In this episode, we're delving deep into the world of email marketing and AI innovation with Eric Nowoslawski. He's a trailblazer who's been sending over 1.5 million cold emails every month. Eric's sharing his valuable expertise and game-changing strategies that have completely changed how businesses do cold outreach. He's using AI to personalize emails on a large scale, resulting in impressive engagement rates.
🚀 Here's what we're covering:
1. The AI Revolution in Email Marketing: Find out how artificial intelligence is changing the game in email outreach, allowing for personalized communication like never before.
2. Mastering Cold Email Campaigns: Learn from Eric's experience of sending millions of emails monthly. Discover what works, what doesn't, and why a compelling offer is crucial.
3. Innovative Strategies for Better Engagement: Explore nine powerful strategies that have boosted response rates and engagement across different industries.
4. The Future of Cold Emailing: Get Eric's take on where email marketing is headed and how to stay ahead in the ever-changing digital world.
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Eric Nowoslawski:
Do I need AI in an email to attempt to sell a Ferrari for $30,000? Absolutely not. If somebody somehow legitimately was emailing me and they had a Ferrari for $30,000, I'd pay cash for that and I'd take it, you know, in a heartbeat. Yeah. So we send 1.5 million cold emails a month. And so I'd like to think that we have a good understanding of what works.
Andy Mewborn:
I would say so. That's a shit ton of emails.
Eric Nowoslawski:
If you are working in a space where your offer is heavily commoditized, you need a way to make your email stand out. I was scoring founders by five different criteria. So one, it's their first time ever being a founder.
SPEAKER_02:
Two, you've done some work with Hormozy, right? Did you work on his webinar thing? Because I think, yeah.
Eric Nowoslawski:
So I got the opportunity to do a webinar with Hormozy.
SPEAKER_02:
The cold email guru. Dude, I was just watching one of your YouTube videos and dude, you're such a frickin whiz. I'm watching this one called like crazy clay workflow for like outbound agency growth. And the stuff you're doing, dude, I'm only like halfway through and I'm like, this is insane.
Eric Nowoslawski:
Well, I appreciate that. Thanks so much for watching it. I, uh, you know, I try, I try not to be a guru. Um, because I, I feel like when people like see all these content gurus, it's all these people who talk about doing outbound, but they don't do outbound anymore. And, uh, I, I very strictly, I'm like, no, no, no, we do this every single day. Um, so I appreciate you seeing all the content and stuff.
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah. No, man. Like when, when I look at you do outbound, like with these videos, it's like, this is like the, this is outbound now. This is like really outbound. I'm like, no, no longer going to like, you know, uh, like grab a list from zoom info or Apollo and then throw them into like a sequence. It's like just generic content. Like that, that ain't it anymore. Um, you know, or it's not working. You can try it but I haven't seen many people make it work, uh these days but uh Dude, this is crazy. So I want to like get into You're testing a bunch of stuff with cold email. Like I just want to go through your brain and like What are you experimenting with right now? What are some fun experiments you're doing with Clay, either for your own biz or for clients? Because I just want to hear all about it, man, and how people should be thinking about this today. Because I think people are stuck. They're stuck in the old way. And when they look at... We're in the pirate email group. Shout out to Jesse once again. We're all in there like, you know, talking about some crazy stuff and like trying to push things forward. A lot of people might consider us spammers, right? Because we're just sending volume of stuff. The fact is we're doing volume because now you can do all the personalization stuff automated with AI. You're right. Like, so I want to hear from you, man, like some interesting experiments that you're running and just like talk through those and yeah.
Eric Nowoslawski:
Well, so I always, I always start this with, in my opinion, cold email is a private ads network. And, and so what I mean by that is, um, But you can go to LinkedIn and you could pay $5,000 and you could run your campaign and then completely burn through $5,000. But you don't go to LinkedIn and then you're like, oh man, I want a refund from LinkedIn. What the heck? You don't think of it that way. But for some reason, when you have an SDR or you have an agency, and you told them what the list is, and you told them what the offer was, and you're in control of all those variables, they're just delivering on it for you. Then you go to them and you're like, oh, this SDR stinks. We should fire them. And I think that from that baseline, it's just the wrong way to think about it. So going back to the original thing you said, if... So you said you can't just take a list from ZoomInfo and just load it up anymore, which I do agree with that. But I tell everybody that, again, it's a private ads network. your offer matters more than anything else. And so do I need AI in an email to attempt to sell a Ferrari for $30,000? Absolutely not. If somebody somehow legitimately was emailing me and they had a Ferrari for $30,000, I'd pay cash for that and I'd take it in a heartbeat. Yeah. Or like a Super Bowl ad commercial for $30,000. You don't need AI to be selling those things. A lot of these problems that people see is... So response rates have gone down. That's just the way that it is. And the big problem that we've seen is that a lot of these companies that don't have product-market fit, or they think that they do and they just hammer on these people, and they think that volume is going to solve their problems, they just burn through their leads. And then all these people who are like, Oh, I never respond to emails anymore because there's all these bad ones, then I totally get it. And so I think that there's a time for high volume, very low personalized emails because the offer is just so good. And I can give an example of that. And then there's reasons why you need very high personalized. You use a lot of AI, you do a lot of data scraping in order to get that. Right? And so like we've got one guy, this doesn't require any AI, right? We've got one guy who he cold emails schools. And when a school wants to throw away their laptops, they usually have to pay for them to be recycled because the memory has to get wiped. And there's all these different things that have to happen. But he has figured out the economics that he can actually pay for a school. He can pay for their laptops and then he'll go and break it down into pieces and then he can sell it. And so there is zero artificial intelligence in his campaigns because all we literally do is just walk up to schools and like, hey, if you have laptops, I'll buy them from you instead of you having to pay for somebody to take them away. And we're certified and we can wipe them and all of these things. So, that's one of the few times that it really is a volume game because it's like... So, there's only two emails in that sequence because if they don't have laptops, there's no reason to keep following up with these people. They just don't have laptops. And we just keep churning through as many people as we can. And then on the flip side, there's times where really heavily scraped data comes into play for these campaigns. So the video that you were talking about at the beginning of the video, right? The crazy clay workflow for outbound agencies. So if you are working in a space where your offer is heavily commoditized, you need a way to make your email stand out. And so what I was doing in that video for people who haven't watched it, is I was scoring founders by five different criteria. So one, it's their first time ever being a founder. Two, they have started the company in less than 2 years. Three, they're hiring for a sales team. Four, they don't have a VP of sales. And five, they don't have a DMARC record on their website. And now, a lot of people on that... When I posted it on LinkedIn, they said, you know, how many people does this actually shake out to being? And it's like, if you upload 5,000 people, it might be like 30 who are actually going to qualify for that. But this goes into my idea of stacking growth, which I can talk about after this. So now, the only reason I'm reaching out to these people is if all five of these stars are aligning. And then in the rest of the video, I show how I use AI to get an inference about who I think that they're selling to, find real LinkedIn profiles of people that they should probably be selling to, enrich it for their email addresses, and then just give it in the email, and then make an offer for, hey, like, if we hop on a call, I'll make 5,000 more leads like this. And you know, if this looks good, and I could take any other criteria that you want. And this is all automated. All this is automated. This is crazy. And so the problem that I'm solving for is like every person who gets an email from a cold email agency, they're always getting emails like, You know, Hey, if you want leads, I can get you leads. And we have this guarantee and like, we'll do crazy stuff for you. Like, please talk to us. And I'm taking a completely different approach to it where I'm like, look, like, what am I unique? Like, why do people come to my agency? Okay. People come to my agency because our list building is way better than everybody else's. If I could get them on a sales call and show them how crazy our list building is, then they could see the value of our agency. So why don't I just show that as much as possible in my product, which is my email? I think there's nothing that makes me more mad than when AI personalization email tools email me to use their AI tool, and there's zero AI in their email. It's like the funniest thing in the world to me. They'll be like, oh, hey, we can personalize emails at scale. And then there's nothing in there was personalized to me, except for my first name. And I'm like, that's just too funny. So this is my product. If you are impressed by this email, imagine what we'd be able to do for your offer as well. And so I guess that's the way that I think about it. And so every client is completely different. So when you're asking, what are you experimenting with right now? Every single client is so, so different. Really, the way that we work on these things is we work with clients and we say, okay, hey, if you were to manually research an account or a prospect for 10 minutes, what are you researching for? And how does that change the messaging if something is true or false about that person, right? And so then we run through all this stuff. And I call this kind of like an ICP, like situation waterfall. I need to come up with a better name for it. And over Christmas break, maybe I'll come up with it. And so we'll onboard a customer and they'll say, okay, at a very minimum, they need to be a company with 500 to a thousand employees who's using HubSpot or Salesforce. And they have to have a marketing operations team or similar titles, right? So at a very minimum, it's like, if those criteria aren't met, we're not going to email these people. It's like, okay, So we'll pull everybody that first meets that criteria. Now, this is the bottom of the barrel of qualification. There's no other stuff that we're looking for. Now what we'll do is we'll go from the bottom of the barrel to now we go to the top. And then I say, okay, who is the best person for you to email? Like what's going on in their company? What's the situation? Who are they? What's going on that makes them a phenomenal candidate? And so then that same company might come to me and they might say, okay, if they are a VP of marketing that was hired in the last six months, they have a paid media person on their team and they're hiring for marketing operations, uh, roles, that's our person. And I'm like, perfect. So that's like number one. That's the best message that we've got is that person. Then usually, number two is just stripping away one of those things. So now it's a VP of marketing, who's been there longer than six months. And now they're not new. And they have a paid media person on their team. And they are hiring for a marketing ops person. And then it might be a VP of Marketing. And maybe we can't detect paid media, but they have marketing ops on there. But they are hiring for a marketing ops role. And so then it keeps breaking down. And then we'll restart and we'll say, okay, now what if it's a Chief Marketing Officer? How does the message change there? And what other situations are you looking for? And then they're like, okay, if it's Chief Marketing Officer, and the past three months of web traffic has been going up, and it's because of paid traffic, We want to message them about that." Like, perfect. And now that is a perfect example of how there's no... There's no step down from that. That's just... That just is the play. It's just chief marketing officer, last 3 months, increase in traffic, a portion of it is coming from paid. That's like... You can't strip any of that away. So then that just becomes a standalone play, right? Yeah. And so we onboard our customers to talk about all these different situations. Then we move them into and that's where we really need their expertise. And then that's when it flips back over to our expertise. And I hope I'm explaining all of this, but this will kind of be the last thing maybe I'll say is we've so we send 1.5 million cold emails a month. And so I'd like to think that we have a good understanding of
Andy Mewborn:
I would say so that's a shit ton of emails.
Eric Nowoslawski:
Yeah. And so, um, yeah. So when, like, when people call me a spammer, like, you know, I was just kind of with my family during Thanksgiving and they're like, what do you do? And I'm like, explaining it. And they're like, ah, I hate it when people send me these emails. I'm like, yeah, but like, you don't get emails the way we write the emails. Like, yeah. So when people call me a spammer, I'm like, yeah, I know. It's like, it's, that's just the industry. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:
And I think it'll change. You're always like an enemy or the bad guy until it starts to work. And then everyone's like, Oh yeah.
Eric Nowoslawski:
And then you're like, everyone's like, well, how do you do it?
SPEAKER_02:
You know, like give me your secrets, you know, like, yeah, it's going to happen, man.
Eric Nowoslawski:
And so then, so we take all of those insights from them. And honestly, that usually just writes the first and maybe the second line of the email, because Now that list becomes the message, right? It's like, oh, you're a VP of marketing and you've got paid media people on your team and you're hiring for a marketing ops person. Yeah. Honestly, that's sentence one. So then sentence three is usually case study stuff. But sentence two and four is where we have these campaign types that we fit people into. And so I have nine that I believe work. And like, I would say a month ago, I had three until I started thinking about this. But I've got like nine campaign types that we've seen work that we kind of bucket people into. And so... Okay, what are the nine? I want to hear this. Yeah, I was just going to get into that. So one is problem sniffing. And so a problem sniffing campaign is like one of our customers, they do Airbnb If you have an apartment building and you don't want your renters to be listing their properties on Airbnb, they've got AI that can take the images of your property and then they're scraping Airbnb listings and then they can kind of compare and say, hey, it looks like one of your renters is listing. And so a problem sniffing campaign for them is we're going to scrape apartments.com for people complaining that there's too many Airbnb visitors. And we're going to bring that to them and we say, hey, I know that you have this problem because I saw this review about too many Airbnb customers coming. We can help you solve this problem if you want to control it. Here's how we can do it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. On a simpler level, you could even think about it if you You know, we're to scrape every restaurant that has complaints about how the parking lot has too many holes in it. And if you are a, you know, paving company, you could go to them and you say, hey, I found this problem. Would you want to do something about it? So that's problem sniffing. Number two, and these are in no particular order of effectiveness. And you can stack these. The more that you can stack together, the better it works. But just one of them will increase your campaigns as well. So then number two is a truly funny, relevant campaign. And so what I mean by this is like... One time, I got an email from a company that was selling... I don't want to name the company, but it was... What were they doing? It's like a gifting company, but for B2B. And when you sign a new client, you can automatically send them a gift and this kind of stuff. And they sent me an email where they were like, hey, do you want to meet Sprinkles in the subject line? And I was like, what? And so that was... Sprinkles. Yeah. And then they get into it and they're like, hey, you've been assigned as one of the accounts that I would like to work with. And just I wanted to introduce myself along with, you know, the fact that I work at this company. I also have a dog named Sprinkles and, you know, here's my dog. And I was like, oh. Okay. Now, candidly, somebody in the office, because I was working at my previous company back then, somebody in the office loved that email. And I was like, okay.
SPEAKER_02:
I would respond to that because I just... Yeah.
Eric Nowoslawski:
So different people do different things. But if I were to suggest that to a client, they would probably be like, what are you talking about? So when we say truly funny, relevant campaigns, there was another guy who ran a pest control company that maybe sent one of the funniest campaigns I've ever seen. The hotels in the area were having a bed bugs problem. So then he sent an image where he said, oh my gosh, bed bugs. And he like put exclamation points. And then he put a meme of the Volkswagen Beetle inside of somebody's like bed, like the toy car inside of somebody's bed. And he was like, you know, by the way, if you want us to do something about the bed bugs in Philly right now, you know, like we can come out and help out in under 48 hours, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, perfect, like, that's actually relevant, like, that's actually funny to the situation that's going on and everything and we do things like that. The third one is using AI to help the prospect envision what using your product or service would be like for them. And so I love doing this.
SPEAKER_02:
That's the lead example you just gave, right? I'm like giving them what you would already provide. Like here's five leads we can give you, right?
Eric Nowoslawski:
Yes, yes. But it could even get simpler than that. So that is like, that is probably the hardest Clay workflow I've ever, that probably took me like seven hours to put together. It was, and I would even call it like not even done at this point. So an easier version of this is, and sales tools lend themselves to this so, so well. So what you can do is you can use AI to figure out what the company does, who they sell to, what's their offer, all of those things. And then you use AI to say, okay, considering all these things, give them ideas of how we would be able to help their company. And so we've done this for sales engagement platforms. And so we'll say in the email, we'll say like, oh, hey, I was looking at your site and I bet you sell to VPs of sales. Directors of sales development and chief revenue officers, whatever. We use AI to deduct what... Or not deduct, infer what titles they sell to. And then we say like, we built a platform that I think, as your team is probably doing a lot of these manual things, we can automate these things. And then we give them 3 ideas of like, outbound campaigns that they could be running automatically on the sales engagement platform. And then we say, if your team is doing this manually today, would you want to talk about how we could do it automatically? And AI wrote those ideas for them. So now they're like, oh, okay. Yeah, that's true. And so anyway, you can use AI in a number of different cases. If you sell bookkeeping services, you can't use AI to help the prospect envision what's going to happen because it's just bookkeeping. Yeah, but there's a creative application or the application changes per user. It's great for horizontal products. And so the number four is, I call it the stars aligning. And so that was a little bit from my example that I talked about previously. I want to reach out to founders who have never been a founder before. They don't have a DMARC policy. They don't have a VP of sales. They're hiring for a sales team. And whatever the fifth thing was, I forget at this point. And so not only... Because usually people are like, oh, I talked to chief marketing officers at companies with 200 employees and they're in the banking industry. And it's like, okay, that's not really the stars aligning. How can we align the stars on things that like if we were to send them this email, they'd be like, oh, we definitely they definitely did research on us. Yeah. And so that's usually the one that's probably the best performing campaign. But if you really do it right, you're going to get you're going to send 10,000 people through that flow and there's going to be like 100 who qualify for it. But that's just the name of the game. And then so number five is extremely relevant case studies so that you can send like an I've been there done that type message. So a company that I helped grow was clay.com and so I can basically. I mean, actually, these companies come to me. But I could basically go to any sales tech company at this point and tell them like, look, at clay.com, this was the outbound campaign I ran. Here was our content strategy. And these were the results that we generated because of those things. And they would open my email and they would engage with my email because I can say like, I've done this before. You should really talk to me because I've had all the success in the past. And so we'll help our customers do this using tools like Ocean.io to take one of their best case studies and then build a lookalike audience on that best case study. And then we write messaging of like, there's no AI for that messaging. It's literally like, look, this is precisely what we did for another health and fitness wearable company. Here's exactly how it went. Would you want to talk? And then that just helps cut through the noise there. And then influencer audience targeting. This is just like, sometimes there's influencers who give you good third party validation and proof. And so what we sometimes will do is we'll take the content that they post publicly, and then we'll go to people who presumably know that person, or if they're in the industry, they would know this person. And we basically say like, hey, this person said this, and we have to agree, this is like the entire thesis of our company. This one's a little bit tougher to get going, and I can answer questions about it if you want.
SPEAKER_02:
I want to make sure we get through all nine.
Eric Nowoslawski:
I want to make sure we get through all nine. What is this? So this is six, a great lead magnet.
SPEAKER_02:
I'm a big guy, lead magnet guy, man.
Eric Nowoslawski:
I am too. And so anytime I work with customers and I'm like, all right, is there anything that we can do for free for them that we can provide value in the email? And they're like, well, we do have that webinar we can send them. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're gonna watch an hour webinar, man. Yeah, I know. And so I used to think of a lead magnet as just providing value to somebody. But when Alex Ramosi came out with his book, 100 Million Dollar Leads, he defined it as the lead magnet has to be something that you can offer for free that the market is already paying for, right? So if I were to offer somebody to build them a list of 50 leads, they'd be like, eh, like, okay. Apollo has 100 email free trials. Seamless has 100 email free trials for life. So it's not really a compelling offer. But to say, I'll give you 5,000 leads, it's like, whoa, that's on the market worth anywhere between $500 to $1,500. That's a true, true lead magnet. And oftentimes, these are the toughest things to come up with our customers. Because you have to have a really good understanding of what your customer wants and how you can provide value to them. And then you have to also understand what can you scale so that if 20 people respond to you, you can actually deliver on these things. So the lead magnet is like a really tough balance of value and scalability and all those things. And so it's usually the toughest thing for us to work on. Number seven is just being genuinely useful. And so same property management, SaaS company example. If you can reach out to somebody with zero ask and just say, hey, I found this, I think you should just know about it. And then they respond and you follow up with something or they don't respond and then you follow up after that. But one thing that we're doing is we are taking batches of 200 property management companies and just in batches, seeing if we can figure out without them being customers, seeing if we could figure out that somebody's listed an Airbnb property illegally, and then without talking to this person before, just going to them and just being like, hey, we detected with our AI that this unit is being used and we just thought you would want to know about it. There's no ask. It's genuinely just going to them and just being like, look, I found this thing. And usually it's probably a combination of problem sniffing and being genuinely useful, but that's another one.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah.
Eric Nowoslawski:
Another one that we found works really, really well is.
SPEAKER_02:
All right. I cannot wait to get the transcript of this and like outline all these nine ways. And I think this is going to be like, like, I'm like, I'm listening like a hawk, man.
Eric Nowoslawski:
I'm just like, Oh my God. Like, I just hope that I'm covering all of them because it could be 12. It's just, I like, these are all the ones that I'm just thinking about right now. Yeah. These are all amazing, man. Yeah. And so another one that we've seen work super well is just two sentences straight to the point. And so one of my best performing campaigns ever was I figured out a workflow to be like the same workflow that staffing and recruiting companies use for their outbound campaigns. I figured out how to automate the entire thing. So all I did is I just went to them and I was like, look, I helped this other company automate the same process that they were doing manually. And they were able... They got so much business from it, they were able to hire another recruiter. And like, would you want me to send you the video of how it works? And we got tons of people to respond to that email. And then they went to the video and there was like 3 book a call links all over the video to make sure that we got them. And we booked tons of calls from that. And so another way to think about that is like... Hey Andy, I did an analysis on your site and saw that you're missing a DMARC record. Considering that you have SDRs on your team, I'd imagine you'd want to get that fixed. You want to just hop on a call real quick and I can show you how to fix it. And they're like, what is that? And it's just like super, super straight to the point. And it's just like, boom, two sentences. Usually it's a Josh Braun style, poke the bear question as well. Taking the property management example, we could send a two-sentence email of using AI to figure out what the top attraction is in the city that we're emailing, and then say something like, as visitors come in to see the purple elephant or whatever, as visitors come in to see the purple elephant, you know, how do you know that none of your renters are illegally renting an Airbnb with them? Would you want to find out how, you know, like just keeping it super, super to the point. Yeah. Um, so then that'd be eight and the number nine of this like non-definitive list. And I'm trying to keep adding things.
SPEAKER_02:
You're like coming. Yeah. You're like, these are the, these are all crazy experiments for people to run. Like, yeah.
Eric Nowoslawski:
And this is our exact onboarding process when we're working with customers. And so I'll finish nine and then I'll talk about how this comes together. The last one is a flash roll campaign. And so I take the wording from Oren Klaff, but everybody knows what this is. You've seen it before and you know that it works. And so what he defines as a flash roll is, have you ever seen my cousin Vinny?
SPEAKER_02:
No, no.
Eric Nowoslawski:
Okay. Is this your actual Cousin Vinny or is this a show? It's a movie. Okay. Yeah. So for people who don't know in the audience, this is perfect. So my Cousin Vinny, story about a lawyer who, or actually have you ever seen Catch Me If You Can? That would be another example. Oh, I love that movie. Yeah. Okay. So in both situations, right? Real quick, because we're on a podcast and I just got to like rip through this. In My Cousin Vinny, he's a lawyer. They call his girlfriend to the stand, woman from Brooklyn. They think and she's being used as an expert witness in like a car situation. Like they need to know if this car was actually at the scene of a crime. Woman from Brooklyn, she's got an accent. She's all dolled up, full of makeup, wearing a dress, all these things. So they're grilling her and they're like, there's no way she knows anything about cars. So they ask her this question and they're like, you know, what's that, you know, I don't even know what the question they asked, but they asked this very specific question about a car and she says, there's no way I can answer that. And they're like, see, she knows nothing about cars. And she's like, no, there's no way I can answer that because it's a BS question. And then she rips the guy for like 40 seconds about, she uses all this jargon and this technical, like these technical things about why the question is wrong. And then she answers it as if he answered, as if he asked it the right way. In 40 seconds, she just went from a woman from Brooklyn that you think knows nothing about cars to this woman knows everything about cars, right? And so then that's your flash roll. Real quick, if you haven't seen Catch Me If You Can, he's running from the FBI and he's doing all these things. Every time he comes to the FBI, or even when he pretends to be a pilot, He watches these movies to like get their jargon down and get their technicalities down and to get their language down so that when somebody asks him a question, he just say, like, of course, I'm a pilot. Like, you know, I'm, you know, the deadhead heading to LAX and, you know. FAA, like whatever, he says all these things. So the key to doing a flash roll correctly, though, is you want to write at like a fifth grader level. And it's like fifth grade, fifth grade, fifth grade. And then when you do your flash roll, you like sink all the way down and you get super deep and technical and then you come back up. And so like if I were to take the DMARC record, for example, I say like, hey, you know, like I saw you, you know, have a SDR team. And I'd imagine you guys are using outbound emails for things like that. Took a deeper look and I saw you don't have a DMARC record. This would affect your domain because this is a key authentication when it comes to your DNS settings that if you don't send this, every person who has a DMARC record won't get your email because you don't have the settings set up on your DNS record. And like, you just like go super deep on there and they're like, wait a minute. I have no clue what this guy's talking about. Let's just ask, like, let's just engage with this because this sounds like a problem, but I don't know how to fix it. Right. And so then that's what we call the flash roll campaign. And so to wrap all this up, I know I've basically been monologuing and.
SPEAKER_02:
No, this is great because it's all value. Like the words to value ratio here is like phenomenal, man.
Eric Nowoslawski:
Well, so I appreciate that. And so, yeah. So this is also that we. The toughest part with my agency is repeatedly onboarding a customer and setting these things up for them. So this is how we go from, it's like ICP, like who are you generally trying to target? And if they don't meet this criteria, we just shouldn't even email them anyway. And then we go a level down to situation. And it's like, okay, what's the situation that will change the messaging and makes this even more important for us to reach out to them? And then there's these angles that you go a step deeper with that now, okay, now we have our ICP, their chief marketing officer. And the situation here is they are hiring for a marketing ops person and in the marketing ops, it says that they're going to be in charge of paid media campaigns. Now it's like, okay, that lends itself pretty well to problem sniffing because you know, like now we can talk about how like, Hey, maybe you shouldn't hire this person. And, or like, maybe in order, like, while you're waiting to hire this person, you could, you know, implement our technology and streamline the team that you currently have going on. Well, don't say streamline an email, but, um, you could improve the current process that you have, uh, you know, already. And so, uh, that that's kind of like our formula for onboarding is just like ICP situation, angle. And there's definitely more angles than that. It usually presents itself. But when I'm doing copywriting for clients, I'll take all the situations and I'll have that doc open. And I think to myself, okay, does number six fit? Let's see if number six fits. How would I approach this if I was doing number six? And it just acts as a heuristic for me to go back to.
SPEAKER_02:
Wow. This is insane. And then like, So you have all these ways to test, right? And you're like, let's say it's nine different ways. So are you testing all nine at once? Or like, are you getting a thousand contacts doing like an ABC test?
Eric Nowoslawski:
All nine usually don't. come up. So usually it's like we get three. So one of them was influencer targeting. Well, if there's no influencer that everybody... Because we could reach out to marketing agencies right now and quote Alex Ramosi and everyone would be like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. That's how Alex does it. Yeah. And so, but not every industry has that person that could cut through. So that's one that usually just gets qualified immediately. And so what we really like to do is I really like to pick the best, maybe two angles that we're going to go with. Because again, At the end of the day, so really what we want to do is we want to test situations. I think the situation is far more important. If you were to walk up to a person that is having your pain and you were to just email them anything about solving that pain and you're right, they would respond. So, I actually find that the copywriting and the angles is the least important part and it's really the situation that we need to get right. It depends on the customer though. And so oftentimes we're mostly testing lists. We're not so often testing the campaign angle because there's only so many ways that you can say somebody's unique selling proposition. And I'm not a huge believer in like, A-B testing the crap out of things. There's only been a very few times where actually changing the wording by itself and not changing the list has really changed the campaign for us. And maybe I'm just wrong about this. And maybe I should try harder on this. But I don't A-B test you know, hey, if you're having this problem, we can help you save time versus, hey, if you're having this problem, I can help you save money, which because every B2B offer comes down to either helping somebody save time, save money, or make more money. And then in B2C, you have those three, but then it's also raise status and then also increase health. And so every offer comes down to those things. And so if I'm telling you that I can help you with your freelance management process, I personally don't think that it matters that I say that I can help you save time versus I can help you save money. You just need to know that I can help you with the process, in my opinion. There was one time, though, we were working with like a tax company. And we were saying, you know, like, are you happy with your current tax process? And that was just a bad question. We weren't getting positive responses. So then I switched it to Josh Braun's credit. Like he put this in his course and I just ripped it from his course. So this is Josh Braun. We changed it to, how do you know that your current tax accountant is using every legal loophole to get you the biggest refund possible? And so that's a situation where you should be A-B testing, but it's, you know, obviously there you're like leaning into somebody's emotion and also doing what Josh Braun talks about, like poking the bear and things like that. But anyway, so when we're testing, it's usually about two and we're really testing the data and the situation, not so much the messaging as much.
SPEAKER_02:
Interesting. So you're, this is a good insight, which is the takeaway for people as you're testing the, the situation slash scenario versus like, you know, did I, did I put this word here or do I put this word here? Right.
Eric Nowoslawski:
Like, yeah. Yeah. I just don't care. Like sometimes. customers, and I'm sure our customers have left to work with other agencies. I'm not saying that, but sometimes customers will come with working from another agency, and then they give us the copywriting they made, and they gave like four different versions of basically essentially saying all the same things. And I just don't think that If somebody were to cold email me and it's a problem that I'm facing right now, I really don't care. As long as you phrase it clearly, I don't care. I don't totally care about the way that you phrase your case study, and I don't really care about the way that you phrase your call to action. I just need to know exactly what you do. And I think being clear is more important than testing.
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, it's almost, it's just like, it's still the game of attention, right? It's like, what's the hook? And the hook is the idea overall of like what you're trying to offer them, right? Like if you look at like, I look at like LinkedIn content, right? Like some of this LinkedIn content, is the formatting perfect? Is the, you know, is the copywriting amazing? No, but what gets you on some of these things that do well, is the hook. You're like, holy shit, this is an idea I haven't heard before. Or that it was presented in a unique way. And it's not like this person's a copywriter, but it's that idea overall that's working. And I'll give you an example. I'm doing this campaign now and you know what's worked best for me? I offer a $100 gift card. to take the time. But I know here's the thing with that. And it works and we have some money to spend, but like not a ton, but we're being very targeted with the list. Right. And so with that, when I'm doing it, I know that, okay, the list is right. And we're doing this. And most of the time people are like, Hey, I don't need the gift card. Right. But they're like, they're happy that you're offering to compensate them for their time. You know, and then they get on. And I know I'm so confident in what we're building in our offer. And they go, hell yeah, I would want my team to trial this. Like, this is amazing. But if, you know, if it was a shitty product, it's like 15 years old or something. And it was like that, then I think it'd be money down the drain.
Eric Nowoslawski:
But yeah. And that is actually a playbook that I had my mind changed about because at first I was like, why would you do that? Like you're just, you know, bribing these people and then they're just going to take your money and they're not a real qualified lead and all these things. And then we ran it for a couple of customers who just really wanted to test it. And I totally agree with you. I think at first I thought that people would just take the gift card and just move on. and just waste your time on a demo and it wouldn't work. But then when you think about it, the people that you're targeting, their time isn't actually worth $100 an hour. So it's just greasing the wheels of somebody who was on the fence a little bit. And then they say, Oh, you know what? Yeah, let's do it. And I would say like, so Rippling has offered me a $250 gift card or something like that. And they range from $100 gift cards and all these other things for a 30-minute demo or something like that. I did not respond because I have three people on my team in Mexico, two in the United States. We don't have an HR problem. I just pay people. There's no HR issue in my team. We're not big enough to have an HR problem. And so for me, I'm not just jumping on and be like, oh, I cannot wait to take $250 from this venture backed SaaS company. I'm just like, no, it's a waste of time for me, I'm not gonna respond. So I think it's a great way to take the people who would be okay, interested, and they're kind of on the fence of responding to just getting them over the line. So that's actually a campaign I had my mind changed about.
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, yeah, that one. I mean, it's working for me right now, which is which is freaking awesome, right? I'll show you the stats after this and pull it up on the screen, but it's like pretty crazy. what we're doing. And I'm a noob compared to you on all this stuff, right? I'm like, you know, I'm like, I don't say that.
Eric Nowoslawski:
I'm a noob too, you know, like at this level. So, and I'll even be posting about it on LinkedIn. I'll hit 2 million impressions for the year, probably by Friday. And you can point exactly to a huge spike in impressions that I got. And that spike coincides with ChatGPT and the API. It's like 3.5 coming out. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Whenever people are like, wow, you have so much experience. I'm just like, hell, you know. A year ago, I was basically doing everything that everybody else was doing and just trying to just be more creative about our approach. This AI stuff is so new that if you wanted to catch me, just watch my YouTube channel and you're going to get caught up basically. So while I appreciate that, I do tell everybody, it's like, hey, it's not that long that AI has really been available to everyone in a way that everybody could use it for their campaigns.
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah. It's just, it's amazing, man. And then you, and you've done some work with Hormozy, right? Did you, you did some, uh, did you work on his webinar thing? Cause I think, uh, yeah.
Eric Nowoslawski:
So, so I got the opportunity to do a webinar with Hormozy because a friend that I did some coaching with ran, so he ran an affiliate offer where he was basically like, look, whoever gets the most amount of the top 10 people who get, you know, affiliates for me, I'll give an hour of my time to do a webinar together and everything. And so, honestly, he did all the work. I just did a little bit of coaching. He did all the work. And then as a thank you, we were on the webinar together. So I am very clear. I've never done official work for GymLaunch or Acquisition.com, but I did have the webinar with him.
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah. Yeah, that is awesome, man. Wow, that is crazy. So you guys should have some leads. That's freaking amazing. And where do you think, where do you, what do you, you know, I was early in outreach. So like, you know, this is the big question and we have the old kind of like way of outbound, which used to be new. And then you kind of have this like new, more sophisticated way where you need to have infrastructure set up, DMARC, DKIM, SPF. You need to make sure you have online. Where do you think, what do you think is going to happen, man? I want to know if my shares are going to be worth something.
Eric Nowoslawski:
No, so I mean, I still, I think your shares are going to be still worth something. So here's, here's, I always think about where, where can we draw like a first principle here and work backwards for like, to give us the answer. Right. And so your, your question is not really about what will cold email look like three years from now. You're really asking like, how is Google and Microsoft going to treat these things three years from now? Yeah. And so when you think about it, it's like, OK, what we're essentially doing is we're sending emails to people that they do not have. We did not get permission from them to send emails. So what other kinds of emails do people send that they don't have permission from the person for? And so every time I sign up for a product, I get an email, a transactional email, not a cold email, but a transactional email signing up for the product. When a new lead reaches out to you and they want to inquire about your services, that's a person that they didn't have permission to reach out to you, but they still reached out to you. When you want to reach out to somebody and use their services, you're reaching out in that way. When a college student wants to reach out about a job, they're using it that way, right? And so there is a world where we have to contact people who we've never contacted before, at a minimum. I tried buying a house with a company I was an advisor for was called gated.com, which was like basically putting a paywall up, which I actually love the idea. If I could genuinely pay you $2 and you would respond like I would actually want to do that. It just got funky and they closed the business down. So anyway, as an advisor, I had the software on my personal email address while I was trying to buy a house. And I had to get it shut off because the amount of emails that I was missing, because there was all these people who were trying to coordinate with me and I just wouldn't get their email, I had to take it down. So for all the complaints that people make about cold email, If you were to shut it off and genuinely not get emails from people anymore that you've never emailed before, your life would completely go away. Well, not go away, but it would be a lot tougher. And so Google can only reduce spam to the level that it doesn't affect regular users, right? So if every time you wanted to send an email, you had to verify your phone number, that regular users would be like, this is the worst system ever. But it would totally kill a cold email if that were to be the case, right? And so there's a certain line where they go to where at one point, they can't keep suspending things. And that's why I think that we can always just keep doing more and more. Because right now, it's like if you send an email and 0.3% of those people mark you as spam, then your domain gets blacklisted. But let's just mathematically work our way out of that, right? If I use an email warmup service, which they can't catch the email warmup service because One, it connects via SMTP. And so if you wanted to block the SMTP, you would block tons of other softwares that just integrate with your account. So you can't do that. Then all of the text in the SMTP, in the warm up email, is completely AI generated and completely different every single time. So how are you going to catch that? And then... So now let's do the math. If it needs to be 0.3%, okay, I'll just send 40 warm-up emails a day so that Google sees they sent 40 emails and nobody marked them as spam. And then I'll send 10 cold emails per account. And now 0.3%, that would mean that to reach that threshold, it would be like... I'd be sending emails... Even if one person every three days was marking my email as spam, which I have another thing that I don't think as many people mark emails as spam as I think. And so now you can just do the math where it just works out that I can cheat that volume game from them. All we have to do now is just reduce the amount of warm-up emails that we're sending. And yes, it becomes more expensive, but it's still more possible, right? And so it becomes expensive because you need more accounts and you need more domains. But it's still possible to send the cold email. So this is kind of a long drawn out way for me to say that it's still going to stick around all of this. Everything that I talk about is no more important than your offer. Like if somebody were to send the most beautiful cold email, so well-written, really, really awesome. And again, it's about HR software. I just don't care. There's nothing that you could really say to me. All of my HR issues are solved. There's nothing you could say to me that would be like, oh, you should use an HR software. I'm like, no, Wise fixes it. It's fine. And so your offer and what you offer to your audience is far more important than everything else. And all of these things accelerate that.
SPEAKER_02:
So you mean asking for 30 minutes out of the gate doesn't work?
Eric Nowoslawski:
Well, it depends on your offer, right? So if I ask somebody for 30 minutes to set them up on a Super Bowl commercial, I'd be like, yeah, okay, let's do it. As long as I believe you a little bit, then yes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:
Or if it was like a hundred, you know, you get a gift card, a hundred bucks, right? You're like, shit.
Eric Nowoslawski:
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So I always tell everybody, because I've built this brand as the AI, you know, automate everything kind of guy. But really, if the people don't need what you're selling, there's no automation that can save you from that. The automation just makes sure that you're talking to the right people instead of just messaging everybody. You just have a way better shot of actually talking to that right person.
SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, crazy, dude. Well, man, this has been amazing. So last thing here, how can people find you? How can people work with you? All that stuff in terms of how people should follow all of your stuff.
Eric Nowoslawski:
Yeah. So I would say I tried to post everywhere for a long time and then I just completely gave up. So it's just LinkedIn and YouTube at this point. And so LinkedIn is just Eric Noslowski. If you just search that up, I'm the only Eric Noslowski in the world. N-O-W-O-S-L-A-W-S-K-I if you wanted to see that. And then it's the same on YouTube as well. And so, yeah, you can just reach out to me there.
SPEAKER_02:
Awesome, man. Well, dude, this has been like, we'll have to have you on for another like Cold Emo Masterclass in like six months to see where things go. Sure, yeah. And like stay updated. That'd be amazing, man. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Which would be freaking great.
