Join us for an insightful discussion with Enzo Carasso, a key figure in modern email marketing, as he delves into the future of cold emailing and its challenges in 2024. Enzo shares his expert views on Gmail's upcoming policies, the importance of personalization, and innovative strategies for email deliverability. Discover how leveraging tools like Clay and SmartLead can revolutionize your email campaigns and why LinkedIn's role in email marketing is more crucial than ever. Whether you're a marketing professional or an aspiring entrepreneur, this episode offers a wealth of knowledge on navigating the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing.
📢 Stay Connected with Us:
Don't forget to subscribe for more inspiring interviews and startup stories.
- Follow me on X (Formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/andymewborn
- Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amewborn
- Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andy.mewborn
📩 Feedback & Contact:
We value your feedback and questions! Leave us a comment below or reach out at: andy@distribute.so
🎙️ About the Channel:
Our channel is dedicated to uncovering the stories of entrepreneurs who are changing the game. From tech innovators to wellness pioneers, we bring you the insights and behind-the-scenes looks at the journeys of today's top founders.
🔔 Hit the bell icon to stay updated with our latest content and dive into the world of entrepreneurship with us! 🔔
Andy Mewborn:
I always tell people, you know what the most important thing is in any cold email system? It's not the subject line. It's not what's in the body. It's the name that it's coming from. Because if Enzo emails me, I'm going to open it because I'm like, that's my boy Enzo.
Enzo Carasso:
I think LinkedIn is today what Instagram was like five, six years ago. I still think we're just like, we're just getting started. And you need to get on a train right now because in five years from now, it's going to be completely different. It's going to be hard to get traction.
Andy Mewborn:
You helped Tornamosi on his last book launch, right? If I'm not mistaken, on the cold email part.
Enzo Carasso:
Who can send us the most people showing up to the book launch? I'm like, okay, let's do it, guys. And to give you the idea, that was five weeks. And that was, I started at like number 12 worldwide. After the first week, I climbed to number one worldwide at the last three days.
Andy Mewborn:
I have a, you know, one email in Smartlead slash Instantly. And this one email I've sent to like, it's got a 2% reply rate. Not the best. However, of that, I'm a one man show. I've set up in the past four weeks, 136 meetings. Are you looking for a job?
SPEAKER_02:
I'm married, man.
Andy Mewborn:
and the drama that's going on. If you go on LinkedIn, it's like the world is ending, my man. 100%.
Enzo Carasso:
Right now, you know, it's kind of crazy, you know, if, and people may be that not aware, organizations sending over, I think 5,000 emails daily will face potentially blocking starting in Q1 2024, if complaint rates are too high. And when we talk about complaint rates too high, we're talking about 0.3% of spam rates. We're talking about like, three email out of a thousand. So it's going to be extremely hard. And on top of that, you have to follow certain guidelines and requirements. For me, I think it's kind of symptomatic for larger trends. You know, the whole predictable revenue playbook is just dead. There's too many tools I have to optimize for volume over relevance. And outreach has become a daily interruption and even an annoyance. I experienced it myself and not just so much insight like it used to be. And if you think about the whole overall, you know, game when it comes to cold email, that you either do it for like big enterprise events for like cold email agency, you could get started for a couple of hundred dollars with an Apple account, because the cost of data will increasingly become cheaper over and over with time. It's the same thing for email sequencer, and the same applies to email finder, verifier. So now we have inboxes that are completely overwhelmed, and buyers aren't responding to cold outreach like before. So it's a big trouble for many sales team relying on the high volume ad bomb messaging, you know. Now, what does it mean for the future? I think for sure, and you know, we both on the same kind of, you know, WhatsApp dark shell group, you know, we know what's going on.
Andy Mewborn:
In the pirate email group.
Enzo Carasso:
In the pirate, shout out to Jesse. Shout out to Jesse, yeah. And all the crowd. You know, it means that email infrastructure is soon going to get expensive. Even the traditional mailbox, the Google policy won't be applied to the domain, but also to the IP address. And IP and domain reputation are tracked separately. So in a traditional model that we used to know, you mostly only cared about your domain reputation. If you wanted to get a little fancy, you host your domain on Cloudflare, and then you were using Fodderly for your warmup, she had a good margin. But now, Each ESP has their own algorithms, some prioritize domain reputation over IP, some prioritize IP reputation over domain, and some have a balanced score between IP reputation and domain reputation. On the other hand, I will tell you in our agency, we're considering building on custom servers in the long term, but I'll tell you our top priority right now is building on private warm-up network with our own private AI people.
Andy Mewborn:
Wow. It almost sounds, and for those people that listen to this or that are listening, I'll give them some context. I'm so curious. I was just like, all right, let's get into those thoughts. But basically they released this email or outreach sent an email on Gmail restrictions and the Gmail restrictions that were put in place. that are gonna be put in place on February 1st, 2024, is that if you have 0.3% of emails that you send out, which is three emails out of 1000 emails get marked as spam, they will lock your accounts, right? And so, and I don't know what that means. Does that mean like you just can't send anything or you literally can't log in?
Enzo Carasso:
Like- From our experience that you cannot log in. And you know, don't even bother sending an email to Google asking them to open it. Even us, we don't even bother trying to save Google domains. We're just buying another one. Just don't waste your time. Just buy new domains. It's going to be a tough one. And therefore, this is a good thing. You know, it's like everything. It's just that there was a bunch of people that came up trying to make quick money with code emails. And, you know, now we have this vague restriction. And just the stronger are going to adapt and going to survive. It's always been like that. If you think back then, it was about the cost to get started. Now everything is cheap. Now it's about AI personalization and how you can make sure that you message your travel event. And now that everybody can access to AI personalization, it's coming back to deliverability. Always vague of, you know, challenges coming our way. We always think that we're on the brink of destruction and cold emails never going to work again. But, you know, I think we're still going to try and be able to land in a primary inbox. And you just have to weather the storm.
Andy Mewborn:
And you said something interesting, which is like, You know, we're in that email pirate group, which is awesome. And we're all, you know, talking about like the different ways we're trying stuff and focusing on email. But you said something interesting, which is like, email was kind of like a, or setting up email and sending a bunch of cold emails was almost like, you know, a couple clicks, right? Is kind of how easy it got. And you mentioned that the big thing that's coming is gonna be infrastructure on this, right? And it's almost like you're gonna have to have a whole team dedicated just to email, like deliverability, like, it's crazy.
Enzo Carasso:
And that means that and if you think take time to look into it, email, code email becoming more and more technical, like it's actually you need to have like, you need to play with API, you need to understand networks, you need to understand IP, you need to understand spam filters. Like I was chatting with a woman partner earlier, like we were literally considering hiring like a head of deliverability, just maybe somebody just making sure that we land in the inbox. So now it's a constant work and just trying to get ahead of what's happening.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And I think too, like, uh, well, I was early at outreach. Right. So I was, I was early, uh, we helped create the machine, uh, whether or not you think that's good or bad. Right. But, um, what, you know, the way I think about it is. Even like what, four years ago, five years ago. Yeah. We would have customers. I mean, big customers, I won't name, but like big B2B SaaS companies we all use every day. reach out and be like, why is this going to spam? What's happening? What are we doing? And like, like none of us really had answers, right? Like no one freaking knew. Like we were like, I don't know, like dude, ask Gmail, right? We were like, we have no idea, man. Like, and so that's not going to fly anymore, man. Like that's going to be a whole, like you almost, if you are touching email as a service provider, like an outreach or a sales loft or a group or or whatever, like, I think they're going to have to have this head of deliverability, just like you mentioned, right. And they're going to almost have to have their pot or their, it's like an engineering squad almost to, to figure out like, Hey, what do we do about this? Do we spin up our own custom, you know, like servers, like what are we doing? Or they'll hire some people like you, right. Which is going to, going to be good for business for Enzo, right. Enzo and team. So. Which is great, man.
Enzo Carasso:
Which is great. But at the same time, I'll tell you that even on our end, we cannot anticipate that we're going to have to buy more domains at some point, just to balance the volume that we want to do. Because right now, I'll tell you that on average, we send between 40 to 45 email per inbox per day. We're actually considering going even lower than that. Because realistically speaking, what do you mean being sent 45 emails per day? It's kind of high when you take time to think about it. And we have to keep thinking that maybe it's just too high. Maybe we just have to go lower. Maybe we just have to adjust the warmup ratio. Even on the warm-up side, most tools right now that are part of email sequencer always have a two email sequence. Now we're considering like maybe we should, that's why we're thinking about getting our own warm-up network. Maybe we should have longer threads of emails, going maybe to five, six, seven emails, just because it needs to look like an actual human is having a conversation. You know, and, and domain's reputation is just unpredictable. So the more we can mimic human behaviors, the more we actually probably have better deliverability overall. And that's kind of the whole mindset we were trying to keep in.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And for those that will listen to this, something I want to call out too, is like a tactic that the email gurus are using today that me, Enzo, Jesse, Jesse O, shout out to Jesse again, he's amazing. What we're doing is we're basically buying a number of domains related to our main domain. So like my main domain is distribute.so, right? However, I'm not sending emails from distribute.so because that is my main domain. I don't want to burn that as domain. So what I and others are doing is we're buying domains associated with distribute, like getdistribute.so. com or try distribute that X, Y, Z. And we're buying tens, sometimes even hundreds of these domains. And even in only sending about 50 emails per one of those domains. But now I think this is a good transition in zone to like, dude, what is your ideal cold email stack right now?
Enzo Carasso:
I'm biased. I'm, my life, I'll tell you honestly, most of our, of a stack in our agency is like the main motherboard is clay. Clay is just the tool. Clay. Okay. Oh, we totally addict to clay. Shout out to Varun. but their tool is insane. And for those that don't know, Clay, it's just kind of where we can have an entire workflow created from start to finish. Like you have 50 plus database integrated within their tools, email verifier, like cleaner, you can just pretty much everything. So that's kind of what we use to like create our workflow. We can do our personalization within it. It's just better to have Clay than have like an item, like, you know, a couple of workflow and trying to like figure out what's breaking, what doesn't break. Clay is just, it's more expensive, but just such a great tool. And we cannot just recommend it more enough.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And Clay is, Clay is like almost air table, but for like data, right? Like that's kind of the way I would describe it. Like it, Am I wrong in that? Or like, how would you describe it?
Enzo Carasso:
No, no, I think, yeah, it's the same thing as Airtable, but all the tools that you would purchase on the side, well, they're all integrated within your Airtable. So you can enrich whatever you need within your table. You can use a chat GPT from it. You can use your favorite, you can use LinkedIn through your clay directly. You can do search on LinkedIn directly from your clay table. You can look at, companies that have similar industries, you can just do everything from it, which is a completely wild tool. Totally recommend it. It's crazy, crazy what you can do with Clear right now.
Andy Mewborn:
So basically, you just get a whole data set of people you want to go outbound to, right? Or you want to reach out to via cold. And then instead of manually having a rep go personalize everything and then hits in, ChatGBT does it all for you. And then you integrate it with like, let's go to the next piece of this. You integrate it with Smart Lead or Instantly. And I'm sure you're biased towards one or the other.
Enzo Carasso:
SmartLead it is, Hibaf is our guy. Such a good tool. Are we staying within the pirate? Yeah, yeah. SmartLead is our favorite tool. It's just such a robust tool though. We are smart for that, for email sequencing. And to be honest, they have also a great community on Slack and we enjoy chatting with them. So we're pretty much big fan of SmartLead. I'll tell you that for email sequencer, to get that data, because Clay is great to build workflow, but you're not going to use your Clay credit to actually get data from that. So we're still using like Apollo for most of our stuff. We have custom scrapers for Google Maps and certain directory. And we also use like Crunchbase and Harmonic for more like SaaS, B2B, SaaS type of companies we're going after.
Andy Mewborn:
Nice. And those integrate with Clay or no? You're basically scraping those?
Enzo Carasso:
No, no, no. We're scraping them on the size. We're just using a webhook and just pushing them into our clay table.
Andy Mewborn:
Oh, wow. Interesting. So webhooks from there. And then so Clay's managing like your rows of data in terms of your prospect data, right? Or account data, whatever it is, you're taking that, you're pushing it into Smartly, which is the sequencer that has the auto inbox rotation for those listening. and that does the automatic warm-up of your domains as well. So you're using Smartly to do the warm-up of these new domains so they look like real accounts. And then after that, like, are you using anything, like, when people respond, right? Like, what's it look like from there? Because this is where I fall off, right? Like, I get responsible to set up meetings and that's probably the ultimate goal, but like, What am I missing in that whole process?
Enzo Carasso:
I'll tell you that depends on the kind of agency side. Like I love JC product. They've been raising. I don't know if we should talk about it. I don't know if it's still in beta, but he has an amazing product on the, on the agency dashboard level. They integrate with smartly at loud fair and that do all the DNS. DMARC set up automatically. That is just an awesome tool. But on the client side, I'll tell you, it depends on the client. Some of them want really to respond to each individual client. We give them access to the master inbox through SmartLead and they can respond to clients. Others just want to get a webhook from their Slack so they know when they have to respond. It just varies. I don't have a set framework. It really depends. But most of them like to respond directly to clients just because we're only taking clients that have kind of high ticket prices. And therefore, they just want to make sure there's this white glove kind of a personalized touch when it comes to the response.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And what is your, and this is probably a very broad question, but like sequence recommendations. Like I'll tell you, I have, I should actually pull this up and show you, I have one email going out. This is crazy. I have a, you know, um, a one email and smart lead slash instantly. And this one email I've sent to like, it's got a 2% reply rate. Not, not, not the best. However, of that, I'm a one man show I've set up in the past four weeks, 136 meetings. Are you looking for a job? I'm married, man. Look, I'll show you the dashboard.
Enzo Carasso:
It was crazy. It's crazy. I'm excited to talk to you about it because actually you're the G when it comes to Lead Magnet. And that was probably like the main part when you just mentioned like sequence recommendation, because realistically, and this is, I only talk for our agency, basically 85 to 95% of the responses we're getting will be coming from email one and two. Anything after that, you're just taking risk on then being tagged as a spam. So for us, we're putting all the firepower in email wall, straight up the best thing we can come up with. We're adding with so much relevance, so much personalization that we pretty much use little to no spin tax because Almost no two emails are similar. You know, as I mentioned, we did so much research on the account research of each contacts that we know that emails are not going to be similar whatsoever. So pretty much we can tell them how we know them. We show them that we know what they do, what they're serving, who's on their team. We can, as I mentioned, we can mention customer by name, reference experience. Then right off the bat, I love the Pog the Bear framework by George Brown. So we're asking them, are they tackling a particular problem? And I think the most important thing coming to 2023-2024 is the lead magnet in your first email. And I think that's what makes the difference. In our agency, we're seeing crazy response when the first email is leading with Flick Magnet. Because if we show people that we know them, that we exactly know who they're serving, and when we actually know what's their problem, and by the way, because we know they have the problem, we're actually coming up with a small way, a narrow, a complete solution to a narrow problem, and we're giving them away for free. they're just losing their mind. They're like, how the hell? And you know what, the best thing I think in this particular case, that we actually experiment things like we don't ask anything else. We're just like, Hey, by the way, I know who you are and what you're doing. I know you might have this particular problem. And I'm just coming up with a solution for you. Do you want it? Yes or no. All I want is create a conversation, you know, and a lead magnet is just a complete solution to another problem. And So our idea is that, it's not coming from me, from Alex and Mozyno, a person who would pay with their time now is more likely to pay with their money later. So that's kind of how we're coming up with our first emails. Like what can we can provide value to the recipient? So much value they will be willing to pay for it, but we're giving it away for free. And yeah, we're just asking if they would be interested in receiving it.
Andy Mewborn:
So that's why email one. In email one, I've seen some stuff, like some interesting stuff I've tried, right? Which is like, if we think about Distribute, which is a product to help you create lead magnets, or basically microsite pages that capture data, get you basically lead magnets, right? And so with that, what I've tried in the past with email one that's worked super well, I actually couldn't even keep up because I was like, hey, I reached out and one of them was like, Hey, it looks like your business does this and this. I want to create you a lead magnet that will help you get leads from social media, LinkedIn specifically. And they would say yes. So within 24 hours, what I would do is I would turn around And what I would do is just use GPT to build out the lead magnet and then add a conversion like event on top, like or or like an email gate or something. Right. And that was beautiful. And then from there, you're right. Like that's what worked for me is then that would start the conversation of like, how do you do this? How would you scale this? You know, how does this work? And that gets people actually talking. I've had some friends do like I've seen some friends do like YouTube thumbnails, right? Where they have an agency that does like a bunch of YouTube stuff. So they'll do like, Oh, Hey, we'll create you a free YouTube thumbnail for a potential video you can make. So they're just giving the main thing, their main, one of their, a piece of their main offering to them for free. Right. And saying, Hey, look, like we're willing to put in, we're willing to give in order to get this basically reciprocity right at the end of the day. That's like basically what it is. Absolutely.
Enzo Carasso:
I think, you know why I think it came up? There is just a rise of those. It's just because people are just surfing way too hard on the guarantee side of things. They're like, they guarantee, like, if I don't give you a million dollars in the next 30 days, like, I will work for free. Like, there's just so much crazy guarantee nowadays that just do not make sense. They're just like, they just sound so unrealistic that the only way you can prove that you're trustworthy is by giving away a piece of your work for free. And you know what, the market is going to always judge you on what you're providing for free. And people are going to be like, hey, if you give me that thing for free, and it's just so freaking good, I can only imagine what the pay thing might be. And that's just the way you can build trust, I think, with Codemon in 2024 right now. Just like showing that you are who you claim you are.
Andy Mewborn:
there was this era where we tried to throw a million freaking tools at things to like do outbound and do all this crazy stuff and like get meetings and all this. And I think we over-engineered a lot of it from a high level, right? I mean, we're going to have to go into engineering how to just make an email go into the inbox soon. But like, At a at a different level, what I mean is we try to get all these different tools that would just send do the same thing in a different way, right? There was like, oh, we'll send a colonial from this system and the system. But at the end of the day, what's underneath there is all the same. And what's interesting about that is. how we're all, we're coming back to like, we're coming full circle to back to basics within what we're doing, right? Which is like reciprocity.
Enzo Carasso:
Human psychology. It's all, I'll be honest, it's all it is. It's just human psychology.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy, right? It's like in when I was starting on this cold email journey, you know, like on the cold email pirate journey with multiple domains and all this stuff, I was like, shoot, like trying to overthink sequences just because I came from outreach. Right. And I was like, oh, you know, I'm going to do this seven step sequence. And the third step is going to be this thing. And yeah, here I am now with this great sequence that has one email in it. I don't even do a follow up.
Enzo Carasso:
To be honest, we do, I'll tell you, you're probably right. We do the max we do just because people, we have to like justify that we're trying, you know, and sometimes that makes sense. And we have to justify that. Okay, somebody might be out of the office, somebody might be sick and some stuff like that. We never know, you know, we do it, we never do more than four. And to be honest, email one is what we talked about, email two is like, we're actually going to go a step forward and deliver the actual result of the lead magnet. Because like, okay, maybe they like this thing in commercial, we actually delivering the results so they can see, hey, didn't say yes, but we're still giving it to you. Check it out. Just because we want to show them the quality of our service or what we're doing. Then from there say, hey, if after that we have no response, we're going on a total different angle of email tree. Like, okay, let's reassess. What's the pain point? We have to actually say, hey, is there is like something we're missing? Is there is a different pain point? Do you have a different problem? Like we literally trying to understand something else because if we're learning money didn't work, maybe there's not the right pimple for the specific contacts. And then email4 is just a breakup email. We're still trying to provide some value in email4 in Richland and know that, hey, we're here if you ever need us and trying to provide another different kind of value.
Andy Mewborn:
Dude, I was at an event the other day talking to like other like CEOs or, you know, like pretty like 100 person plus companies, right? And We were, they were asking me about the cold email stuff because they're like, Hey, you come from outrage. Like, where do you think this is going? And this is before the whole drama came out with like the limits and stuff. And everyone was like, we're thinking of what to do with SDRs and how to think about the SDR team. Cause is it, is it really working? Right. Like all this stuff, like, um, and not the SDR doesn't work. It's just, it doesn't work when you're just trying to do volume and send shit. Right. Like is what I think. So do I think having SDRs is dead? No. Like I think SDRs are amazing, but I think they're going to have to be very targeted, very like, like, um, a little bit more jack of all trades when it comes to this whole outbound process, right? Not just like doing a task and then going to the next and going to the next and going to the next because we can automate that, right? Yeah. And does that work? But they're going to have to be a little more strategic. But anyways, going back to this, they're asking me, What goes on in that? And I look at them and I go, let me throw this question back at you. What do you do with most of the emails you get in your inbox? Because you probably get hundreds per day. And they go, honestly, I do two things. I block, I market spam and I block. They take it a step further than market spam. They just block. And then I go, one guy asked, I go, really? So like, what if it's actually important? And the CEO goes, if it's that important, someone else on my team would bring it to me because they'll know it's a problem that should be solved right now.
Enzo Carasso:
That's why personalizations make so much sense and you really need to be relevant. Personalization has so much level that people cannot imagine for a sec that a human didn't wrote that message.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And, and, and say it goes back to like, you have to almost be like a sniper now, like, right. Yeah. With the problem, a sniper with the problem. And you have to say, Hey, like, I know you're dealing with this because maybe you heard from someone or shit. It's a common. Like, you know, every B2B SaaS company right now is trying to figure out like what to do with Colina just because of the trend, you know, like, well,
Enzo Carasso:
It kind of break their mind when I told them that I send more email than entire SDR department in a single day than they send in an entire month. That just break their like their mind when I show them dashboard. Hey, we send more email than you guys send. We send in a single day than they send in a single month. And it's all personalized, right? It's all personalized. And you would not make the difference between what you guys send and what I send. you know, we cost like five grand a month. Like, you know, it's just like, it's just kind of, it's kind of, it's just, it's just break their mind. And they're like, okay, I have like 45 people, 45 SDR on my team. Well, what do I do? I'm like, well, you know, that's the problem you have to figure out. But, yeah.
Andy Mewborn:
This is a question I have for you. What do you think about setting up this like inbox rotation system? for each person, like in an org, like for different people of an org?
Enzo Carasso:
No, I think for big organizations, it's kind of hard because then the IT guys get involved and they're just like, I don't understand why you want to create 250 domains. It doesn't make sense, security. And they're just like starting being freaked out and they're just like working against us. And I'm like, And it's just too much. Yeah, it's not worth it. There's many ways we're doing it for urgency, like based on the amount that, you know, of the time we just plan a certain amount of inboxes that we obviously split. But then if you have to think about what it might be and what SDRs and AEs should be doing right now, it's really social selling. Like be on LinkedIn, post stuff. We work together where when I contact people, you automate the visit of their LinkedIn profile. You start commenting on stuff like that. We have to work together because otherwise it's not going to, yeah, like you won't be able to beat us in terms of volume and personalization.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And I think, you know, it's something that I've found in doing my kind of old cold email journey here. Is of all those meetings that I set it's I don't even think it's because the first email most of it what most of the LinkedIn profile Exactly.
Enzo Carasso:
It's crazy It's insane. Like I'll tell you something. I have a client right now. She's just killing it on LinkedIn. I send the email Like half of the response is like, I check your LinkedIn. This is wild what you're doing. Can we talk? Can you help me? And I'm like, well, I just should send the link. And I'm like, I almost tended to send the LinkedIn profile in the first email. By the way, guys, don't do that. It's a bad idea. Don't send to me. She just have like 50 or 70,000 followers. She's just put viral content over and over again. People check out and they check the legit. That's why like your LinkedIn presence is everything as well. Like make sure you're over there and you show that, you know, you're putting content, you're relevant, people like what you're doing. Like it builds trust. Like it's all about, you know, it's all about trust and the way you present yourself on LinkedIn nowadays, just everything.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. It's crazy. So I tell people the magic duo in all the cold email, I always tell people, you know what the most important thing is in any cold email system? It's not the subject line. It's not what's in the body. It's the name that it's coming from. because if Enzo emails me, I'm going to open it because I'm like, that's my boy Enzo. Or if we say, I didn't know you when we weren't on this podcast, but it's someone I follow who Alex Ramosi, right. If I never, you know, I'm on his like email distro list and all that stuff. But like, if, if he emailed me, if Alex Ramosi emailed me, I saw Alex Ramosi and it looked like, like a real email, I'm going to open that fucking thing. I'm going to open it because I know who that is. I know the name. And so going back to that, I think what's worked for me is not that, and I'm not trying to toot my own horn here because people are like, how are you doing it? How are you doing it? And I'm like, honestly, how I'm doing it is you're building trust on LinkedIn. You're providing valuable content there. And then if your name, people know you by name, if your name lands in their inbox, you're already 50% of the way there because they're going to open it. Right. And so I'm like, that's the real secret, I think, in this whole thing.
Enzo Carasso:
I agree with you 100%. I'm asking like some vanity matrix or something. Maybe I'm a bit of a shadow, but when I go on LinkedIn, I see 100,000 followers. I'm like, probably the guy has something interesting, like figure out something interesting about life. Because to have 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, I think that's your number that you have, something like that.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, it's like 170 or something like that.
Enzo Carasso:
I'm like, okay, this guy probably know a thing or two about what he's doing because there's such a crazy amount of people. So he might have interesting, something interesting. It's, it's just the truth. You know, he sees posting consistently. He has great people engaging on his comment. Like it just helps so much.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And this is why I've been preaching to people like, man, and dude, every CEO right now, I've been telling like, this is what you have to do. Like your thing right now should be posting on LinkedIn every day. Even if you get a frigging ghostwriter, dude, go get a ghostwriter. Right. And then complimenting that with cold email. I promise you it will work.
Enzo Carasso:
Yeah, for sure. We're adding it to our package right now in our agency. Perfect. I was just going to say that. We're literally adding it in a package because we're like, just mix it. And we see so disgusting LinkedIn all the time. Like, okay, it's going to be hard. But now we're like, okay, let's offer this as a package. And then at least, you know, we know where we're going with this. And that also helped the client on the commitment on the long term say, okay, we're going to grow that thing together. They're really invested in me. So I kind of like it as well.
Andy Mewborn:
Where I was going with this, I was like, you like as the agency helping with cold email, you should actually do that as part of the package, right? Because I think it would be even like, I get an idea, but that would fucking skyrocket it, right? It's going to take time on the LinkedIn side, of course, but like, that's something that you'll have to spin to them and tell them. Because a lot of people today, that's the big sell is like, hey, we're going to do this work, but you have to be patient. This isn't like overnight success.
Enzo Carasso:
100%, 100%. It's just the name of the game. And I think what people underestimate is that I think LinkedIn is today what Instagram was like five, six years ago. I still think we're just like, we're just getting started. And you need to you need to get on a train right now because like in five years from now, it's going to be completely different. It's going to be hard to get traction.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, just like any network, right? Like, yeah, I'm saturated. Right. And I think, man, I am. It's already getting a little harder, right? No, I still am very bullish on LinkedIn. I mean, I Yeah, right. Yeah. But it is getting harder because a lot of people are realizing, holy shit, like, LinkedIn's amazing for like, actually making money. Right. And like, if your goal is to like, use social as a tool to make money, which that's how I look at it, right? Like, Um, if I was a billionaire, would I be hanging out on LinkedIn? Probably not. Right. Let's be honest. I use social media as a tool. That's why I use it. You know, I use it as a tool. So like, um, with that, you know, the way I think about it is like, it's, it's amazing. And so, um, look, I, I've helped. Creators become creators and all that. Um, but every time I see someone post, like, hey, why am I not getting engagement anymore? And I'm like, because you can't post a picture of your food anymore. And like, expect to get 100 likes, you know, like that the game is changing, because now you have more a little more competition coming. And it's still very scratching the surface right now. But you need to like, figure out all the basics, we won't get into the hooks, the formatting, all that, right. Um, anyways, now we're preaching the choir, but I just think it's, that is the magic duo, man. That like, that not enough people talk about.
Enzo Carasso:
I think the company that is, and you know them pretty well more than anybody else, but the one that is getting on LinkedIn is definitely Lemlist. Those guys are like monsters. Oh yeah. They're just ridiculous. I love Lavender as well. They're like killing it, but Lemlist is just like straight up cyber. I mean, they have the tool. They know what's up. They know. You sold them the tool that they need to know to get the job done. So they got their inside out. They know like, okay, we got any tool now, we can do what we want. But those guys are like, I don't see anybody else with better brand, company brand, even individual brands. And it's just interesting. It's not just Guillaume, it's almost everybody in the organization at some high level. They're just like all killing it. This is impressive.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, they're all content people, dude. They're all content people. Yeah, they're all like, every time someone from Lendless Posts, it's fire. It's like- It's just straight up fire. Yeah. It's fire. It's just like, like, uh, who, who's the, who's the kid? Um, I forget his name that does like the cheat sheet stuff. Oh, the end of growth. Oh, is that? Yeah.
Enzo Carasso:
Oh, he took to me the other day. I forgot his name. I'm not going to look it right now, but I know he's talking about it.
Andy Mewborn:
He does. He's the cheat sheet guy.
Enzo Carasso:
Just, you know, we know where you are. This is how good you are. We don't teach it. We know where you are.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. We know the cheat sheet guy. Like we know who, Yeah. And like, he's freaking amazing dude. And like, um, every time he posts on like fire, I'm just like, you know, it's amazing. And so, um, yeah, they, they, that team is, is they're, they're crushing it. Um, so when I think about distribute myself, I think one of my qualifications for, as we build this team, I'm going to do the same thing. Like you're going to, it's almost like you're going to have to be a content person, man. Like if you're a salesperson, content, if you're marketing, you have to be doing content because that is the part of the puzzle today is like creating that valuable stuff, which is why you see, and this is a good transition, why you see like Hormozy, I don't know what he said. He said this publicly, he spends like 150K a month on like a content team.
Enzo Carasso:
Yeah, he has a crazy major team.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, he is like, some crazy amount he spends. I think it was like over 100,000 a month or something.
Enzo Carasso:
Yeah, but what he did is that we did an interesting thing. The first six months that we were planning the major thing is that he actually hired an agency. I kind of told him straight up, Hey, listen, we're going to learn everything you do for the next six months. We're going to pay high price. We want to learn everything else. Then we're going to bring our people copying whatever you did for us. So, and then from there, yeah. And then from there he just like built his own thing and just went, Hey, no, it's like, I'm paying high price for the best guys out there. So just like.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, that's what he does. And so for those listening, Enzo, let's talk a little bit about this man. You helped Tormozy on his last book launch, right? If I'm not mistaken, on the cold email part. So what was the strategy?
Enzo Carasso:
It was kind of like, hey guys, we want to make this challenge and we kind of have, who can set us the most people showing up to the book launch? I'm like, okay, let's do it guys. And to give you the idea, I was, so that was five weeks. And that was, I started at like number 12 worldwide. After the first week, I climbed to number one worldwide at the last three days. Then the guy from publishing.com showed up with his contact list of million people and just took my spot in like, 48 hours. And so it was a joke. I was like feeling so pissed. And then I end up like second worldwide. So we we sent him like 6,978 leads in five weeks. Yeah, yeah, I'll give you the play. You know what you have the exclusive world wide because I haven't recorded the video on my on my YouTube channel yet, but it's gonna come out next week. I'll try to summarize it quite fast for you.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, and then we'll watch the breakdown on your YouTube.
Enzo Carasso:
Yeah, you can go on my YouTube video. By the way, Alex showed up on the YouTube video on my YouTube channel and decided to talk with me about Code Irish and invite a couple of guys. So if you guys want to check it out, it was really interesting. So the idea was, okay, when we saw Alex, we were like, how does this guy build his brand? And that was kind of the first kind of way we were thinking about how does this guy build his brand? Where are we going to find people that are interested in learning more about acquiring leads from Alex and Moses? And what we did is like, we actually listened to all his podcasts that he ever published since 2017, 2016. And we noticed kind of a pattern. We noticed that it always goes on people that have huge audience, people that usually fall under the umbrella of self-development. And there's something else that we noticed that he's always the richest person in the room. In only two other equations, he was not the richest person in the room in all the podcasts that he ever did. So he's positioning himself as an authority figure, as the one that has the knowledge on how you can make a lot of money. Other than that, he's always the richest guy. And he's always targeting people with huge amounts of audience in a self-development space. So we thought about it, what the self-development people love, why they would be interested in Alex. And something that we kind of, the hypothesis that we had was like, those guys are one thing for sure, dopamine addict. When you like your podcast, you're listening to your podcast every day. You're like, almost like a religion. Everybody likes his little podcast. Everybody's listening on the way to work all the time. And we made the assumption that, okay, if this is true, where do those guys hang out? Well, it's kind of hard to, it would be impossible to scrape like Spotify listeners of the podcasts Alex has been on. But we assumed that if those guys are actually true fans, would they follow the actual podcast on LinkedIn? So what we did is that we will pick up all the podcast posts that Alex has been on for the past 24 months. And we scraped all the LinkedIn followers of the podcast post on LinkedIn. And we came up with like a crazy number, like I think 150,000 emails. And the idea was the following. I'll give you one play that we did because we did like six or seven of them. The one that we did was, for example, like Stephen Bartlett, diary of the CEO, we were like, Because let's think about it. Imagine the type of people that would be so in love with a podcast that they would follow on LinkedIn when you're not going to be able to listen to your podcast on LinkedIn, but you're so passionate about this guy that you're still following him on LinkedIn. You, you like to, you're a fan, you're a true fan. You're not just the average Joe, you're like a true fan because you're following the guy on LinkedIn. He's never going to put a video or an audio of his podcast on LinkedIn, but you're still following him. So we know that you, you're probably one of the best guy. So we're like, okay, let's assume that. So, for example, Steven Barley, Diary of the CEO, and this email sequence was like, hey, first name, glad to see another listener of Diary of the CEO. So right off the bat, we're like, hey, we're the same. We're listening to the same stuff. We're exactly the same, right? This is another CEO. It looks like you target, looking at your LinkedIn profile, I'm just trying to remember, looking at your LinkedIn profile, it seems like you're targeting that kind of people and you're helping them with that, with that particular product. So first line, we're telling them that, you know, you're listening to this show. And by the way, it looks like you're targeting this kind of people and that you help them with that and with that particular product and service. And by the way, do you know Alex Somozy? He was in episode 235 of Diary of the CEO. And I actually have the framework he used to send 20,000 leads per day, to generate 20,000 leads per day. Are you interested in having this? And the interesting things we did, we actually tagged, most important thing, we actually look in the list of the, of Tim Barclay, the CEO, all people that have sales, business development, revenue strategy, leads, everything about generating revenue, because we want to make sure that the league makes sense for them, because those guys probably will be interested in learning how to generate 20,000 leads per day. So right off the bat, we let them know, we know who you listen to. We let them know who you're targeting, how you're helping them. And we're giving you something that is related to your job that might interest you. In case you don't know who is Alex Somozy, we're telling you that he was in your favorite guy podcast and episode 235 that you probably saw. So you have the testimonial, you have the, it makes sense. If my favorite guy has invited this guy on the show, he must be legit. And this guy is willing to give me. the recipe that he's using to get 20,000 hits per day, and that makes so much sense for my job, why would I say no to that? And we're like, PS, by the way, Alex is launching his book. I'll send you two of his underage chapter for free. Let me know if you're interested. They respond, and we send them like the booking link, the signup, and that's it.
Andy Mewborn:
Wow. And that was like, and again, all the responses were from that one, most of them from that first email.
Enzo Carasso:
He's the thing with, yeah, most of them were the first email, sometimes the second, but most, like I will tell you, 80 to 95% were the first one. And, but that was a crazy number. We're talking about, we sent like 600,000 emails, like in five weeks.
Andy Mewborn:
It was crazy. Wow. Wow. And were they all coming from him? Like what was it, his name that they were coming from? Or was it from, like the from name? Cause it was, he was trying to... Who were the people coming from?
Enzo Carasso:
Yeah. No, no. It was like random domains. It was not from Alex. It was not from Alex. Like we couldn't use... Now we couldn't use his name. Now we were not allowed to do that. Because he didn't share, we didn't see what we were sending. No, no. We have like a bunch of domain that we are sending from the domains. What matter? And we just, and the domain was just redirecting to the, to the tour or landing page. So they were like, either way they were checking, they were able to sign up right away. Or, you know, they were like, Oh, episode 235. They're just checking. Oh, geez, the guy's legit. Let me sign up.
Andy Mewborn:
Wow. That's crazy. So you said to him about 7,000 leads or 600, 900 or 6,978, I think is what you said. And that's insane. Five weeks. And it goes back to that email that you just described, which was you pretty much were like, hey, we know who you are. And here's something free of value that we know you freaking love. Yeah. He's like the lead magnet play, right? Like it was the lead magnet. Like essentially it's all the lead magnet. It's like giving them something of like that they can use to educate themselves or learn more. Not asking, Hey, can we get 15 minutes or like get their time? No, no, no. That doesn't work. And the other interesting play you did is you like rented the audience of someone else, right?
Enzo Carasso:
In order to do that. Yeah. 70% of what we do in our agency is like, just focus on the ICP. Just focus on the ICP because that will make most of the job. If you have the right ICP, that will just save most of the job you have to do. Like we're not trying to sell like a ribeye at a vegan festival. Like we're trying to get extra narrow to a guy that just like would die. And we know those podcast guys are dopamine addict. All they want is just getting the extra edge. They're trying to get more productive. They're trying to get the extra edge constantly and we're just giving them what they want.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Interesting. So you're looking at like the habits of the ICP too, right? So you're kind of like, Okay, the ICP of Steven probably has a lot of overlap of Hormoses because they're, you know, they're, they're trying to get better. They're trying to listen to CEOs and be more productive. And yeah, interesting, man. That's crazy.
Enzo Carasso:
And we did that for everybody for my first podcast. We did it for Chris Williamson podcast. We have all of those guys.
Andy Mewborn:
Well, man, we're in about time here, Enzo. Where can people find you? How can they work with you? Give us a spiel there on that so that way people know.
Enzo Carasso:
Okay, yeah, you guys can find me on LinkedIn, Enzo Carraso. I think my name's gonna appear down there. You can also find me on YouTube, Enzo Carraso. So hit me up.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, and on YouTube, you're gonna give away a lot more of your email secrets, right?
Enzo Carasso:
Yeah, I just started my first video with actually when I interviewed Alex, like first we got 20,000 views. It's crazy. And so like, I launched it like seven days ago. It's kind of wild. I'm just going to have videos every week, just giving like secrets, workflow, strategy, everything we just talked about pretty much.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, well, I'll be there. I'll be watching, man. You got a sub here. I appreciate it, Andy. I appreciate it, Andy.
