In this episode, join Nick Abraham as he dives into advanced tactics designed to grab the attention of any B2B audience. Renowned as a leading B2B cold email expert, Nick is setting new standards and capturing widespread attention in the world of B2B cold emailing.
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Andy:
Ever wonder how some people crush it with cold emails while others get ignored? Well, buckle up, because we're about to spill the tea on some next-level cold email tactics. We're talking custom servers, AI wizardry, and tricks that'll make your prospects actually want to hit reply. Hey there, I'm Andy Meaborn, founder of distribute.so. Think Notion, but for sales teams. Today, I'm chatting with Nick Abraham, the cold email guru who's been breaking records and turning heads in the B2B cold email world. Trust me, whether you're a startup founder or a seasoned pro, you're going to want to hear what Nick has to say. So grab a coffee, settle in, and let's dive into the wild world of cold email mastery. Let me know if the audio is messed up. No, dude, you should be good. No, you're good, man. All good.
Nick: Usually when I get on Riverside sometimes, my audio just gets totally scrambled.
Andy: Yeah, it's like that with me too. It's kind of like, I don't know, like you have to go on like Google Audio and stuff sometimes.
Nick: Yeah. How's everything been though?
Andy: Yeah, it's a little, is it laggy on your end too? It is. It is lagging. Riverside, dude. Riverside. Always, always giving the issue. Dude, should we just do this on Zoom? Let's rock Zoom. Zoom is my spot. Yeah. We could just do Zoom, too. Let me see. Can you do like HD on Zoom? Let me see, dude. Hold on. Because like, yeah, we can just do it. It sounds like it's like lagging on my end, too. I can hear myself talk.
Nick: It's actually not lagging terribly for me right now.
Andy: No. Okay. That's good. That's good. Let's see. Maybe now. LG. Let's see if I can do it here. Let's do default. Yeah, dude, I think we're good. Let's just go. We're recording. We'll see. We'll figure it out. We'll see if we need to jump. We'll jump. All good, man. So, Nick, man, we've been internet friends, I don't know, for a couple months now or a little bit of time. So, dude, I was excited to be chatting with you because you are I would say one of the cold email gurus out there, my man.
Nick: I am indeed. Three and a half years strong posting cold email content.
Andy: Yeah. Three and a half years strong. Where'd you start posting?
Nick: Were you posting on LinkedIn or what was kind of your… So side note, funny thing. My girlfriend's always like, how come you never post me on Instagram or anything? And you post cold email content all day long. And I'm like, this is how it is. But Twitter is my first place where I started posting content business-wise. And then we started LinkedIn, I think, like a year ago. But LinkedIn's actually been my favorite recently. And then we just started YouTube as well. But creating videos is just so much more work.
Andy: Dude, creating video is like such a pain. Like it's, it's such a pain. Like I, I have this gal right now helping me write scripts and then like, I'll take the scripts and take a week to film them. But like, even with the script, it's like saying the things and then filming the shots. It's like, you need, you know, it's insane. It's so much work. And like, I talked to some, um, some friends in the video world who like work with Cody Sanchez and her mosey and all that, you know, And they're like, dude, their video team is like 10 to 15 people. It's like, it's like a department. So like, don't feel bad that you can't get out more video. It's like a thing, you know, you almost if you're gonna do it right, you kind of like, you know, I don't want to say you need a team, but like, it makes it a lot friggin easier if you're a super busy person, you know, so yeah, doing content all the time. But yeah,
Nick: Yeah, I think at one point, when I first started, I really wanted to get on YouTube. And I was trying to edit a video. And I was like, yeah, there's absolutely no way I'm going to do this.
Andy: Yeah. No. And consistently, no way in hell, dude. Literally. I don't know if you tried Descript. Have you looked at Descript to edit stuff?
Nick: No. I think I was rocking the old school iMovie. Oh, nice. Just trying to rip stuff on there.
Andy: I remember editing skate video, like skate videos with iMovie back in the day, like skating, you know, like figuring out how to like do music on the background. And it was like, people thought you were a genius for doing that, right? Yeah, literally. Yeah, literally. They're like, oh, you're a genius, man. But that's wild, man. So dude, would love to chat with you about go to market, right? And like, let's get into the weeds in cold email. And typically, the way I run this is like, is three things that you're experimenting with right now, two things that are working for you, and then one thing that was an absolute miss that didn't work at all, right? It's typically kind of like, we all have those if we're experimenting, because I feel like cold emails, it's like ads now. You're constantly just testing messaging, testing creative, that being your email, what's in the emails, and all that fun stuff. Dude, I would love to chat with you on the cold email side, like three things you're experimenting with right now. And I know you got more than three, but we'll keep it to that. Because you're always posting stuff on LinkedIn that you're like, okay, should I post this email? And it's like, I'm like, man, that actually is a pretty good email. So dude, I would love to hear from three things you're experimenting with right now.
Nick: Yeah, three things. So one thing that we're testing and early signs are really good. So we're testing like a new infrastructure setup. So like, you know, Google and Microsoft, they're they're cracking down on quote emails a ton. So we built like our own SMTP internally. So I have a pretty I would say a pretty good team of devs, which has made cold email way easier from being able to scrape really good data sources, being able to do things that most people can't do in their cold emails. And right now, it's more on the infrastructure side. And the early signs are good. And so we're pretty happy about that. I would say that's one thing we're testing, just new infrastructure, just because Google and Microsoft are getting just way, way, way more strict on cold emails than ever before. And like the crackdowns have been happening at a faster pace, and more frequently than ever before. And I think that's, that's gonna be the the new standard. And, you know, I'm It's like one of those things, right? People think that cold email's going to die. It's never going to die. It's always going to be one of those things that just get harder. And if this is your business, then like it is for us, you have to just get on top of it and figure out what's next. And so that's kind of what we're doing on the infrastructure side. It's been showing some pretty good signs. The second thing that we've been doing recently is personalizing cold emails better. Okay, like just figuring out different variables to be able to use. I'm sure you've heard of like collegiate. Like, yeah, yeah, research tool.
Andy: Actually, bro, can we go back to that? I want to I want to dig into that first point a little bit of before we get into personalization, I want to dig into the infrastructure part, which is what was like the sign, you know, because I want to I want people who listen to this be like, Okay, when do I know that like, I should start experimenting with new infrastructure, which is probably like, Now, everyone should maybe do that if they have the resources. But what was your sign for being like, OK, we need to build our own SMTP servers and do this in-house?
Nick: So about a month and a half, really like two months ago, We were completely Microsoft. I feel like we were one of the first people to, because everyone was using Google about two years ago. And then we saw issues with Google. And so we were like, all right, let's try Microsoft out. Microsoft was crushing it for us. It was insane, right? Great results, easy to set up. Everything was just easy. And then about two to three months ago, we just started seeing all our campaigns have massive bounce rates. And we're completely Microsoft, right? And our average campaign was getting a reply rate below 1%. And we haven't done anything on our setup side that was different. All our leads are obviously validated. Everything is running the way it's supposed to. And we see that Microsoft is just getting way more strict with cool emails. I'm like the way we set up everything, because obviously we run this for, you know, 150 clients, we got to be on top of a lot of these things. Like, you know, we're doing separate proxies for every admin panel doing a separate admin panel for every client, you know, separating inboxes. But you know, we're setting up like 20 inboxes per client, like separating across multiple organizational units, like we're doing so much on the safety side. And yet we're still getting hit pretty hard. All our emails are bouncing. They're all saying, you know, your emails being blocked because it's suspected of spam. We're doing everything that we should be doing to get a really good cold email campaign to run. And it's still coming with a super high bounce rate. So then, obviously, we just see that, OK, Microsoft is somehow identifying cold emails way quicker. And then they're just banning the entire tenant that you're setting up all the domains and inboxes under. And so then we had to go quickly set up a lot more. And that delayed a lot of things for about two weeks and made campaigns suffer for roughly about a month. And so that was my sign. It was like, okay, the learning lessons, right? It's like, okay, first, you can't just be in one. A couple things I'll say. So like, if you're an average person, you're not running cold emails for like clients. Don't even look at SMTP. It's a lot more technical. If you don't have devs, like it's, it's a pain in the ass. You're not going to know how to do like 99% of the things. Stick with Google, Microsoft, and then just like, keep your limits way lower. So be like a lot less like, what's the word like, a lot less risky with what you do. So like, you know, like no links, no open tracking, like, you know, plain text, very casual messaging, you know, things like that. You know, very low limit param box, but The big thing I learned to as well is just like, you know, you can't, you can't just have all your eggs in one basket. So I can't just be all Microsoft for clients, I have to make sure the infrastructure is like, you know, Google, Microsoft, like split, and then now we're just testing like our own SMTP internally, to kind of like supplement as well, because, you know, they're just going to get more strict with how cold emails are perceived. And I get it, right? It hurts the other users that aren't sending cold emails that they obviously provide infrastructure for. And so yeah, the biggest thing is just diversity. And if you can do that, whenever Microsoft cuts down, your Google inboxes will still do good. Vice versa. If Google does bad, your Microsoft inboxes will do good. And so that was my big learning lesson in the last 45, 60 days.
Andy: Wow. And it almost sounds like there's a business opportunity there, man. Here's a business idea is to set up SMTP as a service for a custom. I'm sure if you build this, you could sell it to other agencies that need to basically get on their own custom SMTP services.
Nick: Yeah. So it's actually funny. There's been so many companies that have popped up recently that do this, where they'll set up SMTP. Really? But the thing is, it's like, when you commercialize it, I've never seen any of these SMTP servers that are provided by a company do well after, you know, 60 to 90 days. And like, you can kind of go like, ask in the like, little communities, like Jesse has and stuff. And they'll tell you the same thing, you know, but they'll tell you all the same thing, you know, that it stops working within the first 30 days, or it stops working after day 60. And so It's not interesting. And I feel like what happens is like, when you commercialize it, you just, and typically, they're cheaper than Google and Microsoft inboxes. So you just like, kind of attract the lower end of the market, which is usually doing things that aren't like pristine, and then they just kind of ruin the shared IP pools that are with everybody. And then from there, it's just like, it's very hard to kind of run stuff. commercialize it. Yeah, yeah. I'd like to give you an idea to like, One of my first companies I built after we built our legion agency was we built an email platform. It's funny, like we basically had inbox rotation, all the stuff that SmartLead initially had before they even were a company. Really? The issue was that was really early on in the journey, did not have the best dev team there. So managing it was a pain in the ass. And then when we started commercializing it, that's when everything started to fall apart. Because we just didn't have the dev team as well as the product to be able to maintain it. When we were just using it internally, we were kicking ass. the prime of when, before cold email really got popular, and there was a lot more information about it on the internet, our campaigns, man, it was the worst offers in the world, but they would get incredible results.
Andy: Yeah, just because you could do more volume, right, is basically it. You could make the mistakes in the messaging and all that, but you were just able to get more volume. early at Outreach, when we were there, it was arbitrage, right? It was like, hey, you could handle as many emails as you can, as prospects as you can add to a sequence. And that's what it was. And then everyone started to use it. And then, as you know now, it's kind of like saturated, where you just really got to stand out. And I think I was just on the call with the CRO this morning, Ciro, who's, you know, been around the block and, you know, we were chatting and, you know, we were just jamming, sharing notes. And, and, uh, he was like, what's working for you. And I was like, look, he was like, it's cold email dead. We're not getting results. Right. And, you know, that's everyone's question. Here's the thing. The. It's never dead, as you mentioned. It's an evolution. And where Cold Emo is at is essentially what everything always comes down to in terms of things that get commoditized, which is it comes down to brand. And that's name recognition is what I say is brand, right? That is why cold email works for me, because I have all this inbox rotation and stuff. But what happens is people recognize the name. I would say over 50, I think it's 56% of my responses say, hey, I know you from LinkedIn. Or they mention it on a call. Now, it's not just sending the cold emails because that's the easy part. It's doing it in a way where people recognize the person that's being sent. I always tell this one. I always tell people this. If it's my grandma emailing me, dude, I know that name. I'm going to open it. I don't give a shit what the subject line is. I don't care what's in the body. I'm probably going to respond because my grandma took the time to send me an email. Now, that's like an example that's up here. Don't get me wrong. I'm not everyone's grandma, right? I just have a two-year-old myself. I'm not even a grandparent. But you get the idea, dude. It's all about the name recognition. And that's where I think that if we were to think of what's at play today with cold email, it comes down to a lot of brand, bro. And so you can't just run cold email. You can, but if you have a brand that coincide with it, that's what's going to make it super like freaking amazing. Right? And this is where liquid death kills it. Right? I always get this example. Yes, they're an anomaly, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But look, liquid death sells water. Guess what? I still open every one of their emails. That's like 15% off liquid death. Cause I know when I open it, they have a sick brand. They're going to make me laugh. or entertain me. And they're selling the world's number one commodity. And so guess what? Email marketing is, I'm sure, how they still print so much money. I still think it's the best channel. in its email, but it's because they have that brand coinciding with it, which I think makes it powerful. So I think it's arbitrage. If you have a sick brand as a company and you use cold email, it's arbitrage. That's the other component you want to build. But anyways, man, I just want to rant. What do you think? Am I spot on here, or do I sound like an idiot?
Nick: No, no, no. I mean, I think with any, because I mean, specifically with commoditized offers. Let's think more B2B. There's a million web design firms. There's a million B2B lead gen firms. You know, the one thing that helps you stand out is when you just are able to embody social proof and the best way to embody social proof, outside of like case studies and testimonials, it's just content. Like, and I think that's one thing and like you think about it from a Coldemar perspective, right? Like, alright, so first, if you look up leadbird.io, we're probably the only legion agency that has 40 plus video testimonials with their customers recorded and put it on our site. There's not many other Legion agencies that have more than just the video or the little quotes or whatever. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, if I send an email, if you send an email, and they look us up, they're going to see hundreds of videos with us, hundreds of content that we've done over the last two, three years. And they're immediately going to think, OK, One, this guy isn't going to scam me. He's all over the internet, right? If he's actually selling something that might actually help me, might as well hear this guy out, right? And I think that's so important. And it's not even that it will help just cold emails. It's going to help with anything that you're doing where you're selling to cold traffic, whether it's ads or anything else. If you get an ad on Facebook or Google Ads, you're going to go search that company up. And then once again, it's the same funnel where you see all this crazy content that they've been posting for two and a half years. And you know, this guy's probably legitimate. Let's hear it out. And so I think that's where content. And I tell this to everybody. I'm a cold email type of guy. I love sending cold emails. And that's what our business does. But content has easily been the most impactful thing I've ever done in my career.
Andy: Really? Interesting. And I'm guessing you're Where are you getting more clients from? Doing the content online or your cold emails?
Nick: It's actually crazy. Cold email is our best channel by far in terms of just generating amount of leads as well as what our close rate is and all that good stuff. But I only think it works so well because we have so many key other pieces from like, you know, the amount of video testimonials, social proof we have, the amount of content that I post, and similar to what you said, like we have, I think, like a pretty good brand reputation behind Leadbird. And so that's why cold emails is so Great for you. So effective, right? I do find that a lot of people that do book calls from us from content are always the most qualified business that we want to personally work with, just because there are more startups. They haven't proven product market fit. And usually when they sign up with a legion agency, it's pretty much a surefire way of making sure the engagement doesn't work. So yeah, our best clients are mostly coming from our actual whole emails.
Andy: Wow, that's crazy. Yeah. And you're targeting the specific people that you that have PMF product market fit and all that fun stuff, right? Yeah, you're kind of like realizing that, which is super interesting. Okay. All right, let's go to the second point you think you're experimenting with, which was the personalization.
Nick: Yeah, right.
Andy: I want to hear I want to hear how you're experimenting there. Because you said clay, clay is all the rage right now. You know, everyone's like, talking about clay, you know, frickin getting T-shirts at Clay, and who knows what else they're doing with Clay. But they're doing all kinds of crazy shit. So how are you experimenting with it? I'm super curious.
Nick: Yeah, so I'll take you back real quick. So we built this company about three years ago. We just recently exited. It's called Quicklines. It does AI personalization. And what it did was it would scan a LinkedIn profile and just write a personalized compliment about you.
Andy: And you did that before GPT, huh?
Nick: Yeah, we did that before. I think either the first or second company that ever did this way back in the day. And it's crazy, too. Before we built it as a SaaS, we just had it internally. And we would just use it for all of our clients. But the lines weren't anything crazy. And this is the way I think about personalization. The number one reason why your campaign will work is because you have product market fit or just a really good offer. If you don't have that, and I would say about 60% of people don't have a really good offer. A lot of people think their offer is good, but it really isn't. If you can't sell it to a cold traffic, it's not a good offer in my eyes. Anyways, if you don't have a good offer, personalization will just help you get an increased amount of replies. And typically, they're a little bit more positive. And so what Quicklines did was they would just write a cheesy personalization line. It really wasn't anything crazy. It would look at your profile and maybe see that Jesse wrote you a recommendation on LinkedIn. And it would just literally write a line about that saying, hey, love the recommendation that Jesse wrote on your LinkedIn. And you would see that and be like, oh, Jesse is someone I know. And this guy looked at my profile and saw that. Cool. Let me give him a reply. And they're cheesy, and they're not really relevant to the email and stuff. And people kind of hate on that. But if you're putting them in the PS line, they actually worked wonders. And we still use them to the day. But that's like level one personalization, where I think Clay came in and really revolutionized this as level two personalization, where it's pulling super specific things from a company's website. And that's what Claygeon is. It's basically just AI research on steroids for your lead list. And we took that same idea and we built it internally just recently. And there's just an infinite amount of possibilities of the type of campaigns we can run. So one of the campaigns we ran recently we have a client that targets restaurants, we would just grab food menu items off their website and put make like a cheesy personalization line where it's like, PS, next time I'm in town, I'm definitely gonna have to come by and try out your tater tots or you know, whatever, whatever thing is. And it's like, It makes it look like we researched it when we really did it. And I think that's what Claygent does. And there's an infinite amount of possibilities with that. I'll run you through a couple of them. So every agency, for example, they have a case study on their website. And the case study has usually the company name. So imagine if you could just grab all the company names and mention that in the PS or in the email. Like, hey, love the work you did for company A, company B, and company C. You guys are crushing it. Another one would be grabbing the portfolio company names of VC firms and PE firms that they have on their website. Or grabbing the industry that they invest in and just creating these merge tags to put into your cold email campaigns. They just crush. And if you can just kind of think creatively like that, there's an infinite amount of possibilities with Claychip.
Andy: Wow. That is great. Yeah. And you go back to offers and personalization. you're kind of boiling it down to make it more it's you have to be more creative, which is the hard part. But it's actually more simple than then creating something crazy, right? It's like creating familiarity. Yeah, really what it is, right? It's like, oh, they know their top customers are these five? Why don't we just put those in there? Because then they think how did they know that they must have did their homework, you know, like, yeah.
Nick: Like, the way I always think about it is like, okay, like, anybody can go into Apollo and grab the first name, last name, company name, and, you know, write an email and send them out to 1000 prospects. But how many of the like, how many people are actually sending emails where you build your own custom variable, and are able to mention that in the in the email? It's always funny, because people always say, oh, cold email as a channel is getting saturated. I still, to this day, have not gotten more than five personalized cold emails in my life that were relevant to me. Yeah, I agree. And every five of those that I've gotten, I've replied to, because it was something I needed. Or it was just me literally telling them, yo, this is great email. it works. It's just that people are just trying to automate and make it super fast and easy to do. And most of the times when they do that, it's just not like something that's relevant or actually got to like actually break through the person's inbox and market. And so like, I think that's what you focus on. It's like, how do I actually make an email that isn't like the other thousand people that are sending emails?
Andy: Yeah, yeah. And it's like, I feel like there's a high correlation too. So if we think about this, I don't, so personally me, I don't personalize my emails, like right now, and they're crushing it, right? I use Instantly, shout out to Instantly, shout out to Smartly, my boy V there. So I don't personalize, man. I have a strong offer in there, a new one that I'm currently testing that's interesting is, hey, let me create a free deal room for your sales team. Yeah. And that's literally it. And it's like, and it's crushing it because people are like, Yeah, I know that persona needs it. They probably don't have something. Let me show you what it looks like. And the goal there is not to even get them to sign up. It's almost just a marketing play at the end of the day, right? It's like, to know it exists. And then knowing that it exists, the way I'm thinking about it is that it will compound over time. So when someone's like, hey, we need we need a platform like distribute, they're like, Oh, well, I talked to this one guy one time, you should you should talk to him. Right. And so it's, it's playing that game of like, also, the thing that I always preach is like, hey, only 3% of your market target market is ready to buy at one time. Right? And so for that other 97%, obviously I'm not trying to sell them like most people are. I just want them to be aware of who the hell I am. Because when the time comes, and it will come, they know who I am. Right? And so it's kind of like, that's the way I'm playing it. But going back to the offer, I don't personalize anything. I just make it something where I'm like, OK, I think the market needs this. What if I can do it for free real quick? Right? Like, yeah. And that's kind of the play I'm doing. So that's an offer. And then I was going back to this personalization. I was talking to cold email wizard. What's his name? Daniel Fazio. Did you do a quick lines with him?
Nick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the company we would meet in.
Andy: Yeah, Daniel's the man. Dude, I'm having him come in the pod in next week or something, too.
Nick: Dude, he's hilarious. It's so funny because people would think that he's not like, they just see his content, his personality online, and they're like, oh, this is a regular guy. And this dude is literally the smartest marketer that you'll see ever. Oh, yeah. He just takes these complex ideas and will distill them into simple topics for people to understand. And then you just immediately think, oh, this guy may not be, he's not super smart or anything like that. Dude is insanely smart. Genius.
Andy: Yeah. He's genius. I hear him talk. I've been watching this stuff on Twitter that he posts. I'm like, dude, he knows what he's talking about. He knows. He's on point. And I'm like, OK, we need to get him on the pod. Because I've been lacking on getting people on the pod. I'm like, OK, we need to get Daniel on. But I asked him. I'm like, hey, dude. We have a PLG offering, right? That honestly, I just want to break even on my PLG, my self signups. All I care about is breaking even there. I want to use it as leverage to get more enterprise deals. Right. And so I was like, Do you have any PLG emails that work? And this is a couple days ago, and I'm testing this free deal room thing, which actually does work. But he goes, what's working now, too, is done for you offers. And so then I kind of saw his ads pop up, which is like, hey, for List Kit, his data, hey, we'll do a cool email system for you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, damn, that is genius, dude. Because he's integrating his product into that whole thing. Right. Um, so that's, have you seen any other offers like that, that are like done for you that fricking crush?
Nick: Like, no, okay. I haven't, but like I was speaking about like his own cold email setup offer recently, uh, like maybe like two weeks ago with him. And it's just like, so. And I'm not sure if you'll be comfortable if we share the numbers behind the ads and everything. And you should ask them on y'all's podcast in two weeks. It's actually crazy. It literally blew my mind. And my biggest takeaway is because we run ads for our agency. We also run it for all of our SaaS companies that we have. And I realized, I was like, Our ads are never going to work for our POG SaaS, because we're in the B2B space, and it's a very niche product. And there's just no way that our CAC to LTV is good, ever. And I was like, and then seeing how he made, and he understood that as well, because he was running ads for Liskit. And then he built more of a high-ticket kind of service with the cold email setup. And his goal is it will just break even. And then we'll win on the back end, because then they continue to buy subscriptions from Wizkid and stay on the subscription. And that's how we win. And I was like, wow, that's so genius. That's what it is. It's amazing.
Andy: Yeah. It's kind of going the extra mile and banking on the back end. Banking on the back end, right? And it's like, that's what I'm trying to figure out. So we're going to jam on the pod. Because I'm trying to figure out, our product is basically you know, a content management solution for sales reps and to create content. We took Notion. We took Loom and a content manager and put it together. So now they can create, like, Notion-like pages, but also add video. Basically, a big high spot and seismic competitor, if you know who they are. But kind of trying to take them out. And I'm like, what's a done-for-you offer that I could do with this whole thing, right? I'm trying to think through it. And I'm like, shit, we're going to get Daniel on and jam and see if he has ideas.
Nick: He is the king of offer creation. There's so many things in everything that I've ever done in my career where I'll call him, and he'll give me advice. And then I literally just pivot all the way through. Because he takes this complex thought process, and we'll just simplify it. And I'm just like, dude, you're so right. This is what I should have done. And I'll pivot the business model or whatever it is to kind of hit it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Andy: Crazy, dude. All right, let's look at the third thing you're experimenting with right now. What's what's kind of the third thing that you're in this is kind of like,
Nick: it kind of coincides with personalization. It's just like another variable. So, you know, we've, this is why I love having devs on our team and being able to be like, you know, I've seen the SaaS space and built a lot of tools in the B2B lead gen space. It really does give us a competitive advantage. And one of the things that we built recently is a scraper to and it's, it's so dumb, but it works. it basically would just find like a colleague that is most relevant or like in your same department, it's probably like most related to you. And we just mentioned that in a cold email, our opening line is always like, Hey, I wasn't sure if we should send this to you, or if we should reach out to you or Billy Bob Joe, right? And then you go into the offer and do that crushes so good, you know, and then it's like, then you think about like all the other things you do, right? And like, the one thing I realized is like, okay, if you take us And, and I'm like rambling right now. But like, most Legion agencies, their clients are people that cannot solve for Legion. That's why they hire a Legion agency. And usually that's because they have a subpar offer. And so how do you make a subpar offer work? And it's like, you got to make the cold emails come to another level of personalization, so that it has a higher chance of getting a reply and the replies will eventually convert into leads. And so, you know, level one personalization is just taking and putting something like quick lines. works to some capacity, but it's not going to make your campaign a killer. Level two personalization, using something like Collagent, right? And then pulling in specific new variables that most people can't grab. Level three personalization is doing both of those and then also mentioning the colleague and putting that all in one email. And now it's like, oh, dude, this guy he like hand wrote it, right? But we're just like, able to do all that with a click of a button, and then like scale it to, you know, 3000 to 5000 prospects every month. And then, you know, we just seem like a huge decrease in the amount of emails we have to send to generate a lead by like, putting all three of those things together. And, and yeah, I don't know, like, I think that's, it's a super gimmicky thing. And, you know, I'm sure a lot of people hate on it. But it works. Like we have the data.
Andy: You know? Dude, but it works. And you have the data. So it works. And like, it's just so crazy that, you know, the game now is, it sounds like what the game is, is how to, like, the best people that can use the AI to do personalization. It's like, using AI for personalization is easy. But using it to put all these pieces together and construct that is hard to make it look handwritten, right? 100%. Yeah, and so that's interesting. That's kind of the, you know, that goes back to the prompt engineering, right? It's like what everyone says is going to come down, which is true. Like, if I were to hire a cold email agency ever, it would be like, to do what you've done is like, anyone can do the commodity, like personalization with AI and clay, but not like the way you think about it, right? With doing these different components. And let's just be honest, dude, name dropping works. Oh, easy. Every single time. Yeah, it works. Like, if you know, if you bring them up, there's so many, I think there's a lot of psychological reasons it works. But like, you know, people want to represent authority. If I'm like, Oh, is it you the CRO or the CMO? Like, you know, if you're a CRO, you're probably like, No, that's my jurisdiction. Don't get Sally or Lauren involved. Right? Like, there's just so many reasons. And then like, people may also think, Oh, they mentioned Sally, maybe they know her. So maybe I should respond. Right? Like, exactly. So it's interesting, and so many people will hate on this, but that's OK. Adam Robinson yesterday, again, I use a two-step email sequence. I don't do more on two steps than any of my sequences. And people are like, wait, you come from outreach and you do a two-step sequence? This doesn't resonate. And I'm like, yeah. I'm like, I look at what other people are doing, and I do the exact opposite. That's my strategy, right?
Nick: You know, it's crazy, too. So we also only do two-step email sequences for all our clients, because I was kind of like, and you know what it is. It's like we post content, and sometimes we get brainwashed from content, right? And so in my head, I've always seen everyone post about four-step email sequences. And then I was thinking about it, and I think we changed this in November of this last year, so give or take eight months ago. And I was sitting there, and I was thinking, and I was like, dude, I absolutely hate when I get four emails threaded over a span of 10 days. It's just annoying. That's a block.
Andy: That's a block. I'm sorry. Yeah.
Nick: You know, if I look at the data inside of smartly, you can see like, which sequence is getting the replies and which which sequence is getting the positive replies. And I'm opening up a lot of our client campaigns. It's like, all the responses, like 90% of them are happening at email one, right? And then the drop off is just staggering every single step you put in. And so in my head, I was like, wait, Why are we doing four-step email sequences? We just need to do two, and then we just need to reach out to more net new contacts. That's how we win. And so then we change that across all of our clients, and we see the increase in results. And I also think it helps your deliverability, because you do have less people that are marking you as spam, and you have less people that are blocking your emails, because they've only received two.
Andy: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, I'm gonna be honest, when I see someone that's emailed me four times in the same thread, I'm like, dude, like, come on. No, no. Yeah. And I just honestly, I think of myself on the other side is like the other people are like, what else do you do to get good results? I'm like, I think of myself being the prospect, man. I don't want And I also throw jokes in my stuff for the second email. And it's literally seven words, bro. And that gives me the most meanings. And it's a joke, right? And I think two's great, because the first one is like, here's what we offer. Here's what we do. Look, the person's either thinking about it, or they're not. Or they're like, ooh, I haven't ever thought about this. Maybe they show a little curiosity. Maybe I should. And maybe they just miss it. They get busy or whatever. That second bump's like, hey, just a quick reminder. Then after that, if they don't respond, it's like, move on. It's not a thing. I haven't done the data, but I would say that, actually, I won't ever have the data because I've never done more than a two-step sequence in the past year. Um, you know, I just don't do it because I'm like, Hey, this works. Let's see, you know, don't, if it ain't broken, don't fix it. It was kind of my, my motto. Right. So, man. Um, okay. Now let's talk about what's two things you swear by Nick that always work for you. Right. That are, that are like, that maybe people are overlooking? We kind of already went over this a little bit, but you mentioned mentioning certain things. What are two others that you mentioned PS line, right? Give us the strategy on the PS lines. There's probably more than one, but what is some other stuff you've been doing?
Nick: Yeah, so I think on the PS line, PS lines are great for the first email. And I think the PS, because when people look at an email, if they're not interested, they're just going to scan it really quickly, right? And the PS line, if you are putting it under your signature and kind of spacing it out, sometimes that's like the first thing that you'll scan whenever you start to scan, right? And I think it's a great place to put, you know, the level of like quick line, something like a personalization or something of that sort. But even if you don't have that, it's okay. If you have some kind of really strong offer element, that's a great place to put it. So it's like a PS, we guarantee this, this, and this. Or PS, by the way, we do this on performance. Or PS, put in something that really is strong about your offer there, I think is a great spot to just kind of put it to clarify stuff. But yeah, that's kind of how I think about PSs. I really do like them in the first email. Another thing that I really like doing, and this is one of the things that we've been, it's kind of more popular now, but we've been doing this for literally four years, is, We so like, you know, how spin tax is pretty important when it comes to cold emails, right? Like you have to spin the different variations of your, like the content in your email. So you can kind of avoid spam filters and stuff of that sort. Right?
Andy: Okay. Okay.
Nick: Yeah.
Andy: Explain that. So that's high level for people that don't know.
Nick: Yeah. So I'll break it down. So like, think about like this, right? So Google, Microsoft, you know, they're always trying to identify spam and bad senders, right? And so what's an easier way to identify a bad sender than someone that's sending the exact same message over and over and over again, like that, that shows clear automation, right? And so you want to spin the context of your message. So like, easy example would be like, instead of just saying, Hey, Andy, in every email, right? Spin it, say, Hey, Andy, Hello, Andy, you know, happy Tuesday, Andy, happy or good morning, Andy, like spinning the different ways like the meaning doesn't change, but the content in the email changes, right? So now it's a good way to like avoid the spam filter. And most tools have this kind of like natively built in. So it's easy to kind of set that up. But one of the things that we do is below the signature, you know, like a lot of like old corporate people, they'll have motivational quotes in their signature. Yeah, yeah. So we'll just spin 50 variations of different motivational quotes from different people. And every time we send an email, it's like a new variant, right? No way. And so it's really hard to fingerprint our emails, because we just have so many variations from all the other spintechs we do, and then also the spin quote. And so that's an easy way to improve your deliverability. Just have 50 quotes that you spin through in all your emails. And this is the funny thing, too. I've seen so many replies where people will actually reply because of the quote. They'll be like, dude, I love that quote. That's been my motto for the last five years. Let's book a call. And then it's like, if you do it the right way where you make it look like it's a part of the signature. It makes you look more human and not just like a regular cold email sender. Yeah, there's like variances there. You got to like, you basically highlight it and then you decrease the text and then you put an italic so then it looks like it's a part of the signature and stuff like that. Yeah, that is that does wonders.
Andy: That's how do you rotate? Can you do you use clay to rotate those? And when you do the insertion? Or can you do that?
Nick: And you can do that instantly in and in smartly. Oh, it'll do a rotation, huh? Yeah. So like each, each very like each email that goes out, you know, it'll use another quote or variant. Yeah, another greeting variant or whatever you decide to put in there. But yeah, just type in like, smartly spin text guide and it'll it'll come up.
Andy: No way. I'm going to do that, dude. That's amazing. Okay. I'm learning here. And that's like a, it's just simple little thing, but it's human, right? It's almost like it's people say scaling personalization. It's like scaling humanization.
Nick: Yeah. Yeah.
Andy: We're going to need to cut that one right there. Yeah. It's scaling humanization is really what it is. Yeah. Like, um, But the art is figuring out what are those humanization components.
Nick: Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing with like, like everyone starts their email with like, Hey, Andy, right? So in smart lead, you can actually pull the day of the week, it's the cold email campaign. So let's say the cold email campaign is going out tomorrow, which is Wednesday, right? And then you could literally have a greeting where it's like, happy day of the week, first name. So if it was sending to you tomorrow, it would say, Happy Wednesday, Andy, and then it goes into the cold email. And like, that's another example of like, the scaling the humanization, you can also do it with like the time of day. So like, if the email is going out in the morning, it will literally say good morning, Andy, and then it'll send to you. And it's like, that's another example of like scaling the humanization. And if it sends in the evening, it's the same thing, it'll automatically switch over to say, good afternoon, or good evening, Andy, and then kind of go into the cold email. And so it's just like, I will say that it's not going to make or break your campaign, but it's definitely one of those tiny little things that kind of just turn and give you an advantage compared to everyone else that's emailing them.
Andy: Yeah, because I'm not going to lie, I am being a hypocrite because I say I do everything different, but I do just say, hey, first name. And now I need to switch it out. I'm going to switch to the happy insert day of the week, you know, insert first name. And then I like that quote, you put the P the quote in the PS line, typically PS quote, or you just kind of put it out for the sake.
Nick: We'll play around with it. You know, if we do like if we're going to put quick lines in it, it's usually just signature and then quick lines. And then if we don't have quick lines in it, then we'll just put the quote under the signature and kind of just like put it together.
Andy: Yeah, I like that. Nice, man. You are the guru, dude. I'll tell you, I can't wait to have Daniel on too. Just little simple things. And this is why someone would hire like pros like you, right? Like, yeah, you know, it's like, because you guys are that you're constantly thinking of this when most people, it's they just think it's a flip of the switch. And it's like, no, dude, like, I tell my friends, how do you make cold email work? And I go, it's the same way marketers would make ads work. They constantly are testing. And that's why people are like, wait, you run this company, and you're running your cold email stuff? And I'm like, yeah, because that's my world, and I have to constantly keep testing. And I know no one else is going to. give it their all and testing it like I will, you know, like, and it's a constant test to find, like creative on ads, you find the one that works, okay, double down on it, and then still keep testing other things for either different segments of your market, or like different personas, or you're constantly every day you're testing, like, that's what I love about cold email is in most of people, I would say that think it's dead is because they're not testing. Right? Like, yeah, it's dead. If you just if you're gonna say the same, you know, use the same playbook from 10 years ago, sure, it's dead. But like, it cold email will never be dead. And it's still I think a lot of people, there's studies on it that overall still the highest ROI channel. Yeah, work over ads. Right?
Nick: Like, the one thing I would say, and this is like another thing that Daniel, like really, like, taught me and it's actually true. So it's like, The thing about cold emails, though, is it's not scalable. You won't see a billion-dollar company completely reliant on cold emails. At the end of the day, paid ads, it's the best channel to scale and to really sustainably acquire clients. I mean, we're running paid ads now. We're spending like $15,000 a month on it. And it really is. Every day it's just going to run and there's not going to be any much issues. It's going to consistently get us new appointments on our calendar like it just works with cold emails. It's like one of those things called emails. The reason why it's so cheap. Is because it's a lot more like there's a lot more. work that needs to be done, right? A lot more moving pieces that you have to manually set up and do. With ads, you just click a couple buttons, and then you throw a budget at it, and it just kind of runs. And so, yeah, I think everyone should start off with cold emails. I mean, at the end of the day, everyone should be using every channel to grow their business, right? Start off with cold emails. Prove your offer works. If your offer works in cold emails, it will 100% work with ads. And so if I was looking at another company and I was giving advice, that's how I would always say it. And then content just needs to always be happening.
Andy: So yeah. So you would start testing with cold emails. And then once you find what works, then you would scale it with ads. Is that kind of your playbook right now?
Nick: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what we're doing right now. Leadbird and it's working well. I mean, we still send obviously cold emails. But I mean, like the thing is, though, it's like, you also just got to know your numbers. I think like when a lot of companies start out, like they just don't know what their LTV is and things of that sort. And so it's like, you don't if you don't know your LTV, then you shouldn't really be spending money on ads because you don't know what is a good CAC, right? You don't know what you can spend to actually acquire a customer. And you don't know what your payback period is, and things like that. And then it makes it really hard to run ads profitably and know if it's being successful or not. So that's another thing. I wouldn't really run ads until you know those kind of things as well.
Andy: Yeah, yeah. So two things I want to ask you. Well, one statement and then one question is, I think for a lot of the lead gen agencies that I see, they just push cold email. And I'm like, I have some buddies that run. So I'm like, no, dude, you're a lead gen agency. You need to also know how to do ads. Whatever channel is going to work, you should know how to do ads. Are you doing ads for your other clients right now?
Nick: We don't do it for clients. Because I think most of our clients are still in that startup, SMB, mid-market space. Ads, they probably don't have too much of a budget to throw on it either ways. And then here's the thing. For us to acquire a client through ads, we're going to have to spend roughly $1,500 to $2,000 to acquire one customer. And then most people will probably have to spend a little bit more because their offer isn't as, it doesn't serve as well. The reason why our offer works is it is performance based. And then second, it's hitting a huge TAM. So it's easier to get a lower cost per click. most people's offers aren't like that. So they're going to spend a lot more. And then their payback period will be quite some time. So it's like, they're going to have to float a lot of cash for it to actually work. And a lot of businesses aren't run properly, specifically from that marketing side, as well as the finance side. It's surprising, right? Yeah. And if they look at their P&L, they're just going to see, oh, we spent like $15K on ads this last month. And we haven't seen much from it. Yeah, but there's a lot more to it than that. And so I think there's a couple of things that some people don't think about when running ads.
Andy: Yeah, that's crazy. And how do you think about creative for ads, man? Do you have a creative agency you use for the creative? Or what's your strategy? Because I'm starting to dabble. And it comes down to the creative, I feel like, with ads a lot of the time, too. Well, no, it comes down to offer, obviously. But then creative is important, too. So how are you thinking about the creative on the ads there right now?
Nick: So right now, we're doing strictly Google. So we don't really need the ad. We're not running YouTube ads. We're just literally bidding on keywords. We are going to start Facebook soon, but the best advice for anyone that's watching and listening, just ask Daniel. Like literally how I learned ads was I paid my friend hourly for a whole like two months every week to just sit with me for an hour and just literally explain everything that he's doing with ads. And that's literally what I did. I would just hit up Daniel, literally pay him his hourly fee and learn on how he's running his ads and just replicate. And that was like the best thing we did. That was like literally the best thing we did to learn ads.
Andy: Wow. And so what are you doing right now? Like, cause you learned from him, like. Are you focusing on the creative, right?
Nick: Like- Oh, so it's on Google, like when you're running- Oh, that's right, you're doing Google, yeah. Yeah, you don't really need- You don't need that.
Andy: Interesting. So, dude, that's crazy. I have no fucking clue how to even start a Google ad.
Nick: Dude, I didn't either. And I had to have them really break it down for me. And I still don't really know too well. I'm sure if someone went to go look at our ads, they're probably like, dude, there's a billion things you could be doing here. Yeah, you know, I know like enough to get it. Yeah, I know enough to get it to work. But yeah, that's like, it's one of the like, there's two things I want to learn in the next like six months. And that would be like, get really good with financial stuff. So like I've been enrolling in a whole bunch of financial courses, and then get really good at paid ads. And then like, I feel like I'll have like a really good like foundation of skills to really like build stuff with.
Andy: Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I've kind of been toying with the Facebook ads, like, just to learn and I've been kind of like, okay, how the heck do I like figure this out? Like, where do I get creative? Like, how do I get like, the thing with Facebook ads is I think Daniel, he does a lot of like his own ads. Yeah, he does all of his ads. He does all of his ads. Does he have someone write the scripts for him?
Nick: He usually will do his VSL, do the entire ad structure. I think the only thing he won't do is like, create the creatives. He may have ideas for it. But like to actually like, you know, go on Canva and like design and stuff. Yeah. Same thing with like, you know, he'll record the VSLs, but like, he's not gonna be the one editing it. Yeah, but he'll launch the ads and everything like that.
Andy: Wow. Yeah, yeah, that's crazy, bro. Awesome. Well, dude, Nick, it's been a pleasure, my man. Where can people find you best? I'm guessing LinkedIn is the place, right?
Nick: Yeah, LinkedIn. Just type in Nick Abraham, type in maybe like Liebert or cold emails, and I'll probably pop up somewhere in the feed.
Andy: Yes. Amazing, man. Well, dude, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for sharing everything, man. And, um, yeah, I'll let you know how it goes with Daniel. I might even send them this recording cause we've given him a bunch of shout outs and Jesse, everyone in this, in this email world. I know. Seriously. Yeah, man, we're going to, we're going to edit it all out, dude. Yeah, we're going to edit it all, but no kidding. What's, um, but yeah, dude, we'll talk soon, Nick. And then, Hey man, I'm going to shoot you a text. So yeah, absolutely. And, uh, just share what's working, man. Cause I always love doing that.
Nick: Absolutely.
Andy: Thanks for having me on. Take it easy, man. I'll talk to you soon, man. Later. Later.
