, shoot them my way via Twitter, #productledsummit, and definitely please check in and let me know what awesome collaborations this strategy leads you to. I can't wait to hear them.