S. 2 Ep. 13 – Email Outreach And Marketing Not Working? Listen To This.

Taylorr: Welcome to another episode of Technically Speaking, we’re your hosts, Taylorr and Austin, and today we are to talking about one of the most elusive things in most people’s businesses, and that is email outreach. And the perfect person to talk about this and why it doesn’t work for most businesses and how to change that is Jason Bagley, now Jason is the co-owner of a company called sitecare.com, a WordPress maintenance and digital marketing agency. Now, Jason owned an email outreach service called Firing Squad for 12 years, where they just specialized in cold email outreach and email marketing for businesses of all sizes before that company was acquired by SiteCare in 2020. 

Now, Jason has developed the perfect recipe after all of this time to make email outreach one of the highest performing channels in any business. It doesn’t matter if you’re a speaker, a coach, a consultant, you sell software, you can use email marketing and email outreach to be the highest performing channel over phone calls, over LinkedIn, and Jason in this episode shows us how. So, if you want to level up your email outreach, definitely stick around until the end and as always, we hope you enjoy this one. And we made it, Jason, man, welcome to the show.

Jason: Yeah, super pumped to be here, time zones aligned to a point, but you’ve got it done.

Austin: Yeah, to a point, it must be pretty; it’s pretty late there right now.

Jason: I’m hesitant to say, but it’s 9:00 PM on a Friday night.

Taylorr: Wow, Jason, man, a legend.

Jason: I’m dedicated.

Austin: Good for you, thank you for being willing to come on our show so late in the evening, very, very grateful to have you here. So, I have to just throw this out there before we dive in, and this is an awesome topic today everybody, very excited about this, and listeners only, this is a chance for you to go and watch the video. But I’m seeing what looks like two pictures of cats behind you there, is that what I’m seeing right now, Jason?

Jason: So, those are two NFTs that I print, no, I’m joking, I’m joking.

Austin: I was right there with you for a sec, I was on the hook.

Jason: But now that I’ve said that, not a bad idea but anyway.

Austin: Yeah, seriously.

Jason: So, yes, those are two, I do have, I had two black and white cats, one passed away, the OG is like 18 years old, but yeah, that just sort of represents the two cats we’ve had. Yeah.

Austin: We’re animal people here at SpeakeFlow, we have a cat on the footer of our website, so for those of you that haven’t seen that definitely check that out, but luckily, we’re not here to talk about cats. So, that’s a good segue, we are here to talk about email outreach, so Jason, like what came about in your life to become so passionate about email outreach? Where did that stem from? How did you get where you’re at today?

Jason: Yeah, so it started when I was running a web design agency, selling hours, grafting hard, selling these hours, building websites, thinking that was the be-all and end-all and it became a full-on race to the bottom with website builders with the likes of Squarespace and Wi, it’s so easy to build a website nowadays. They almost don’t need someone to design your site and at the end of one year, we looked at the revenues that we were generating, and which clients were paying us the most amounts of money over a three-year period. 

And right at the top of that list was a client and we were just sending newsletters for them, nothing else and I was like, and looked at my business partner at the time, I was like, dude, this is the most profitable thing we do, it’s the easiest thing we do, why are we not just diving straight into it? Because when you send a newsletter, it’s gone, I can’t, oops, pull it back, when a website goes live, the world sees it and then it’s just bug fix after bug fix, there’s no celebration, there’s no celebration hosting a website, it’s panic. 

So, we pivoted to deciding cool, well, I knew enough about email marketing, I was like, let’s put our hands up and be the experts and say, we are the experts in email marketing, not that we knew, we knew enough about it, and we were like, let’s dive even further. And took anything to do with email marketing, whether it was newsletters, email automation, anything around that, and we started to do that and that worked really well, but we didn’t have enough clients to just self-sustain this direction.

And I was like, well, let me like do this cold email thing where I cold email to try and get some more meetings for this business, and as I started to do that, I started to book a whole bunch of meetings for this and then I realized, wait a second, the reason why people are talking to me and the reason why they’re wanting a newsletter or previously, the reason why they wanted a website ultimately was to have more leads. They wanted more sales, and they ultimately wanted more leads, and I was like, well, let me rather have those conversations, and so I started to go from selling the email marketing and newsletter to, well, I’m going to sell cold email by cold email. 

Yeah, and I think the funny part of that was like never somebody asked or had a meeting with them, and this was like pre-COVID, so you’re having them face-to-face, and they would ask like, well Jason, how do we know this like really works? And I would just sit there and go, we are having a meeting because this works, so here’s the contract, and how about you just sign on the dotted line right now. Note that I pulled out the contract then, but the point was that was sort of like the story I had with MinION, that’s how we got into just focusing primarily only on email outreach.

Austin: Wow, well, the market asked for it and you gave it to them so that’s huge, and plus, obviously, like for you, it was a lucrative decision too, so that’s good, that means everybody won in that scenario, but my favorite sales conversations are the one where the premise is like, you’re already doing the thing that somebody is asking you for. How do you know, just what you said, how do you know it works? Well, we’re sitting here talking about it right now and this is how you came to me, so like being able to just point at what works is awesome and this topic, it’s not surprising to me at all that people latched onto this because email marketing is just this, mystical sort of thing in most people’s businesses. 

They know they should be doing it, they see examples of it happening, we know that there are people that are doing it really well, but actually implementing it is difficult because it’s not just about sending out an email like it needs to be strategic, we need to be pointing somebody to a proper place. So, I’m sure people are very grateful to have you in their court in order to help that happen, I want to just start this conversation by addressing something that we get all the time, as it relates to email marketing and outreach, and it’s this feeling of pushiness, maybe like the email doesn’t work because it’s annoying to people, so is that push back that you get and what’s your response to that if so?

Jason: Yeah, so there’s without a doubt, look, we send a bunch of cold emails on behalf of our clients, and we send enough ourselves and we do get mails back with people do tell us, bugger off, and leave me alone. So, that does happen, but it’s so few there’s way less of that than there is of the success side where there are either people saying, I loved your email, this might not be the right service for them, they’re like, I loved your email, great work, like let’s start at a meeting. 

So, that’s like one side of things or there’s likely, hey, this is something different, I’ve never seen this in an email, loved your email, let’s have a chat, so there’s a balance that does need to be struck, look, some people, unfortunately, they, when I think about it, like people in HR, so Human Resources are probably the people that get bombarded the most with email. Number one, because hiring, they have hired people; number two, they also handle internal products and staff when it comes to staff, and so they’re getting it from both fronts, from product people and they’re getting it from trying to hire. 

So, they get the most mail like where you will just get people, they don’t want to see anything in their inbox. But the way I sort of look at it is like when you’re writing a cold email and you’re wanting to send it out to people, put your favorite, like in your head and actually in the email when you write, put your favorite client’s name and company name in that email template when you’re writing it. 

So, that when you send this out, you’re so comfortable in sending it to them that when you then replace it with the first name and company name in brackets and all of that, to send it out, that the mail comes across as if it’s you and it comes across in a way that you would probably approach someone. So, that I think’s a great tip for getting over that pushiness that some people come across with, and lastly, just one last point in there.

I think a lot of the times people they include way too many buzzwords in their cold emails, and then what they’re also doing is in that first email is they’re like, can I have some of your time? Can I have 15 minutes? Can I have, and, or quick call or 15 minutes? Let’s be honest, no one has 15-minute sales calls, it just doesn’t happen now, so stop lying, so just be more honest with someone and one of the things we do now in our emails, for example, is reaching out, I don’t ask for the meeting in the first email, I ask them, can I send you two ideas on how I would grow your business, right? 

Can I send that over? That opens up, listen, I haven’t even researched the company let’s be honest, I know who they are, but it’s not like I know what the ideas are, the minute they reply, I’ll go do my research, spend 20 minutes, half an hour, figuring out what two ideas there and then email them. But the point is that I’m not asking for their meeting and the strike rate from replying and saying, listen, here are some ideas from just looking at what you guys are doing to a meeting is almost a hundred percent. So, that helps get across that sort of pushiness that people probably get a bit afraid of and don’t want to be sending out emails being too pushy.

Austin: Oh, man, what a bunch of gems in that little excerpt, we’re only a third through the show folks, I hope you got the notes out, so like honestly, what I love about what you just broke down, Jason is it’s this idea of getting some micro-commitments, so many people, their first email, it’s like a life story about why they’re so awesome and how they can buy from them, and here let’s book a call, and if you want subscribe to my new and do this, it’s just, what’s the word, chaos maybe.

Jason: It’s trying to get married on the first date.

Austin: Yeah, that’s right.

Taylorr: Yeah, exactly.

Austin: That’s exactly right, trying to get married on the first date, and it’s so much more about like, let’s just ask for permission maybe first and then they say, yeah, oh, great, now we can deepen it and then maybe, I don’t know, two or three emails later, we can get a meeting on the books if it’s relevant. How important do you feel like aside from just like the first touchpoint being that approach to like, hey, I have a few ideas like that permission kind of step. What about the follow-up? 

Because I think where we hear the pushy thing a lot is some people are pretty okay, a lot of the people we talk to, they’re okay smashing a button sending out a thousand emails at once. They’re pretty good about that, but what’s not so good is what the follow-up may be and their approach to following up, so how much about getting somebody to be interested in what you have to offer is about follow-up?

Jason: I think it’s actually one of the most important parts and I think that’s the tricky thing if you think of what a really good salesperson does, right? A really good salesperson sends, they follow up, right, and they follow up until the point, so that’s a really good salesman, a great salesman gets an answer, right? And the difference between the two is following up is just one thing but getting an answer, even if it is a no means that you can then move on from that prospect and realize this is not right for them. 

Now, without a doubt, I don’t want to be sending a person a mail every second day and keep going, that’s a terrible way of doing follow-up, but what we would do is write in a sequence maybe four to six emails that would send over six, maybe even eight weeks right? Because timing is the most craziest thing, I have too many examples of in my own outreach of people emailing me six months back after I’ve sent them an email because it was now the time for them to be like, I remembered your email, I bookmarked it but it just wasn’t right for us and I now want to chat. 

I’m like, well, I’m here, and I think there are a whole bunch of those people that have probably looked at your email, maybe checked your website, and go, oh, this is maybe something we could use but it’s just a timing thing. That’s most of the time when it comes to these things, especially, and if you’re like whether it’s and if I think for your business, like when it’s speaking, there are times of the year that people are having getting in speakers into their business to talk or vent or in certain times of the year. 

You don’t know that when that company has their annual breakaway and they need an international or they want a speaker, you have no idea but it’s a timing thing, so they might have just bookmarked your email, but you have to be the one to follow up. Because the person that emails them close enough in that window of when they’re thinking about it is the one, they’re going to reply to your email, and so it’s the least amount of friction if you think about it. 

They’re looking for something and you pop in their mails like, oh, let’s have this chat and see where it goes, and normally pretty much people are pretty great, so you find a good fit quite quickly, so I think just on the follow-up thing, I think it’s, yes, you can get pushy with a number of mails, but think about them in sequences and then give that prospect a break. So, maybe send four emails in let’s say, 4 to 5, 6 weeks, give them a month, two months break, and if they haven’t replied again, put them in a new sequence of emails, write something completely different, say, hey, I mailed you two, three months ago, times have changed, NFTs are now a thing. 

Like, babe, throw some joke in there, I’m now on Meta here’s my [inaudible 14:18] address. I’m going inside baseball but like throw something in and then you’ll find that there potentially is a reply then, so I would just keep going, be a great salesman, keep going and get an answer versus just following up once or twice and like, oh, I don’t want to these people off. You don’t know them, don’t take it personally if they do tell you to go away, but don’t also feel afraid to just keep going until they do give you some sort of an answer.

Austin: Hmm, man, I really like what you just said because I feel like one of the questions we get asked pretty frequently is, when do you stop? Like when is the emailing too much? And to your point, it probably doesn’t ever stop unless they give you an answer, you just have to give them space so that you’re not just bombarding them because if I got an email from somebody every single week for a year straight trying to sell me something, eventually it would end with me being like, please stop, just leave me alone. 

But if I had a break and then it was just a reminder kind of a thing like, oh yeah, that person, well that gives me a chance to reassess whether or not it is the right time to reach back out. And you also have the benefit of potentially catching somebody in a different mindset because you never know when you’re reaching outright, to your point; you just don’t know what you’re really getting into. You just have to do your best to be service-oriented and just trust that you’re being a good, authentic human being that somebody’s not going to be upset about, but if you catch them on a bad day, you can give yourself the opportunity to catch them on a good day if you follow up, otherwise, it’s just going to forever be lost in their archive.

Jason: Just one thing to add on that is also what you can do is go for the, no, right? So, in an email, I think that’s from one of Chris Voss’ “Never Split the Difference.” It’s like go for the, no, which allows the person to not feel like it’s okay to say, no. So, is this a bad idea for me to follow up with you next month? Or that’s like one example of it or one other one that I sometimes do is like, listen, please tell, like, I don’t want to be that guy, and I wrote this. I don’t want to be that guy, if you don’t want to receive any more emails from me, just tell me, no, you’re not interested, I’m totally cool with that, and then I’ll go into my little pitch to why I would want a meeting? 

So, I’m like almost, I’m giving them just the permission to go like say no, and then, look, two ways, it makes me feel a bit better that I’m not bombarding them with a ton of emails, and I’ve said to them, hey, just say no. And then at the same time also from their side, they’re like, oh, okay, I can instead of just, okay, let me just say no, and I know these emails will stop.

Taylorr: What I love about what you’re saying is that it really is a two-way street, this just boils down to a relationship, it’s not any more complicated than that, everyone wants an exchange of interaction, an equal feeling of, I don’t know, participation, right? When you give somebody the ability to opt-out, to say no, or to even just say, yes, I would love some more ideas, please send them over, you’re asking for them to be a part of that conversation with you, and I think naturally that’s just a more human behavior than here’s a bunch of information, go do something with it.

Jason: And I think on that also is that look, no one’s buying any of your products or services offered this cold email, it’s not happening and you’re trying to start a relationship, so you have to also be a little bit cognizant of being respectful of that person’s time, being respectful in maybe the way that you write your email. That doesn’t mean you need to be overly professional but come across in a way that if you got the email, like, hey, this feels like there’s a human behind this and not some sort of buzzword full person that sounds like a salesperson that’s desperate to hit their quota. 

There’s that balance between the two, because what needs to happen from the email, the person’s like, okay, I’m going to give you some of my precious time to get in a call, and that’s what you’re just trying to do because on the call now you can chat to them. Now, we can talk about cats and posters and all those cool things and get to know each other and feel each other out a bit better before we talk about the business side of things and potentially doing work together.

Austin: Yeah, man, I love just this take of being an authentic human being that cares about the other human being that’s on the other end of the email; I think there’s a lot to be said about just being respectful to what you just said. And I have a question that sort of built on the back of that, and this popped up earlier when you were talking about the idea of putting in their name and the company’s name into the email, and we found that like, and maybe you’ll see things differently, so I’m interested to hear your take on this. 

But the emails that perform best typically are the ones that are the most relevant to the audience that we’re sending them to, and so probably in a perfect world, if we had unlimited time, if we could just personally write every single email with something very relevant and contextualized into where we’re at, that’s probably best-case scenario because they’ll know that you genuinely care, but we have this barrier of entry, which is time, right? 

We can’t spend 30 minutes writing every cold email that we send, or at least probably, most of us can’t, so where’s this balance between being respectful of their time and wanting to have a genuine relationship starting to develop, but also not hemorrhaging time into potentially unqualified prospects through these cold emails?

Jason: So, that balance is defined by what your end goal is, so if you are only needing to generate two to five to seven meetings, maybe in a month because you sell some high-value product, or I like to talk about your guys’ business, if personally needs to be booking three gigs a month and they’re already making money already in that month, then think about, they just need to work out. You just need to work out the number of emails that you would send to book, okay, so three gigs, you probably need to book maybe 10 to 15 meetings in order to book three gigs, and so if you can work that out then, well, you only probably need to be sending a hundred to 200 mails to the right person to get those 10 odd meetings to book like two to three gigs.

So, you need to work that out, if it’s large numbers, you’re trying to hit, well, then it’s a final gain like I need 20,000 email addresses to bang those out in a month because I hit my quotes of like 40 meetings and therefore, I get the sales that I’m looking for, it also depends on the product that you’re selling. So, that’s one of the balances and then most of the clients that we work with, we don’t have that much personalization going in, table stakes is name, company, name, job position in the company, maybe company size, you can get all that stuff off LinkedIn, right? So, that’s like table stakes when writing a cold email and including that information. 

But then there are these like, we always ask our clients like, well, what are some key accounts that you would, what companies would you love to work for? And then like, you’ll always rattle off 5 or 10 names and you give them a couple of days extra and they’ll give you like a list of 30, those we would say to them, you need to do more research for those people, and then figure out who they are? What are they talking about on LinkedIn, on other social platforms? What is their company really doing? 

And try and figure out is the new angle, oftentimes, if they just spent a bit of time, they figure out they know someone in the company that knows this person, or then just go that route, right? So yeah, there’s that balance between the two, for the most part, we’re on the camp of the time, saving as much amount of time, and as long as you’ve got a big enough audience that you can work with. Look, if you’re a landscaper and you can only work in one city, and there’s probably only a couple of hundred, let’s say companies or clients that you could work with, that’s just, you need to knock on doors, not cold email and mass email that, right?

Because you’re going to run out of that list very, very quickly, but if you can reach across the country, across the US, there’s hundreds and thousands, millions of businesses that say, you could reach out to, or then just build a bigger list. Get that Mail-Right, and you won’t need to do as much personalization because three to 500 emails sent or people sent a month will generate you those numbers of 5 to 10 meetings a month, which is what you’re just trying to do, and then it’s okay to do the list, sort of on the list personalization side of things.

Taylorr: Yeah, it sounds like the caveat there though, is that good research, good prospects that you’re emailing first, right? So, the spray and pray approach, we’ve seen this millions of times, but get a list of a thousand people and just blast that all off, and it’s just not relevant at all to the person reading the email at that point because how can it be? I think we’re kind of leaning into this a little bit here with this question, but prospecting, obviously has to be a portion of this process, right, getting the email, understanding who the decision-maker is, is that a function of what you would help somebody with or does the person that is pursuing email outreach? Is that something they have to have on lock before even benefiting from this type of strategy?

Jason: Yes, we always say it’s the right email at the right time to the right person with one offer gets you a meeting, and so if we think about, let’s say we tick the box of the right email and we’ve ticked the box of the offer that you have, the one specific offer, even if your company has multiple services and products, pick one. You need to pick one in the email because you get to talk about those problems in that email specifically, and on a sales call, you can rattle off everything that you do and figure out what to go with, but then it’s to that right person. 

So, I would say it’s definitely the most important, because an amazing email that gets opened and read and replied to, but they’re like, well, we can’t afford your $40,000 a month software. We’re a five-man company, what’s the point of doing that, so prospecting really, really important, it is something we help all our clients with in-terms of, no, most clients know, or most companies know who their ideal client is, right? 

They have a good understanding of who they’ve sold and if they don’t, well, it’s quite easy to go, well, let’s just look at your current clients, what makes them good clients because of X, Y, and Z. Okay, cool, well, let’s form and go find some more of those, that’s a very good, quick and easy way to start off that, but, yes, prospecting’s super, super important. For us, it’s always like when we’ve done the prospecting, we’re always delivering those prospects before we even email, I’d say when you look at this and go, would this list of, let’s say it’s a hundred for the week. 

Would every single person say, if you looked at their company, would you want to do work with them? Do you think they’d make a good client? And if you say, no, you have to draw a line through that, don’t send the email, so that’s how important that is when it comes to email outreach.

Austin: Nice, yeah, so it sounds like you’ve got a quality over quantity approach here or mindset around this.

Jason: Exactly, yeah, definitely, and it works like we don’t have clients that send more than like a thousand, maybe a thousand is like the top end prospects per month, it’s normally in the hundreds per month and it’s just because of the quality list plus quality email that you’re writing gets in the number of meetings booked that they’re trying to sell. But I guess that’s also, if you think about what we’re talking about, our ideal client as well, it’s the same thing, we don’t want the client, the guys that are selling, let’s say insurance, they need to be banging out millions of emails to be hitting thousands of clients a month to be making that $10 on the premium that they’re selling, that’s a totally different game.

Taylorr: Yeah, one thing I can’t help, but think about in this conversation is we’re really focusing on email outreach, which is awesome, we’re big fans of it, obviously, I think, again, this is a function of time and in an ideal situation, right? We would also want some elements of more different touchpoints, right? Like, say a follow-up call or a LinkedIn message, we’re in the mix of email outreach, do you find other touchpoints to help bolster that relationship or maybe quicken the trust that someone might have? 

I’ve just found that like with phone calls, for example, you can almost cut through the noise immediately and just get someone’s interest as well, so do you find a balance that having phone calls, maybe LinkedIn messages, other touchpoints help the process of outreach and is it ideal to incorporate all of those things? Or do you think one channel truly is enough?

Jason: One channel can work, and it also depends on the person, some people cannot cold call, they just, they clam up and it’s like something and I guess not natural for a lot of people, so if you can, I think that’s amazing, and I think it will definitely help your outreach because you can just call to check if they received your email. So, that’s a really great thing just as a conversation starter, I think within marketing, we all know multiple touchpoints across various channels, even for ourselves, when we are looking at buying something online, we see it, we look at the site like, ah, and then an ad pops up. 

We don’t click on the ad, it’s not even that we’re now getting sold on it, it’s just our brains mentally now looking at this thing again and seeing again and again, and then it’s like, ah, let me just add this to my to-do list. And then you go look at the website again and then you like, so you know that you need multiple touchpoints for a person to eventually take some sort of action, so email great, email or phone call, really amazing if you can do that, LinkedIn messaging is super tricky, I can’t get it right, we’ve tried to. 

What message works in LinkedIn? Because I see it, the SEO person connects with me, I’m like, I know that picture is coming, I know the or like a business coach or it’s very difficult, I think to get LinkedIn messaging, right, I’ve never come across a message that’s worked. The only thing I’ve seen that we’ve tried is, hey, I dropped you an email to this email address and I put their email address that I sent it to.

I just want to check you got it, I sent you something there, that’s the only thing I’ve ever tried that I felt was authentic and could maybe work, so that’s a difficult one, I think just connecting with people, right? And not sending them LinkedIn messages is probably the best of the worst thing you could do; I think it’s fine to probably do that. And then I think a trick that probably a lot of people are missing out on is taking that email list, look, I think you need to get over about a thousand email addresses, but remarketing them or retargeting, right? 

So, using Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads and what we’re trying at the moment is video, right? So, I’m not trying to even get people to go to a landing page or anything. I’m sending them cold emails and I’m putting some videos that I put up just in front of them so that they see my face and they hear my voice potentially if they watch the video and now, I’m a real human behind the email that I sent. 

And so, I think to myself, if someone sent me an email and now, I saw a quick video of the person, I’d probably click play just to hear their voice, and then I’m like, wow, this guy sounds decent, he doesn’t sound like this pushy sales guy. So, I feel like if it potentially could work on me, it might work on our prospects, so I think that’s something people are not doing is using retargeting with those email lists.

Taylorr: So, what a cool idea, I love that, I think that honestly, retargeting is one of those things too, that’s been so deeply embedded into the marketing culture for so long that it seems, well, I said earlier, email marketing kind of looked mystical. And I think advertising is maybe even two steps further in that direction, but it’s really just playing into the same thing, right, if we can find the people that we’re reaching out to on various platforms so that they have the opportunity to get exposure and become aware of what we’re doing, then that trust starts being built. 

And then they’ll be more confident reaching back out to you or replying to that email, and I was actually a little bit surprised to hear your take on the LinkedIn messaging thing, and obviously, you do this all the time, so I’m not questioning that, that’s true. But it seems like it’s just another messaging platform, much like email would be, so what do you feel is the main distinction there?

Jason: I think the distinction, I think it’s been clouded by the way people are using it, and so I don’t know anyone that’s doing really great, I just haven’t seen it and it feels like everyone’s just pitching their product right up front, going in straight away for that, the jugular like give me your time. I can offer you this service and like zero research done, that’s what it comes across as, and I think it’s also because you haven’t done any research i.e. you don’t even have the person’s email address. 

So, it’s easy to find the CEO of X company on there and send them a message, and it’s also if you think about it, it’s a platform that you need to login to and see the messages there versus email, is a thing that you’re using for your work every single day, you’re logging in, you have to like and unfortunately, there’s something sitting there in our inboxes. And so, emailing you something on there, you’re on their turf, you’re in their inbox, and so versus when you’re on LinkedIn, just getting these random DMs and we get spam messages on all platforms. 

And I feel like LinkedIn’s just one of them, unfortunately, that you can’t block, you can’t block the message that comes in no matter what versus your inbox, the spam filters will protect you against the rubbish, so that’s sort of how I sort of see the distinction.

Taylorr: Yeah, we found it to be most in a supporting role, that’s the only time LinkedIn has been helpful, it’s like to what you said, like, hey, just following up on an email I sent, thought we’d connect anyway, by the way, here’s a funny video of two cats that I found or something like that, right? It’s meant to be so much more casual and supportive, but I really think that email is certainly the way to go if you’re trying to get into someone’s inbox. 32 minutes in, I wish we could just talk about this for another hour, there’s one question I’ve been burning to ask, and I think a lot of people have this and it’s around the balance of email marketing with this outbound approach. 

Now, I’m going to shift this because we’ve been talking a little bit about outbound primarily here’s a list of prospects, let’s start emailing them. But so many of our clients and I think a lot of just small businesses, they have an email marketing tool and then opt-in on their website of some nature, and they might have something to drip to them, like a welcome series. But when somebody is inbound, what’s the balance of email marketing and then outbound? How do you know when it’s worth reaching out to somebody one-on-one if you’re somebody with a lot of inbound leads because you’re doing lead capture strategies and things? Do you have any quick tips and insights there?

Jason: Yeah, so without a doubt, the first thing we do whenever we onboard clients, like give us your email list that you’ve built up, doesn’t matter how old they are, doesn’t matter X clients just give me that email list, whatever it is, let’s just clean it up first. You can do some additional prospecting and you should double-check that these email addresses are valid and a couple of other things, and then we put them into the sequence and unless they’re clients or ex-clients, we put them into a sequence and try and get answers from them. 

Like, can we book meetings with them, or are they interested potentially because, with email marketing, it’s a one-to-many relationship, so think about it, a newsletter, how many times do you really reply to a newsletter that you receive? You don’t, you read the content, you might click the link, you can see it a mile away, even drip emails, you know they’re not one-to-one emails. And so, you don’t get enough validation, or you don’t get enough emails or people replying to your email marketing, then you would, if you sent them a one-on-one email, but obviously there’s a balance. 

Because what’s nice about it though, is when somebody does reply to you when you’ve sent them a one-to-one email if it’s a no, then you know they’re not, okay, cool, you will never need to send them that cold email again. But they’re still on your marketing list and you can continually send them email newsletters and keep them up to date with what’s happening and all of that, so I would try and rule out the ones that are, by cold emailing them. And then, obviously, continually doing on the marketing side because there’s more marketing play, the one-size marketing, long term nurture, they become your fans, their company isn’t the right size for you at the moment. 

But it could be in 18 months, two years’ time and cold email, which is I think we could do work for you right this minute, you should be a good fit, let’s see if I can help you let’s get on a call or whatever that, that sort of sequence is. So, let’s say that sort of is, I would use both.

Taylorr: Yeah, no, what a great distinction, thank you for breaking that down, I know that’s usually a really abstract topic for people to wrap their heads around and the fact that you were able to lay that out in a couple of minutes is perfect. Jason, you have delivered so much value here today, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, as you know since you’re here, we’re all about creating value for our audience. So, what are some of the things you’re working on right now? I know you have a WordPress management agency, as well as this email marketing outreach, someone’s interested in more about that, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?

Jason: Yeah, I’d say take a look at sitecare.com, we’re a WordPress sort of maintenance agency and we do some on the digital side. We’ve got email outreach, which is one of the products that we help, so take a look at that, and maybe subscribe to my YouTube channel, I’m trying to grow my YouTube channel, do a whole bunch of videos on email outreach, and trying to help people write cold emails better and talk about some of this stuff. So, I’ll say those are the two things that I’ve talked about.

Taylorr: Awesome, well, we’ll make sure those links are in the show notes; definitely go check those out, you guys. And Hey, if you like this episode, don’t forget to rate it, like it, subscribe to it; if you want more awesome resources like this, go to speakerflow.com/resources. Thank you so much for chiming in, I just wanted to take a second to thank our sponsor Auxbus, Auxbus is the all-in-one suite of tools you need to run your podcast and it’s actually what we run here at Speaker Flow for Technically Speaking. 

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