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I Make 7-Figures/Year From Cold Email Outreach

September 11, 2024

When Adam Rosen founded his first tech startup, he learned a lot of important skills before he eventually sold it. One of those skills was using cold email as a sales technique.

Fast forward to today, Adam has his own cold email outreach agency that sends more than a million emails and schedules over 300 meetings each month for his clients. He’s earning more than $100k a month.

Adam’s able to run his business from anywhere in the world, which has allowed him to live and work in places like Lake Como, Hawaii, Montenegro, and Switzerland.

Don’t miss this information-packed episode to learn ow to send successful cold email campaigns and to leverage email to grow your business.

Watch the Full Episode

Adam starts by sharing a bit about his background, from founding his first tech startup to selling it and applying the principles he learned along the way. He talks specifically about using cold email as a sales technique.

He eventually went on to found an email outreach company that currently works with many big business names to help them fine-tune their sales processes. At present, his agency has 100 customers who pay anywhere from $750 to $30k per month.

Adam talks about the current cold email outreach market, how various acquisitions and the rise of AI have changed the landscape, and how the number of domains his clients are using, and how email copy has evolved.

He shares some of the rules that need to be followed if you want your cold email campaigns to land and to increase deliverability, and he talks about using multiple inboxes.

Adam explains “small lever movers” like spintax, not using links, excluding gifs and images, and others that are essential for success.

Then he shares the three most important parts that are needed for a successful cold email campaign: infrastructure, list quality, and copy.

If you’re wondering what makes good copy, Adam reveals a few secrets he’s learned as he’s grown his company, which sends over a million emails a month, and he also shares a hack he uses to improve domain health and increase engagement.

Moving on, he talks about response rates and KPIs as well as calls to action and how non-service businesses can use cold email outreach.

When it comes to getting and vetting contacts’ email addresses, Adam recommends a few tools and offers tips for getting off blacklists, should you end up on one.

Domain health is an important factor in email campaigns and he talks about how to check yours.

And lastly, Adam shares how he bought, built, and monetized his newsletter, Nomad Cloud, up to +200k subscribers. It’s currently earnings $3-$5k a month, with an open rate of 50-60%. He also shares his top two tips for people looking to grow a newsletter.

He concludes by talking about changes he foresees in the future as well as aspects of cold email outreach that are unlikely to change.

Topics Adam Rosen Talks About

What he learned about sales from his tech startup
Who he works with now
What the cold email outreach market looks like today
Whether or not there are more changes to come
Best practices and email campaign size
Having multiple inboxes
The importance of small lever movers
Things to remember with cold email
Response rates and CTAs
Non-service businesses and cold email
Getting and vetting contact information
Getting off a blacklist
Checking domain health
Growing his newsletter
Changes on the horizon

Links & Resources

Transcript

Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. Today, we’re joined by Adam Rosen. Adam, welcome on board.

Adam: Jared. I appreciate you having me.

Jared: Hey, thanks for being here. Um, we’re talking about email today. It’s going to be fun. Email is, I think at least in our little neck of the woods here in this podcast, certainly been a hot topic of late, maybe a bit of a buzzword.

You run email outreach company. You also have cloud, uh, other things, uh, I’m sure as well, but, um, maybe introduce us to yourself. Uh, give us a little bit of backstory, uh, anything else we need to know going into it and then we’ll pick up right where the story starts.

Adam: Yeah, that sounds good, Jared. So for me, I never held like a true corporate job.

So I started my first company about three weeks before I graduated from a, from a one year MBA program I was doing at the time. And I had a tech startup for about five years. I sold it now back in 2019. And while there were a million things that we did wrong as a startup, the one thing we always did exceptionally well was getting big brands as customers.

And a lot of them were, were, you know, like I said, big brands, bank of America, Amazon, Apple, Goldman, Disney. And how we got just about all of them was not from a big marketing budget, was not from great connections in the space. It was from being scrappy and how we got scrappy was through cold emailing them.

So when I sold the company, I started to do a lot of work with different startups and just different companies in general. And as you Jared know, and probably everyone listening to this podcast knows, we all need more sales opportunities. And every company is really only as good as their top of the funnel.

If we don’t have new opportunities, we really don’t have hope as a company. for listening. And there’s of course, a million different ways to get more top of the funnel. But the way that was always most successful for me was cold email. So one of the startups I was advising at the time just said to me, Hey, man, we’re struggling to get meetings on the books.

Do you mind meeting with my head of sales and seeing if there’s anything that we can do to improve it? And long story short, I saw there was a big gap with what they were not doing when it comes to cold emailing. I called up my co founder of my previous startup. I said, Hey, I think we can help these guys out.

We’re three years in and. Have built a cold email marketing agency where we do everything from start to finish to book meetings for our customers. And we do it again through cold email.

Jared: So maybe give us an insight into where email outreach company is at, you know, again, whatever, just to give people an idea in terms of the scope of what you do, maybe how many clients you work with, or, you know, top level revenue, or just something that gives us some scope.

So we understand where you guys are at and how many companies you’re working with.

Adam: Right now we’re working with over 50 customers. Uh, a big portion of those now are larger companies. Companies like, uh, uh, Magellan jets, a big private aviation company, uh, customers like a tomorrow. io, one of those billion dollar unicorn, whether AI startups, and we have a fortune 500 that looks to be starting with us over the next few weeks, which is exciting.

And the reason why I bring that up is because in the cold email world, because of how much has changed in the old days, when we first started the company in the first few years, almost all of our customers were early stage startups, like things, sub 20, sub 25 employees. Because a lot of the bigger companies, they could get away with cold emailing and doing it in a, in a relatively nonchalant way, for lack of a better word, but now because of the level of complexity, it’s weeded out a lot of folks that were just scrappy and hardworking and could put together a list and send a bunch of emails where now, if you don’t do A through Z, right, you really don’t stand a chance.

So it’s been exciting for us to, while we still do work with earlier stage startups, the majority of our customers now we’re more established companies. Because they need the support. And, you know, me as a business owner, I’m always looking at stability, you know, with our startup and a great way to find stability is to find customers that, that aren’t going anywhere.

Customers that have a real offering customers that have hit product market fit and customers that just need a jolt of new top of the funnel.

Jared: I want to get into a lot of tactics that you are seeing effective right now, but maybe before you, let’s camp on email marketing company and the company that you’re a part of.

Like what for you guys, I’m just curious, have been the growth levers for you guys as a company. It might be a little bit of a meta question. You’re running an email outreach company. I’m curious if that’s part of the answer, but like how have you guys grown your company to where it’s at? And then we’ll get into, don’t worry folks, we’re going to get into all the email tips too.

We’ll

Adam: Yeah. So at this point, we actually just crossed a hundred total customer mark. And those are customers that pay us as much as 30, 000 a month. So we have some customers with our DIY offering that pay us 750 a month. So it’s a wide gamut, but we, we track how we got every one of those customers. So was it through cold email?

Was it through a referral? Was it through a previous relationship? Was it through a podcast that I’ve been on? How did we get those customers? And for us right now, it’s about 50%. I think the latest numbers are on 47, 48%. Have come through cold email. Uh, so it’s been the largest channel by more than two X of any of the other channels.

So cold email has been. Uh, the biggest, uh, new business generator for us out of all the different channels.

Jared: Okay. Well, that makes sense. I was kind of hoping you’d say that to be honest with you. Um, so you kind of let the cat out of the bag a bit cold email or just email outreach in general. It’s just changed a lot over the last number of years.

I won’t even put a number on it cause it has changed. Maybe. Catch us up to speed on what cold email outreach looks like today, and maybe some of the markers that have changed over the past couple of years from a high level.

Adam: So a lot of us know about some of the big changes that have taken place in the cold email world.

Like in September of last year, 2023, there was a major acquisition between Google domains and Squarespace. Earlier this year, Yahoo and Microsoft, uh, have put up and other providers have put together restrictions on what can and can’t fly now when it comes to cold email of obviously we all know about AI and all the changes that have happened because of AI in every industry, but especially in the cold email world.

So those are some of the reasons why the cold email world has changed. But just some very simple things that everyone can look at to just see how differently, how different cold email is today. So in the old days of cold email, think about a year ago now. So in the summer of 2023, those are the old days.

Now I’m not talking 10 years ago. Yeah, fair enough. When we would service our full service customers, we would create about one domain for every customer and a few email inboxes for each customer. The reason why you do that is because even then you should never cold email, you should never mass email off your main domain.

But now more than ever, you cannot do that today when we work with our full service customers on the low end, we have about 40 domains per customer, and we have some customers with over a hundred domains that we’re sending from. We have some customers, we have over a thousand email accounts that we’re creating to send from because you have to be so, uh, you have to be so targeted now and you have to be so, uh, you have to, you have to reach out to such a smaller, uh, audience of people now.

So that’s one area, things like email copy in the old days, you could get away with creating one good piece of copy and sending it out. Even that now is not good enough because Google and Yahoo and these other providers will see, hey, this might be a mass email. So there’s things like spin tax that everyone should be aware of.

And basically what spin tax does, it randomizes different parts of your email. So every email seems slightly different for true. And the whole purpose is to get into the inbox and stay out of spam. So those are some of the examples.

Jared: Why do you think it’s changed so rapidly? And I only ask that, like, are we going to continue to see this kind of change on the horizon?

Is this something where it’s no longer. Today, something that the average business owner can do. And is that supposed to, or do you think it’s going to continue changing this rapid rate? Like we experienced in the last year?

Adam: Yeah. Cold email, like any industry, and let’s even just stick to marketing. SEO has changed dramatically over the coming year, over the past few years.

And we’ll continue to change Facebook ads, Tik TOK, Instagram. I mean, you name it, any marketing medium, especially when it comes to technology. Has changed and will continue to change. So I think sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking that cold email is like a different world from every other marketing medium, but it’s really the same.

It’s of course, Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and all the providers are going to figure out how they can maximize their business. And then, of course, there’s people like me or like you, Jared, with your, with your marketing company or any other marketing business that now has to stay ahead of the trends, stay ahead of the changes.

But I don’t think cold email is any different. And yes, today we’re recording this in August of 2024. I’m sure in September of 2024, I’m sure in August of 2025, things are going to look very differently. It’s going to continue to change. But that’s life, especially when it comes to technology. And I don’t think cold email is actually all that unique in that.

Jared: Yeah. Let’s talk about maybe some perspectives for people. And then we can get into some of the details. Like when, what type, what size of cold email campaign does someone need to be paying attention to all these elements you went through? All these changes that have happened. Like if I want to send an email to 50 people that I have gathered from a trade show, maybe I went to a trade show and I have 50 people that dropped their name.

I don’t know. I’m just coming up with ideas here. Drop their name on my bucket and I want to email 50 people versus 500 people versus a list I bought from a, uh, 3000 people. Like, where do we need to start considering a lot of these best practices?

Adam: The reason why for our full service customers on the low end, we have several hundred email accounts that we’re sending from is not because we want to pay for those extra inboxes is not because we want to send emails from multiple email accounts.

We’d rather just send it from 1 or 2, but the reason we have to do that is because of the restrictions that are in place right now. Where to give you an idea, Jared, we used to be able to send several hundred, if not several thousand emails from an email account in a day. Now you can really only send about 20 emails per inbox in a day, 20 outbound emails.

So if, even if you have a list of a hundred or 200 or 300, if you wanna send all those in one day, you have to have 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 different email accounts that you’re sending from. Because even for us, what we saw is that when we increase the sending limit for our inbox across all of our customers, we dr.

We increase it to 25 emails per inbox per day. Just by doing that, our deliverability dropped across the board. We brought it back down to 20 emails per inbox per day. Deliverability increased again. So these providers are getting so finicky because they want to weed out the bad emailing, where if you don’t follow these rules, it’s going to be really difficult to get results.

So even if you have a small list of a few hundred, uh, it’s either you ballot, you, you delay your sending quite a bit, or you get the inboxes and build the infrastructure needed to get results.

Jared: So when you say different inboxes, talk about what that looks like in brass tacks. Like, can I send from the same alias as it were from multiple inboxes or do I have to be trying to send from a variety of aliases from variety of inboxes, et cetera?

Adam: So my URL is EOCworks. com. We do not send mass emails from EOCworks. com. We have, I don’t know, at this point, at least three, 400 different domains for my company, because we’re always running different outbound campaigns for us. So let’s say one of our inboxes or one of our domains, I should say is try eocworks.

com, which by the way, we’ll redirect back to eocworks. com. If someone were to type it into their URL or type that URL in, and then we’ll have three different inboxes under that domain. So there, let’s say we’re emailing from me. It would be Adam at eocworks. com, Adam at tryeocworks. com, adam. rosen at tryeocworks.

com, and arosen at tryeocworks. com. And then we would replicate that across, you know, however many domains were created.

Jared: Okay. So yeah, they are different actual aliases and I hope I’m using the term, right. That people were applying to that people can see if they were to get in the nitty gritties and you’re saying about 20 per day is really where deliverability starts to change.

Adam: Exactly. You can send about 20 emails per inbox in a day. And these aren’t aliases. These are just, these are just straight up users. So if you, let’s say you have, it would look like in that domain, you have three different users with headshots and everything. So these aren’t even necessarily aliases.

Jared: Wow.

Okay. Uh, this is probably the right time to ask it. Although we’re, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, um, get into your success in newsletters, cause we’re going to talk about. One of your newsletters and kind of what you’ve done there and almost look at it like a case study. But I think I want to ask this question now, because I’m imagining most people listening are thinking this in the back of their head.

Like I have a newsletter, I use a company like go to, uh, uh, sorry, MailChimp. You said go to earlier MailChimp, ConvertKit, whatever the, you know, the company is. And when I, I have a list of 5, 000 people, when I send a blast email, I’m sending 5, 000 emails. Are you telling me that that is horrendous for deliverability?

Adam: No, because if, because it’s through one of these newsletter services and that’s why they’re so picky on, they have to be opt in because if you have high spam rates, it affects everybody. So like we use beehive, that’s the company we use, but you mentioned a few others that are good too, like ConvertKit for example, but it’s not, it’s, it’s different than when you’re cold emailing because all of the emails are, uh, kind of merged together.

So you benefit. From the other senders and their reputation, just like they benefit from your sending and your reputation. That’s why they don’t let you just put cold lists in there. And if you have a high spam rate, I have a high bounce rate. You’ll be, they might kick you even off that platform. Like we had a client come to us.

It was on one of those big platforms and they got kicked off because they had a huge bounce rate. Um, and that affects everybody. So it’s really important that you, uh, you don’t have a high bounce rate, of course, but with, with, uh, newsletters, you can certainly send from one domain, one email account.

Jared: Okay, and that’s really a distinction that I wanted to get out.

Like that’s an opt in environment. Whereas what you’re talking about with a number of emails per day and all this kinds of it’s a cold email environment, right? It’s a different relationship with the Senate with the receiver, and that’s why we’re kind of looking at this scenario from where we’re at. Um, let’s keep talking about.

Something else you said, um, which is spin tax. And I want to learn more about that. I’m sure a lot of people, that’s gonna be the first time hearing about it. Go into more detail on this and talk about if it’s really important or if it’s maybe more of a small lever mover.

Adam: It’s a small lever mover, but all of these things are small lever movers that make a big impact.

So for example, like spin tax is important. That’s a small lever mover, not putting links in your main email. That’s a small lever mover. Not putting gifts or images on your cold outbound. That’s a small lever mover, not tracking opens. That’s a small lever mover, not tracking clicks. That’s another small lever mover, not sending more than 20 emails in a day.

That’s a small lever mover, not putting, you know, not getting marked as spam. That’s a small lever mover, not getting or getting increasing the, uh, the amount of replies you got, you get not just meetings, but replies. That’s a small lever mover. So all of these little things are small lever movers that make the difference.

That’s why. When it comes to cold email, there, there are so many people that are getting out of the cold email game. And the reason why is because there are so many to your point, Jared, small lever movers, where you don’t do a through Z, right. You might as well not do it because you’re not going to get results.

But if you do A through Z right, cold email can work better than ever. And we’ve seen that even in the last few months, we’ve had our best months ever when it comes to meetings and replies across our customers, even from two years ago, when it was kind of like the golden ages of cold emailing. If you could do everything right, you’ll get great results.

But if you don’t do A through Z right, you really might as well not even do it.

Jared: Adam, I’m sorry. I’m going to put a pause here. We normally don’t do this. I Riverside is telling me that I need to, let me just hit a button here. I’ll put a cut, a cut note here. Um, I’m going to refresh and are you

Adam: seeing a delay with me?

Cause I, yeah, for my screen, I keep trying to cut my camera and I don’t know if it’s on my side. Let me do this.

Jared: I’m going to hit refresh cause I’m getting a big delay on your end, which happens, but

Okay. I think I’m back in.

That was wild.

Adam: Let’s try it. Yeah. I don’t know. No, I didn’t know if I was on my side of your side, but pretty early on, I got a big, I was noticing a big delay and I didn’t know if maybe it was just on my side, so I would just keep running with it. So the whole time I was delayed.

Jared: Probably started like maybe five minutes in, um, uh, it looks like it’s still recording and I’ve had experience in the past.

So it’ll, it’ll pick up everything that we did so far. So we’ll just have to pick up and it records locally. So we should be able to edit it together and it won’t have that delay.

Adam: All right, cool. And, um, yeah, what I’ll do is cause I have another, this camera is a little different, it’s not quite as good, but just in case it was on my side, I’ll just use my, my Mac book camera.

I know it’s not quite as good, but it’ll

Jared: that’s okay. I totally agree. Let me just check here. Yeah, it’s still been recording us. So yeah, it hasn’t stopped.

Adam: Yeah, it hasn’t stopped recording. I’m at 33 minutes. So, okay, good. It started

Jared: me over, but that’s all good. I’ve had this happen before and it’ll be fine.

I actually took great notes too. So I know exactly where we’re at.

Adam: Good. Cause I have no idea.

Jared: Okay. So do you mind if I just, we’ll pick up on all the little things, the little levers that you, you went through a bunch of them. And so I’ll just kind of transition us back and say like, that’s a great list.

And like, maybe we can talk about a couple of the other ones that you would want to highlight.

Adam: Yeah, sounds good.

Jared: Okay, good.

Yeah, I’ll go ahead and start. Okay, so that’s actually a long list of little levers. And I’m fascinated by any others you think matter. I know they’re all little levers, but to your point, if they all add up to making a big deal, like maybe walk us through a couple more of those and what we need to be doing around those.

Adam: Just to keep things simple. There’s really three things that everyone should think about when it comes to cold email at this point. The first is the infrastructure. If we don’t have our infrastructure built. We don’t stand a chance. So when I say infrastructure, what do I mean? We talked a little bit about domains and emails earlier.

So that’s important. You have to create enough domains and enough emails so that you can send emails at the scale that you want to. When you create these domains, you want to make sure that the backend DNS records are set up. Things like your DKM, your SPF, your DMARC, basically those act as your registration stickers.

It’s like, if you didn’t have your registration sticker on your car and you got pulled over, you’re going to be in trouble. Same idea when it comes to email. If you don’t have your DNS record set up properly, the email police officers are going to stop you and put you into spam jail. So you have to make sure that your infrastructure is set up properly.

That’s number one. Number two, then you have to think about your list and getting a high list quality. Now, the good news when it comes to lists, they used to be very expensive. Like people used to have to pay a dollar or more contact through a zoom info of the world to get to get high quality contacts.

About 18 months ago, we used to sell, uh, wasn’t our main business, but we would have people that would come to us to buy lists and we would sell them for a pretty good deal, 25 to 35 cents a contact. Usually that was a good deal. Now you can get contacts for a few pennies. High quality verified contacts because of great tools out there, like an instantly.

ai or an Apollo or some of the other, uh, great technologies out there that can not only do your sending, but also can get high quality lists. But that’s number 2 is you have to make sure you have high quality lists because if you’re sending to bad emails and you’re getting a lot of bounce backs, what’s going to happen?

You’re going to go into spam

Jared: and then

Adam: 3 going to what I talked about earlier, of course, is copy. Now, the basics of writing good copy, and I can get, again, as nerdy as you want here, Jared, but the basics of writing good copy, again, going back into the basics, don’t, don’t track opens, don’t track clicks.

Don’t put links in your emails. Don’t add gifts or memes or photos. All those things are going to increase the likelihood you go into spam. But then how do we write good copy? And the basic level and anyone who wants this, either we’ll put in the show notes or just send me an email and I’ll give this to you for free is we created a GPT prompt that basically recreates our highest performing emails for you and your specific company and your target audience you’re going after.

So, but a simple way you can think about email and what works best. And we’re sending over a million emails every month. This subject line made my stomach turn. At first I was like to my co founder, man, I don’t want to do this. I don’t like this subject line. It’s one of my pet peeves. But we were, we had a heavy recommendation by one of our coaches to try it and it’s worked out well.

And now I just say, Hey, the data speaks. So now I just run with it. The subject line is just high first name. You run with that. That’s going to get great results, get great results for you. The body of your email, simple way of looking at things is. One sentence, one line. What’s the purpose of your email?

Next line, one sentence. What’s the problem you solve? Next line, one sentence. What’s your solution? Next line, one sentence. What’s your social proof? Next line, one sentence. Your call to action. Hey, got 15 minutes to chat. So those are the basics. I’ll give everyone a P. S. Where if you want to use it, steal it, take it from me.

It’s Not only increased our response rate dramatically, but it has gotten so much goodwill from our emailing. We have a Slack channel, two Slack channels, one of which is great, memorable responses. Basically people say, and we have, we’re the best email writers ever. We have another Slack channel. That’s like bad, ugly response where people tell us to F off oftentimes, literally telling us to F off.

That Slack channel though, at this point, almost never gets any action. And I attribute a lot of that to this PS. And again, anyone steal this if you want, it basically goes along the lines of just by replying positive or negative, we’re going to donate five bowls of dog food to a charity. And the reason why we’re doing it is because every reply helps our domain health.

The more replies we get, the better it’s going to be for all of our customers. Right? So that has not only gotten us much more replies, but people that are like, Oh my God, thank you for doing that. Like, this isn’t a fit for me, but thank you for feeding the puppies. And every month we do a donation to a charity and feed dogs.

At this point, we’re closing in a hundred thousand dogs that we, a hundred thousand bowls of dog food that we have now contributed through that. And it’s greatly introduced, introduced, increased, I should say, Our response rates, which helps us get more meetings for our customers. And every meeting is so damn valuable.

And then the last thing I’ll say quickly is when you want to take things to the next level. When you want to get hyper personalized, where it feels like someone has scanned your website for 30 minutes, learn tools like clay clay. com. It’s one of the best personalization tools out there. It’s not personalization like, Hey, I saw you went to this university.

What do you think about the president? It’s no, it’s here’s a message. That looks like, again, I did 30 minutes of research on you and wrote you a tailored email for it. It’s not easy. It’s definitely more of the PhD level of emailing, but if you guys want to get to the best of the best level, uh, those are some of the tools that, that I’d recommend.

Jared: You talked about copying, how important it is, um, in, in the world of responses, like what’s a typical, if you do the copyright, um, and I know that’s a very big statement, but what, Is a typical response rate in today’s day and age. And does it vary across maybe different industries or different offers that you’re trying to get across the board?

Adam: It absolutely does vary, but the biggest KPI we look at, so we look at meetings as a KPI, we look at replies and we look at positive replies per thousand. So if you’re, if you want to be in like the hall of fame, for example, of cold email, if you’re one positive reply per thousand emails, which does include follow ups might be going to 200 unique folks.

You’re doing a phenomenal job. And that’s always the benchmark that we set for all of our customers. We have some customers like, well, I think our best ones are like 2. 5 positive replies per thousand. Uh, we have others that are right around one positive reply per thousand. We have others that are lower.

They’re like 0. 1 or 0. 2 positive replies per thousand. And then what we have to figure out there is, okay, is it the list? Is it the offering? Is it, is there just maybe a struggle to, uh, to, to communicate the message properly? Does the market not necessarily want what they’re offering? It could be a number of different things that we would need to dig into, but if you’re getting one positive reply per thousand emails you’re sending, just know you’re doing a great job when it comes to cold email.

Jared: Okay, so it’s a numbers game. I think we can safely say it’s a numbers game. Um, what typically works best to get people to, we’ll say positive reply, but maybe just take the next step. Is it a meeting? Is it, um, like what other types of calls to action are you making and you’re seeing success with?

Adam: For our customers, almost all of them is, Hey, do you basically do you have 15 minutes for a conversation?

So that’s typically the CTA for all of our customers, because most of them are selling deals anywhere from 10, 000 annually on the low end to, we have some customers that are selling deals that are high six to seven figures. So for them, a meeting with a qualified prospect, uh, is, is so valuable to them.

So for them, we’re selling phone calls, but for some people, you know, we don’t work with as many of these types of folks. Okay. They’re just saying, Hey, go straight to, uh, to purchasing. But that of course is a harder sell, especially through cold email, where for us, the CTA is a phone call.

Jared: Is there a role for non service businesses to use cold email outreach?

And is there a role to do it for lead generation perhaps, or lead nurturing rather than closing a phone call or business?

Adam: Yeah, we have some customers will do more lead magnet stuff like, uh, like, uh, uh, here’s a case study, or can I send you a video with more information so you can serve, or we have a customer working with these, he’s a well known business leader, influencer that probably a lot of people listening would know, and he, um, for him, it’s a lot of, it is around, um, uh, giving away his book for free.

So if you have different lead magnets, you can certainly do that through email. And to your question earlier, is this just for service businesses? No, cold email should work for anybody as long as you can get contacts. As long as you can get email contact information for your potential buyers. If you could do that, I don’t think there’s a better, and I’m biased obviously, but I don’t think there’s a better, more effective, more efficient Marketing medium that you could choose.

Jared: Let’s lean into that a little bit. It was on my, on my list. I’ll jump to it now. Getting contact information. Let’s, I mean, I’ll just, I’ll just leave it at that and throw it, throw that to you open endedly. Like, where do you get these emails?

Adam: So there’s a lot of different lead sources out there. My favorite is a tool called instantly.

ai. They’re one of the leaders right now in the cold email marketing space. They, uh, they do your sending. They can manage all the replies, but you can also get high quality lists through them. We’re sending about a million emails a month. We get about 70 percent of our lists from instantly. So for most people, instantly should be a great way to get lists and lists at a low cost, um, for the other 30%, we need to get creative.

We’ve other vendors we use for some of those more, uh, challenging lists, I’d say, but for the majority of people, you can use an instantly. ai or an Apollo to get high quality lists for, uh, for a low dollar amount.

Jared: Okay. Okay. Um, Is there any vetting that you recommend people do when they get a list? Is there any sort of, uh, you know, cleaning?

Or is that usually something that when you get a list, it usually has gone through those processes and you can use it out of the gate?

Adam: Yeah, tools like an instantly or Apollo, they do a good job now of helping you clean it. So they make it easy for you because you’re also oftentimes sending through their platform and what they don’t want is to be sending a lot of bad emails.

So typically like when we get, let’s say we get 100, 000 contacts from instantly, typically about 50, 000 M will be what we call double verified, which is a very, very, very high likelihood that they’re going to be a legitimate email and, and are going to land in the inbox, for example, or should land in the inbox, I should say.

Now, if you’re getting lists from other lead sources. You will want to use tools like a zero bounce. As an example, there’s many others that you can use zero bounce, one that we’ve used a lot and we like to help verify these contacts because again, if you get a big list and we’ve seen this before, you get a big list, you’re all excited about, you do a big campaign and you get a high bounce rate, you’re almost certainly going to have your inbox.

Uh, landing, landing and spam, but the bigger issue is your whole domain could become blacklisted if they see you’re sending out a bunch of spammy emails to bad contacts. So you always want to make sure when you are emailing, you’re sending it to good contacts.

Jared: Any tips if you’ve ended up on the naughty list, if your domain is in that spot, whether it’s, I mean, I’m sure there’s degrees of it.

And so to your point, like maybe walk us through some tips to get out of that spot where you Your domain, maybe you’ve made some mistakes in the past, or maybe just without even trying, you know, you just happened to get some emails marked as spam and it’s, it’s put a little bit of a black mark on your domain.

Adam: Unfortunately, there’s no like silver bullet. The one thing you can do though is let time help you and let time heal you. So even with my main domain, we made the mistake a few years ago, doing a lot of mass emailing on it and we were in trouble. Like everything we were sending then starts to go into spam from all of our different inboxes.

But with time, with good emailing, what with stopping our cold email and our mass emailing, it does tend to resolve itself. So like even one of our big customers right now, I was talking to their chief marketing officer. A few weeks ago, and he told me, he said, one of the big reasons we even wanted to work with you guys is because we saw our domain health was as low as it could be.

And we were probably days away from being blacklisted. And now, though, we’ve been emailing for them for several months now, and their domain health has increased as they’ve stopped emailing off their main domain. So step one would be stop mass emailing off your main domain. And step two is to just, you know, start, uh, making sure you’re only sending to warm, legitimate contacts, because with time, your domain health will improve.

Jared: Where can people check on, you know, their domain health, right? Where can people go to do that?

Adam: Yeah, there’s, there’s different sources. Um, the one that we use, I’m going to butcher the full URL. Um, but we also actually built a tool with one of our coaches that checks on our domain health across the board.

So if anyone’s listening to this and you want to check on your domain health, just send me over an email and I can even check that for you.

Jared: Let’s, um, let’s transition a bit and talk about the newsletter project that you’re sharing with me and its growth. I think that’ll be really interesting to a lot of people listening.

Newsletters have been a topic we’ve talked about. We had someone on a couple weeks ago or probably a couple months ago at this point. I always do that. Um, who, who shared a whole, uh, uh, outline of how he’s built a local newsletter for his local community. But we’ve been talking about it in, in, in fits and starts.

Like, tell, you know, like introduce us to this email newsletter that you’ve built and kind of the success you’ve had with it.

Adam: Yeah. So for almost three years now, I’ve been running my business as kind of a traveling entrepreneur. The more standard name is probably a digital nomad, but my co founder and I have been traveling while building our business.

And we spent a lot of time in some of the most beautiful places in the world and Positano, Italy, Lake Como, Paris, London, Hawaii, you name it. We’ve spent a lot of time traveling the world as we do it. So one of the things that we wanted to do is share more about how people can travel the world and experience the beauty of travel.

While building a successful business or while building a successful career. And with that thought in mind, we, we came across this newsletter, the nomad cloud. com and we liked the content. So we reached out to the previous owner of it. And we ended up buying the newsletter back in January of this year, January of 2024.

And we’ve grown it now to over 200, 000 subscribers. While increasing the engagement rate. So it’s been a fun project because I’ve had a lot of people talk to me about newsletters and how can I create a good newsletter? And it was never a game I really played. Like we were always cold emailers, but I always wanted to learn how to create a successful newsletter.

So by us buying that newsletter kind of sped up our process, our learning curve of understanding newsletters and how to get the best out of it. And because of that, now, now we have a bunch of clients. That we’re actually building out newsletters for as well. So it’s been a good learning by now. We’re trying to make this into a bigger business initiative where we can build out newsletters for folks.

Jared: If I could ask when you bought it, how many subscribers did it have? What was its focus? And then, you know, what have you grown it to at this point?

Adam: Same, uh, same type of focus. It’s around how you can travel the world while building your career, building your business. So like which, what are some good digital nomad hotspots to go to and different travel tips, all that stuff.

But it was about 5, 000 subscribers and uh, yeah, now we’re over 200, 000 subscribers. We should get to, uh, our goal is to get to at least 300, 000 by the end of this year.

Jared: Wow, that’s fast in eight months. Okay. Uh, you know, what were the tactics you used to grow it that fast and that rapidly?

Adam: A lot of it is targeted, targeted marketing.

So like there’s things that you can do if you really want to hack stuff. Like, for example, on Instagram, you can hack your way into finding out who has digital nomad in their bio. And then you can get that contact information, reach out to them and see if they want to subscribe to the newsletter. So a lot of it is that a lot of it is, you know, people sharing it.

Uh, we have, there’s different boosts that you can do through tools like beehive that, which is our, where we send our newsletters from that can help get your newsletter in other common newsletters, but a lot of us is kind of mixing some of our cold email skills of like the list building on that, reaching out to those folks and seeing if they want to be a part of the newsletter.

Jared: That’s that’s that’s um, that’s great growth. What? Um, uh, like what’s the avenue of monetization? If there is any with that newsletter,

Adam: it’s been a good learning curve with that. Um, When we bought it, there was really zero revenue. That was the other opportunity we saw is they had a few sponsors, but they were sponsors that were stopping because they weren’t getting the results that they wanted.

Um, so for us, it’s been a big learning curve to understand that. But, uh, for us, we have different sponsors. We have different tiers. Like, we have, like, a community partners bulletin where people in our community can pay 25 to 75 dollars just to shout out, like. a lot of wellness events or retreats, um, or small businesses.

Then we have a premier sponsor, which is typically 500 a post where they’re towards the top of the newsletter. They get a nice image and, you know, a few sentences. And then we have a dedicated, which is typically a thousand dollars where we just write about that one company and how it relates to digital nomadic.

So that’s how we’ve been getting a lot of our sponsors, but a lot of these tools now, like a convert kit or like a beehive, they do a pretty good job of sending you, uh, sponsors too. Like they’ll typically, especially cause we have a good engagement rate. They’ll typically give us sponsors where they do like an easy CPC where we get a cost per click on everyone that clicks on it.

We get maybe it’s a dollar per click. Maybe it’s three, almost 4 per click. And if you can get a lot of clicks on those, you can make a good, a good chunk of change. So. It’s still not making a ton of money. Like most months we’re anywhere from three to five grand of revenue, uh, per month on it. Uh, we’re also not investing a ton of time.

My two business partners on it are full time with my main business email outreach company, which takes up about 90 to 95 percent of our time. But, um, It’s been good to, the best part about it is not the money we make each month. We haven’t even taken a dollar for ourselves yet on it. It’s been the learning and the money we’ve actually made from our email outreach company clients that are now paying us, uh, you know, maybe 2, 500 bucks or more for us to build and run a newsletter for them.

Jared: Right, right. What’s been, I mean, if you could, if you look back at all the different ways you’ve grown it, like what’s been the, the, like the, the best one or the one that you can kind of share for people who are like, I know I have a, I just, it’s ironic, but I just bought a newsletter myself about two months ago.

It’s got like some somewhere on the same number, like seven, six, 7000 subscribers. Right. And so I’m hearing it. All the different things you’ve done, but I’m curious, like, if I was only going to have time for one of them, which one would you recommend to people to grow their newsletter? Um, from the ones that you’ve tried and experienced

Adam: for me is targeted list.

Like if you can get targeted list that would be interested and then reaching out to them and just say, Hey, do you want to subscribe to this newsletter? That’s the best approach. That’s what worked best for us. And then the key though, with the newsletter that I found is you always want to be cleaning.

Like, it’s not just about having a lot of subscribers. It’s about having a highly engaged audience. So every month we’re scrubbing if people aren’t opening the newsletters, they they’re they’re off the newsletter because for us, what’s more important than anything is engagement. So right now, our open rates are pushing 50 to 60 percent on most newsletters are click throughs are not the best, but they’re pretty good.

It’s around 2 percent click through rates on each newsletter and we’re just always cleaning. And even when we bought the newsletter, we dropped it down to about 3000 subscribers, like in that for in those first few weeks, because we saw there’s a bunch of people that just hadn’t engaged in a long time.

So the key is just not just growing the newsletter, more subscribers, but also cutting people that aren’t engaging because they add no value to you.

Jared: Is there a, I think I know where you’re gonna go with this, but you know, for everyone listening, what are the benefits to cutting them off? Deliverability, spam, like are there other fringe benefits besides just getting rid of the dead weight?

I think

Adam: All of that, but also for sponsors, like if you approach a sponsor and you say, I, even if it’s a hundred thousand subscribers, but you have a 10 percent open rate and you have a 0. 3 percent click through rate, they’re not going to be very interested. What they really care about is engagement. So even when we work with sponsors, like they want to know the clicks, they want to know if people are purchasing from it, they want to know legitimate engagement.

They don’t want to just know the total subscriber number. Anyone could have a lot of subscribers, you know, anyone can upload a bunch of subscribers to a newsletter. And if they’re not engaging, it really adds no value to you. So yes, for deliverability, it does actually help when you have more engagement, even for newsletters.

But almost more importantly, it’s when you’re trying to get subscribers. If you have a lot of subscribers and poor engagement, they’re, they’re not going to pay you. The definite I can give you top dollar.

Jared: Starting to take a step back here. And as we kind of come to wrapping up, like from a high level, obviously you, you just live in the email world, right?

You have, you know, your, your cold outreach company, you have this newsletter, you’ve been in this space for so long. You’ve talked at the outset about all the changes that the email world has gone through in the next, in the last year. Sorry. I mean, not trying to look ahead, but maybe. With your knowledge, like what other changes are on the horizon or might be coming to email outreach just from a high level?

Adam: Deliverability is always going to be the key. How do you land in the inbox? So that, that will never change. There’s going to be things that we have to completely redo in our technology and our systems and our outreach two months from now, three months from now, whenever it is that we don’t have to do currently in August, 2024, because.

It’s always a battle of these providers and then cold emailers of how do we stay ahead of the game to make sure that we can get results. You know, one of my favorite quotes is you can’t hit what you can’t see. And I think it relates to so many things in life. It includes getting results through cold email.

If you don’t land in the inbox, you don’t stand a chance. So deliverability is something that will always change. And that’s one of the reasons even we feel so confident as a business, because some people say, Oh, cold email, I can figure it out. It was pretty straightforward. It’s simple. And it’s like, if you knew what was happening two months ago.

You’re already behind because it’s changing so fast. So it’s always just who can understand how to get the best results. Like in any marketing medium, what works in SEO today may be completely different than what works in SEO in three months. So that’s number one is deliverability. But number two is AI.

AI is changing so many things in our everyday lives. So many industries, cold email is a big part of that. AI has made it so more people have access. To cold emailing and thinking they can do it effectively. Great tools like instantly or Apollo also make it easier for more people to get into cold emailing.

So it’s, how do we understand how to leverage these technologies to get results? Because if you are a deep expert in them, you’ll get a lot of results. If you are not a deep expert, you don’t know how to use them properly, you’re gonna be like everybody else that’s not seeing results through cold email.

Jared: Whew. We have a long list of things to look into, I’ll tell you that much. This was really action packed and um, thanks for coming on and sharing like, at such depth. I think that anybody who wants a overview probably got in the first five minutes and then anybody who wants a deep dive probably got it in the remaining, uh, time.

So thanks for coming out. Where can people fall along with what you have, um, with what, with what you’re doing?

Adam: Yeah, you can check out our website, eocworks. com, my email. If anyone has any questions about cold email, uh, newsletters, you name it. If you want any of the free stuff that we talked about too, any of these prompts, just email me at adam at eocworks.

com. And then I’m most active on LinkedIn and Instagram. And I’m just Adam. I Rosen is my handle for both of those.

Jared: Adam, thank you so much for coming to the podcast. Um, this was a fun, uh, this was a fun topic and one that we haven’t touched on, which is specifically cold out, uh, cold email outreach and, um, you’re the right person to bring on.

So thanks again until we see you next time. Bye bye.

Adam: I appreciate you, Jared. Take care.Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. Today, we’re joined by Adam Rosen. Adam, welcome on board.