How To Convert Customers With Cold Emails with Aaron Epstein | Startup School

**Aaron Epstein** (0:09)
Hi, I'm Aaron Epstein, group partner at YC. And in this video, I'm gonna talk all about how to write cold emails that convert. So first, I'm gonna give you the all time best email outreach hack. You ready? Get a warm intro. This is the most effective way to get people to respond to emails that you're sending to them. And you're gonna have a conversion rate two to three times what you would get if you were just sending a regular cold email. And so there's a lot of different ways to get warm intros to people that you're trying to get in touch with. Mostly, you want to use your network and go through LinkedIn, all of your contacts, look up your friends, your friends of friends, current or former co-workers, your school alumni networks that you're a part of, and even employer alumni networks at past companies that you've worked at. And you basically want to turn over every rock and stone to try to find people that might be able to get you a warm connection to the person that you're trying to get in touch with. It's not always possible to get a warm intro, though. And many times, you gotta go in cold. So that's gonna be a big focus of what we're talking about in this video. Whether it's for sales, recruiting, partnerships, or whether you're just trying to get some of your users to talk to you, or even reach out to other founders as mentors to be able to give you advice, all of the tips in this video should be useful for you. And the good news is that most cold emails are actually terrible. So the bar is really low for you to stand out and get somebody to pay attention and respond to you. So the first thing that I'm gonna talk about here is mapping out your funnel. And to do this, you wanna start with your goal. And for many of you, if this is a sales context, your goal is gonna be, I wanna get new customers. So your goal is to get one new customer, let's say. And then what you wanna do is you wanna work backwards from that goal to build your funnel, which I'll walk you through now. So we're gonna take a look at what a typical conversion funnel might look like if you're a B2B software company. I'll give some sample conversion rates as we go through this example here, but it's important to note that yours may differ and you're gonna need to figure that out through trial and error yourselves. So let's say your goal is to get that one customer, and then let's say you have a funnel where you actually need to give product demos to convert people to a customer. And so let's say you know that your demo to customer conversion rate is 10%.
Well, in order to get one customer, that means you're gonna have to give 10 demos to get that one customer. Now, in order to get 10 demos, let's say you know that you have a 25% conversion rate from people that respond to your email to people that actually sign up and show up for a demo. So, that means that you need 40 responses from the emails that you send in order to get 10 demos. Now, in order to get 40 responses, you need 400 people to open your email if you have a 10% conversion rate from opens to responses. And then in order to get 400 people to open your email, if you have a 50% conversion rate from emails sent to emails opened, that means that you need to have, you need to send 800 emails to get those 400 opens. So when you look at this all in aggregate, basically what that means is you need to send 800 emails in order to get one customer conversion. So if you're expecting to just send a handful of emails every day, every week, every month, and see results, that's not going to cut it. You're going to need to send dozens of emails per day, possibly even 50 per day, in order to see meaningful results with conversion rates similar to those that I showed. And you should plan to start this writing these emails manually and personalized, doing it yourself, not starting with automation. You have to do it manually first so that you can learn and figure out what works so that you can then start to scale the process more. And it's important to remember that the goal is not to make the sale right away in the first email. Your goal should be actually to get to the next step in the funnel. That's all you should be focused on here. And as you're optimizing your funnel, you want to make sure that you're tracking and measuring your conversion rates so you can figure out what they are for your specific situation. And this is really important because it helps you understand where to focus your efforts. If you have an especially low conversion rate at one step in the funnel, it might mean that there's a lot of room for improvement that you can do to bring those numbers up, which will help improve your conversion rates across the entire funnel. And I wish I could give you industry standard conversion rates for each of these steps, but the truth is they're all different. It really depends on your industry, your brand, your product, and even the customer type that you're going after. But one thing that's important to note is that conversion rates will decrease as you scale. So if you're starting out in the early days and you're writing these emails manually and you're not getting good conversion rates, then that's something you should fix before you start to scale, because they're only going to get worse as you grow and scale. Because by definition, you're going to be going after potential customers that are not your most ideal target as you're starting to grow. All right, now let's talk about how you can increase open rates. The most effective way to increase your open rates is going to come through better targeting. We talk a lot at YC about making something people want, and targeting is really all about finding the people that want it. And this is the highest leverage thing that you can do to improve your open rates and your responses. Because it's better to send a hundred targeted emails that are going to have a much higher open rate, much higher likelihood to respond, rather than a thousand untargeted emails that are mostly going to be deleted. And the thing is, you should get better at this over time as you learn to qualify your leads better. So this is an iterative process. This is effectively the screen that your recipients are going to see when they're trying to decide if they should open your email or delete it. It's an email client. You basically see the name of the sender and you see the subject line and maybe a tiny preview of that first sentence in the email. So the from in your email should just be your personal name. It's better because it feels like it's coming from a human rather than a company. And the subject should be something that's short, relevant, interesting. Hey, quick question. Can I get your advice? Help a fellow founder. Hello from your company name. These are all great examples that are just really simple. Don't feel overly salesy and feels like, you know, your friend could have written it. And when reaching out to people, I found that the ideal channels to contact are email is usually better.