how to write the perfect cold email

to turn total strangers into paying customers.

(bright electronic music)

Hey, it's Patrick Dang here.

Welcome to my channel, where we're gonna talk

about all things sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship.

Before we go ahead and get started with this video,

make sure to give it a like, subscribe,

and turn on notifications.

Now during my time as a sales rep in Silicon Valley

working at Oracle and another Y Combinator-backed startup,

I sent thousands, literally, thousands of cold emails

to generate countless of meetings,

but I know in the beginning, it can be very frustrating

when you're sending out your first campaigns

and nobody is really responding.

And here's the thing, after coaching thousands of people

around the globe on how to write cold emails

that generate meetings, the reason for why most people fail

is because, number one, they have a little bit of an ego

and they think they're really good at writing cold emails,

which they're not.

Number two, they think that their product and service

is so great that everyone

should automatically just take a meeting with them.

Obviously, this does not work.

So what I wanna do is show you a simple

but very effective way to write your cold emails

to skyrocket your response rates

so that you can start turning strangers into customers,

and make sure you watch into the end,

because I'm gonna give you my special cold email template

that you can use for yourself.

All right, so here's what we're gonna do first.

First, I'm gonna give you an example of what not to do,

and I'm gonna show you an example

of someone who sent a real email to me,

and I also changed a couple texts,

changed the person's name, changed the person company,

just leave it anonymous, but for the most part,

this is a real email that someone sent

and we're gonna break it down

and show you why it doesn't work,

and we're gonna show you what actually works.

All right, so let's get into it, so, this person started off

by saying hi, Patrick.

Crazy times, huh?

And that's obviously because of the Corona

going on right now, and this person says,

I heard online learning is on the rise now.

What about you?

Is it a good time to strengthen your R&D?

Well, right off the bat, I have no idea

what he means by strengthen your R&D,

so I'm not really sure what he wants.

Now he says, I'm John from Demo-Soft web agency,

glad to meet you.

My point is pretty simple.

Would you like to get benefit from our experience

in the online learning domain and decent developers?

If any, if you are anything like ready

to a discuss potential partnerships, just drop a line.

Kind regards, John.

Okay, so breaking this down,

I have no idea what this guy does

or what value he can bring to me, right?

Normally, if you write an email to someone,

you're trying to offer them something,

but I actually have no idea what he has to offer.

It's too vague, and there's no reason

for why I will respond to this email.

A second thing is that the grammar's really off,

so maybe he's from another country,

and maybe English is not his first language,

and I understand that, but if you are writing to,

let's say, a Western audience or a Western company,

you definitely want to make sure

that you use some kind of grammar check

to make sure you're writing your email properly

or else people aren't gonna take you seriously.

So if you're writing emails like this, don't worry about it

because I'm gonna show you how to fix this up real quick

using what I call the Pain Formula.

Now the Pain Formula is one of my best cold email templates

that you can basically use in any industry

no matter what it is that you're selling,

and it's super simple because we're gonna break it down

into four simple parts.

The first one is having a relevant intro,

introducing yourself and what you do

or why you guys should be connected.

Number two, we're gonna talk about the customer's pain.

What pains does this person experience?

And number three, solution, how do you solve those pains?

And finally, you're gonna have the call to action.

What do you want them to do next,

and you want to make sure every single one

of these elements is extremely clear.

So let's go ahead and give you an example of the email

that I wrote, and you can kind of get inspiration from it

and use some of the elements in your own emails.

Now, in this example, I'm going to pretend

that I have a some kind of marketing agency

or a content management agency,

and I'm writing an email to myself, right?

So I'm this person trying to sell to Patrick Dang, right?

This is how I would write an email to myself.

So let's go ahead and get into it, right?

The first part, like I said before, is the relevant intro,

so I'll say, hey Patrick,

just checked out your latest YouTube video on,

and then whatever that video is about,

and I thought it was great, right?

Very relevant because I'm posting a lot of YouTube videos.

If this guy understands I'm doing that,

he is on the same page as me.

Now, number two, we're gonna go

into the pain section, right?

Keep diving deep into what is the person's pain.

Hopefully, you find a really deep pain

so you can solve it, so I can say something like,

after watching the video, I checked out your website

and noticed you weren't running a blog yet, which I'm not.

With all the high quality content you've been putting out

on YouTube recently, it's surprising

you haven't started converting those videos into blog posts

to capture more organic traffic to your website.

Now this is actually something I've been thinking about.

I've been putting out all these videos,

but I also have a website, but I don't have a blog,

and it would be really easy for me to turn my YouTube videos

into articles or blog posts that people can read,

and I can generate traffic and make money from that.

So if someone wrote me this email, it's really relevant

because it's exactly what I'm thinking about,

and if they have something to solve this problem for me,

I am a lot more willing to take a meeting with them, right?

But it's all about context,

understanding who your customer is

and what pains they have.

Now, the third part is all about the solution.

How are you gonna solve these problems?

So, in this email, I'm gonna say, now, if you're interested,

my company helps YouTube content creators like yourself

start highly ranked blogs using your YouTube content

you already made and converting them

into high quality blogs.

Best of all, we handle all the tech and content management,

making it extremely simple for you.

Some of our clients include client A,

client B, and client C.

So here, what I'm doing is I first started

with the pain, right?

You're not getting this extra traffic

by turning your YouTube videos into blog posts,

then I'm providing a solution.

If that's something you're interested in,

I can do that for you, super simple, super easy.

All you have to do is say yes, right?

I try to make it as easy as possible for the other person

to understand what I'm talking about,

and agree to take a meeting with me,

and the last little thing I did there

is I included some clients that I worked with, right?

So what you want to do in this situation,

if you have past clients relevant to the prospects

you are currently reaching out to,

you want to name drop them.

You don't really have to say what you did for them

because it would be too long.

All you want to do is mention,

hey, I worked with these people.

They're similar to people to, what you're doing,

so it's very relevant, and if I see that,

I'm like, oh, he worked with these people that I admire?

Well, I want to take a meeting with this guy, right?

So now that you've got the solution down,

the next final step, and this is where most people

get it wrong, is having a clear call to action,

meaning, once somebody reads your email,

what's the next step you want them to take?

And naturally, for cold email, that next step

is to ask for a meeting, so I would say something

like, so if you're interested in learning more

about how we can help you get more organic traffic

with blogging, let me know what your calendar looks like,

and you could also have a variation

where, let's say, you have something like Calendly,

and people can schedule a time on your calendar.

You can end it with feel free

to schedule a time on my calendar, right?

Whatever works for you, but if you do it this way,

like in the example, if you just ask them,

let me know what your calendar looks like,

usually they'll give you a time and day

on when they are free, and then you schedule a meeting

through there via email, and then you sign it off,

best, John, or whatever your name is, right?

So now that we've kind of put the whole thing together,

if you kinda look at it,

this is basically the Pain Formula structure

that I showed you in the beginning.

We have the relevant intro, we understand the person's pain,

and we really make it hurt,

so that when we provide our solution,

it makes it a lot more appealing.

Finally, once they understand the solution,

you have a clear call to action.

Don't say something like, hey, drop a line

because that doesn't make any sense.

What do you mean, drop a line?

You just want to make it clear.

Let me know what your calendar looks like,

or feel free to schedule a time on my calendar to talk more.

So, you don't have to exactly copy the words

that I'm using.

You can paraphrase it or use your own style of language,

but for the most part, the main important thing here

is to follow the framework of the relevant intro,

pain, solution, and call to action.

Now, if you do these simple things,

just following this template, your response rates

may skyrocket just because you have this template in place.

Most people go in, they think they're great

at writing cold emails, and they just write whatever

and it doesn't work because they don't have a formula

to have predictable results,

but I've sent these kind of emails,

literally thousands of these emails,

I got tons of meanings from it, and I'm positive

that you can also do it too if you follow this framework.

So with that said,

that's gonna be my cold email Pain Formula template

that you can use for yourself.

Now if you enjoyed this video, make sure to give it a like,

subscribe, and turn on notifications, and let me know

in the comments if you enjoy these kind of cold email videos

or prospecting videos, and I'd be happy

to make more for you guys, and one more thing,