Cold email outreach | Plant a Flag

Pieterjan Schouppe - Managing Director

Cold email outreach is an outbound sales approach, targeting a potential customer that has no prior connection with your organization. This can be a daunting challenge, so we have created a step-by-step approach.

A man with a megaphone sits in front of a large laptop displaying an icon of a letter

Step 1: Find a list of companies that you want to reach out to. At Plant a Flag, we believe in creating big impacts for small businesses and nonprofits. To find our list of companies for our Canadian office, we used government directories, business directories and indigenous organizations directory. You can use any other directories that you may have access to and can use them to build a relevant database of emails.

Step 2: The second step is to find the decision maker of the companies you are targeting. You need to know who you’re talking to and if they are in a position to make a decision in your favour. The most simple way is to navigate to the ‘about us’ section on their website or look for them on LinkedIn.

Step 3: Guess their email address - this can be a tricky one because not all executives have their email address widely available. You can use tools like Norbert, RocketReach, and Hunter to find their emails and use them in the next step

Step 4: Clean your list by assigning all the values in their relevant columns, removing duplicates, cleaning up the first name, last name, organization name and verify email addresses. You can use tools like Hunter's Email Verifier to check the validity of these email addresses.

Step 5: The next step is to craft and review your email copy and make sure to check it for its spaminess. Some tips when writing your first email is to include who you are, your value proposition and a clear call to action. Less is more.

Step 6: Use bulk emailing softwares like Yet Another Mail Merge for Gmail to automate part of your job. A mail merge software makes it easy to send mass emails with a large degree of customization possible.

Step 7: Send follow-up emails to stay on top of mind after every 2-3 days and create an email sequence where you’re giving free value to your email readers.

For us, that flow looks like this:

- Email 1 - Introduction

- Email 2 - Case study

- Email 3 - Relevant article

- Email 4 - Industry-specific marketing tips

- Email 5 - Friendly break up email

Good luck creating your next cold email campaign!