How to Make Cold Email Affordable and Effective

Charles Cormier [00:00:00]:
As soon as you start a cold email, you need to not be identified as just another spammer. You need to interrupt patterns. You need to start with first name. No, hey, for example, straight up first name, right? And then go with your offer and be unconventional. 

Jeffro [00:00:25]:
Welcome back to digital dominance. If there’s ever a marketing strategy that lived up to its name, it’s cold outreach. Just mentioning the words cold email sends shivers down the spines of many entrepreneurs. It’s super intimidating and we avoid it because we’ve all had bad experiences receiving cold emails. But there are plenty of successful entrepreneurs who are doing cold outreach very well. Remember, when someone posts their email address on their profile or on their website, that means they are okay with you reaching out to them. They may not be hoping to get pitched all the time, but they are putting themselves out there and that presents an opportunity. My guest today is Charles Cormier, and he gets 100 meetings per week using unconventional cold email tactics that leverage AI.

Jeffro [00:01:07]:
He knows what works and what doesn’t, and he has refined the process to make cold email predictable and scalable. He founded a company called Top Leads where he helped set up these systems for his clients over and over again. He’s a true entrepreneur, always building and growing and looking forward to the next challenge. So welcome to the show, Charles. I’m excited for our conversation today.

Charles Cormier [00:01:25]:
Thank you, Jeff.

Jeffro [00:01:27]:
So Charles, how did you end up specializing in cold email?

Charles Cormier [00:01:30]:
Okay, long story. Ten years ago, founded my first startup, was in nootropic. These pills that you take to have better memory, concentration and brain performances. Shut that one down to the ground. Founded a first agency with my first mentor, which was this really od and unconventional guy. This trailblazer obviously had its flaws, like most of them, but I learned tons from this guy. Started an agency with him, website building. That was then adwords, then shifted to call centers and Facebook ads.

Charles Cormier [00:02:06]:
Call centers. I had 200 employees shut that one down. Went to LinkedIn outreach. LinkedIn outreach. It started being limited by LinkedIn from 500 connections a day to 50. So I was like, what do I do then? My business going to crap again, as business and startups usually do, by the way, they don’t live forever. You always need to reinvent yourself. I turned to cold email and there was this tool called Apollo.

Charles Cormier [00:02:33]:
It was all brand new. I researched a tool, tried out at scale, sent my first email, had my first replies, closed my first deals off it, and then I was like, can I scale that? And I’ve been using Sendgrid for a while for marketing emails. And I discovered that I could plug Sendrid into Apollo and send up to nowadays 500k emails a month and get a bunch of meetings. In my case, it’s 100. In my clients it’s five, it’s ten. And scale that to the sky, basically. So never looked back. Since then, scale my prices.

Charles Cormier [00:03:10]:
I started charging from my Facebook ads agency’s days, $300 a month. By the way, that Facebook ads agency scaled to 30k. Nowadays I charge more around five to ten k. Plan to never stop charging more because it’s so efficient and derives so much money. So that’s the shorthand story. I also use cold email to scale my own little empire to create this startup ecosystem. So it’s not only for sales calls, it’s also for podcast calls. I reach out to you that way, for partnerships, for finding co founders, for investing in companies.

Charles Cormier [00:03:46]:
It’s just the best front end strategy ever to get advanced into your business ambitions.

Jeffro [00:03:54]:
So what made cold email so much more appealing? Because it sounds like you did a lot of other things. First, different strategies, but now you’ve landed on cold email, it worked. And so you’re sticking with that, right?

Charles Cormier [00:04:05]:
Okay, call center, no one wants to be interrupted. Have this iPhone ringing like, who’s that? Okay, no, bye. That is not efficient, right? LinkedIn outreach from 500 to 50 connections a day. LinkedIn is pretty efficient, right? Because you see my face, it’s like, oh, okay, this guy’s about this and that. I will accept it. Nowadays. By the way, most of LinkedIn messages is bull crap. You’ll just go up and it’s all sales.

Charles Cormier [00:04:38]:
LinkedIn ads, which is another on the list. If you’re into b two b, it’s quite expensive. You may generate leads for like $500. It’s $600. While with cold email you can do it at $510. Just unequal. People are not about to stop using emails, right? It’s a wonderful technology. It pretty much scales forever.

Charles Cormier [00:04:59]:
Sometimes there’s people and assholes trying to control it, like Google tried to do. Eight days ago, Google and Yahoo started limiting deliverability. That didn’t do crap to my campaigns. My open rate is still high, but other than that, you don’t have that oversight, right? When I was running my Facebook ads agency, Facebook meta and March banned me all the time for no know their policy and blah, blah, blah. Quite bad. Like controlling that ecosystem and putting policy and having them respected. I think they were just overstringent over pretty much everything. They had investors to please.

Charles Cormier [00:05:44]:
They didn’t want to get into trouble after Cambridge Analytica. So cold email, you don’t have a platform telling you what you can do and what you cannot do, which makes it the perfect tool for a libertarian like me.

Jeffro [00:05:56]:
Right, that makes sense, and I don’t foresee that changing either. I did see on your LinkedIn profile you’ve launched over 2500 cold email AI sequences, so you clearly have some very reliable systems in place to make that happen. Can you talk to us about that a little bit?

Charles Cormier [00:06:12]:
Yeah. Apollo 10,000 contacts a month for $100. Send grids $20 a month. You plug both together. There’s an integration section in Apollo. You buy five domains, five.com, right, from namecheap, $10 each per year. You host them there too. That’s $35 a year.

Charles Cormier [00:06:34]:
So the total tech stack of what I just mentioned is $130 per month and can generate you about 50 to hundreds of leads, that is per month. Now, there’s many components to that, and there’s many systems at play. My first and favorite system is always the human mind, human psychology, how humans think. What are their pains? How can I help solve their pains, right? How can I add value in the short form email that I will send them? But even before that, how can I interrupt their patterns, right? How can they get me in their mailbox? And how can I get my email open by them? The headline, right, is the first thing. And then as soon as you start a cold email, you need to not be identified as just another spammer. You need to interrupt patterns. You need to start with first name. No, hey, for example, straight up first name, right? And then go with your offer.

Charles Cormier [00:07:34]:
And be unconventional. This might be a question. This might be shooting them a stat. This might be trying to poke the bear with controversial statement. This might be swearing, this might be making a joke. This might be a gif that you send them. Probably not in the first email, so that you don’t get in the spam with gifs and images, but interrupt these patterns. And then once you did that and they don’t identify you as this silly salesperson, then you can go with an offer, an offer that appeals to them, that’s full of value.

Charles Cormier [00:08:11]:
And I send you this report about the 56 trends in the health tech HR sector, and they’ll be like, okay, in the podcast case, I send a bunch of podcasters lists for you, for you to interview a bunch of other podcasters that could be interesting and to get you invited on other podcasts that’s full of value. So you need to think about an offer that is really good, and thinking about that offer and finding pain points may take ten years. Is this super long process. What my systems allows to do is that you have this lab to test out on 10,000 contacts every month through 50,000 emails if your offer has a potential product market fit. Most business owners nowadays, they just don’t stand a chance, right? They think that sending tree emails will make them rich or will confirm their business idea. That’s not how it works. When you’re dealing against sharks like me in this market that are obsessed with product market fits and obsessed with adding value and interrupting patterns and being different and getting replies, it’s super hard to get yourself noticed. The mistake that most make, they just write super professional emails, oh my reputation will stay safe.

Charles Cormier [00:09:27]:
They just dip their toe in the cold email waters while you need to jump in. It’s like a cold plunge. If you’ve been to cold plunge, dude, you just need to jump into the thing. When you have water there, you can go out and try to stay there for at least 30 seconds. And the payoff is huge, right? The payoff in the cold email case is hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, even millions. You can get business deals brokered, you can have people invest and acquire businesses. It’s pretty limitless. And then you stack AI on top of that.

Charles Cormier [00:10:06]:
It’s just an unfair advantage.

Jeffro [00:10:09]:
Are you going for that pitch in the first email or are you just leading with the value first and then following up with an offer?

Charles Cormier [00:10:16]:
Usually value first. Sometimes I follow up with a bitch like hey, here’s what I do. And for example, the free podcasters list, right? Wish I could somewhat share my screen, but basically we first offer the list and then after that they reply yes, I send them the list and then at the second reply I mention what I do. So usually I don’t go with the pitch on the first email, but sometimes I like adding a PS line. Like PS. I do cold email as well. If you need help reaching out to these folks.

Jeffro [00:10:47]:
Got it. So it’s a little more subtle and it doesn’t feel as salesy that way because you’re leading with value. Do you test your headlines before you send them out? I know there’s headline optimizer tools out there. Or is it just mainly test your 1st 10,000, change it, tweak it, et cetera?

Charles Cormier [00:11:02]:
Yeah, the weirder the better and the shorter the better. So no AI tool at this moment can tell me if this is going to be good. First, most AI engines, they’re woke. Like GPT is woke. So that means that anything that’s edgy, controversial, or spicy, it’s going to tell you not to do it. It’s not going to help you rate it. There is a prompt that can have you have GPT, rate your emails and so forth. There is grok AI by Elon that’s a bit less woke as well.

Charles Cormier [00:11:38]:
But for now, I just test these at scale. I may do an A B test on Apollo, and at this stage of which I’m at right now, I don’t need these tools to test out. I just go really OD. My process is that I talk to a bunch of people on a daily basis through the podcast. I talk to my clients and I write down ideas. So yesterday I talked with that AI client of mine, and he mentioned that Sam Altman’s concept of $1,000,000,000.01 man business would be a thing. So I tested that concept. One person, billion dollar business as a headline.

Charles Cormier [00:12:20]:
And yeah, got a bunch of opens, right? You also need to think of your ICP pretty much all the time. And knowing your ICP, just like product market fit, may take multiple years. My ICP is a weird person, a serial entrepreneur that has a bunch of money that does believe in AI, right? So I don’t care if I offend people by telling them that employeeship won’t scale. For example. What I want to do though, is get these golden nuggets. Clients of mine and the billion dollar business, one man business or one woman business can directly tag in their brand because they’re like, oh, okay, $1 billion just for me. And I believe in AI. So think about your end audience when you write these headlines.

Charles Cormier [00:13:10]:
And don’t be scared to not hook with people. That wouldn’t be a fit anyways with you, right?

Jeffro [00:13:16]:
Yeah. Knowing your ideal customer profile is huge in order to make it effective, because one thing that’s effective with this group won’t be effective for that group. So you can’t just copy what someone else did if you’re in a different market segment. Does Apollo help you warm up your domains, or do you have to do that manually?

Charles Cormier [00:13:33]:
So, yeah, another misconception in my industry. First, there’s a bunch of kids offering cold emails out there with whatever tool out there that’s not Apollo. First, pick Apollo. Okay, that’s the right choice. Any other tool out there is noise. Apollo got half a billion in funding. They’ve got one main competitor, and that’s clay. And it’s almost unrelated to what they’re doing.

Charles Cormier [00:13:57]:
But people that understand business will understand that clay will eventually eat Apollo’s lunch. Everything else is noise. Apollo sangria. Right. So you go with these two tools at. Yeah, the emails that you send, they need to be personalized in a way that no other businesses would. So when it comes to warm ups, basically you buy these five mailbox on namecheap. But warm up is not really a thing in my world.

Charles Cormier [00:14:30]:
Why? Because the first emails that I send are great. And that means that this is the warm up in itself. Plus you might want to send a campaign that’s a tip for everyone listening with podcasting ones, right? Everyone should have a podcast. Nowadays, podcasting is like the new way of selling and everyone’s going to be on the bandwagon in a couple of years. So if you ask people to come on a podcast and invite them straight up, who’s going to refuse you? Who’s the asshole that’s going to flag you as spam? No one. So your open rate should be true to roof, aka 70, 80% from the get go without needing a warm up. Apollo had a warm up feature. They took it down because they just realized it was useless.

Charles Cormier [00:15:15]:
Now you have all these kids nowadays that claim that you need to be warming up stuff, but that’s because they use outdated tools or outdated mental oss or technology. So I don’t do warm ups, but I do keep my emails under. First it’s 50 emails a week, right? Then it’s 55, then it’s 60. And eventually I found that the ceiling was around 150 emails a day. Sorry. So 150 emails a day. And every week you increase by five from 50 to 150. When you reach 150, you stop.

Jeffro [00:15:49]:
Got it? Well, that’s interesting to hear. And for those listening, if you are new to cold email, the reason you would traditionally want to warm up a domain is so that it doesn’t get flagged as spam. Because if this new domain starts sending 200 emails a week and a lot of people are marking it junk, then the mail servers are going to say, hey, this is spam, stop delivering this stuff and you won’t even know that half of your emails aren’t getting through. So I like what you said, charles. Just make sure your emails are good, right? Do your homework up front and then you’re not going to have that problem. So that’s good to hear.

Charles Cormier [00:16:21]:
So just a recap. You start at 50 emails per mailbox, right? You have five mailboxes that you plug in, Apollo, and then gradually every week you increase by five until you reach 150 emails a day. So usually that does it. And it’s not because there’s strict rules, right? Like most of the spam filters are AI based nowadays. It’s just that you have more probability of three people from the same company to flag you, and that would be destructive to your reputation. Also, most of the secret, as mentioned at the beginning of this call, is Sendrit. Sendrit is SMTP as a service. It’s deliverability as a service.

Charles Cormier [00:17:00]:
So they’re the world class. They’re the very best at getting your email in the mailbox, which is why Apollo and Sendrid combo is at least 50% of the equation.

Jeffro [00:17:10]:
Got it. And that makes sense. So, I mean, you’ve given us some really good keys to a successful cold email campaign. From a tech stack perspective, it’s Apollo and Sendgrid, and you’ve given us kind of the quantities of how you want to start. What else would a business owner need to know to have a successful cold email campaign on the back end? Follow up, follow through. Once you’ve made that offer, how do you deal with those sort of things?

Charles Cormier [00:17:34]:
Yeah, follow ups. I have a bunch of contrarian thesis on pretty much everything and follow ups. In my case, in Apollo, you save the contacts, right? So me, I constantly add these saved contacts to new campaigns because I target founders and ceos. So I don’t really need to ever think about follow ups. I just add the same founder to literally like 15 of my sequences because I write good shit that interrupts patterns all the time. So I don’t really think about that. When it comes to follow ups, though, I like setting up automations. They’re called plays in Apollo.

Charles Cormier [00:18:07]:
So if that person opened my email three times, I’m going to send them an email like, hey, seen that you were potentially interested there. Let’s book something. Or, hey, you replied to my email a couple of months ago. I think we should book something. So that’s my two cent. I’m everywhere. So I’m omnichannel. I do podcasting.

Charles Cormier [00:18:27]:
They’ll hear about myself there. They’ll hear about myself on LinkedIn. I do LinkedIn outreach. I’m connected with pretty much every CEO out there, literally to a one or two degree, right? Because I’ve interviewed the very best in the CEO community, so I don’t need to follow up that much. You’ll hear about Charles Cormay sooner or later. What else in terms of cold email? Keep on. Like, the greatest flaw that I see, Jeff, is mindset. People are fucking scared to send emails nowadays.

Charles Cormier [00:18:59]:
They think that reputation is a thing. It’s not reputation is what you invent. Reputation was made out of the corporate world, right? Like Apple and all that. I don’t believe corporations are going to scale. So I’ve got a bunch of odd thoughts here that we could talk hours, but just go and send your stuff and experiment. Especially as a like no one remembers who emailed them last week with that shitty email. Your first emails, they’re going to be shitty. But how will you learn if they’re shitty or not? You’re certainly not going to comment on that because you’re no expert.

Charles Cormier [00:19:37]:
The market is going to tell you if it’s shitty. So you need to be sending stuff without fear. You’ll get a couple of fuck offs, but at least you’re going to get data. And from that data you’re going to get better and better and better and 1% better every day. That’s 365% better at the end of the year. So maybe you’ll have a shot against me one day if you have that mindset. The problem is that everyone is so conservative nowadays. They’re so scared they don’t want to launch anything.

Charles Cormier [00:20:07]:
So have that mindset, have that experimenter’s mindset and don’t let anyone detract you out of that. And once you have that, you can just unleash your full creativity on Apollo. So I got insights from the questions you asked me, right? I’m taking mental notes. These mental notes are going to be on the Google Docs and then I’m going to test out new emails from this podcast today. It’s like this virtuous system that never stops. I’m also going to create LinkedIn content out of it. How can I lose if I do that?

Jeffro [00:20:37]:
Exactly. If you’re in the game and paying attention, you’re learning lessons and you’re moving forward. Can you give us some numbers just so people have a reasonable expectation of what’s a good conversion rate? How do they know if they think I’m failing? Or how do they know if they’re doing well?

Charles Cormier [00:20:54]:
Yeah, the classic 1% positive reply rate. But me, I’m operating on so many levels that are not directly sales related. I have some complex marketing funnels in which I touch base. A lot of times it’s not really an indicative. If you’re talking about open rates, you’ll want to look. If you’re hitting scale right, scale is 100k emails a month. You’re going to want to hit at least 40% open rates and up. If it gets under 30, you’re starting to get in the spam, you’re starting to have a big problem.

Charles Cormier [00:21:28]:
1% positive reply rate, like half of which it convert into meetings. Right? So 0.5 and close rate. Nowadays, if we’re talking about agencies or b, two B SaaS, around 20%. Highly variable. Sell cycle has been stretching, if that’s even a word, in the last couple of months, like extremely. So we were thinking of, yeah, if you’re selling a product around the ten k ticket size, you’d be thinking of a sell cycle that goes to 120 days. Back then it was like 60 in average. So the market is not super hot right now, which is why you absolutely need such a system under $30 a month.

Charles Cormier [00:22:13]:
I mean, who doesn’t have that in the western world? And that system can allow you to really find a product market fit, which is pretty much the only shot you have at making money as an entrepreneur, if that is the chosen path.

Jeffro [00:22:26]:
Right. You just let that keep running for you day in, day out. And yeah, that’s a great way to go. And I love that it’s so affordable, too. Obviously, you got to put in a little time up front to set everything up, and you put in a little thought to figure out your headlines or your angles of how you’re going to provide value to people. But once you do that, you start sending it and yeah, you’re just going to see a lot of positive effects from that over time.

Charles Cormier [00:22:49]:
How do you integrate cold email in your systems? Jeff?

Jeffro [00:22:53]:
I’ve dabbled over time. There was a while where I was doing a lot more cold email campaigns. I was using a different platform. I think I was using Woodpecker, which there are some parts of it I liked. But I recently started looking at Apollo and I’m probably going to start switching to that because I really like the way they do it and how they have a lot of things integrated together. So I was listening very intently to your suggestions there as well because I’m going to use it for myself. So I appreciate that. But we are coming up on our time today.

Jeffro [00:23:22]:
So, Charles, I really appreciate you joining me here. I can tell, you know, cold email inside and out. You put in the reps. Hopefully the people listening can take what you’ve given us as a jumping off point and know this is your sign. Guys, go start. It might be bad at first, but you’ll figure it out. So if you want to go connect with Charles, we’ll put his links in the show notes on his LinkedIn profile. He also has a list of moonshot ideas.

Jeffro [00:23:46]:
He calls them starshots, but I love people thinking big, and they’re really interesting. So take a look at that last question for you, Charles. What’s the most important thing that you want the audience to take away from this episode?

Charles Cormier [00:23:57]:
Well, first, if you’re not into entrepreneurship, jump into entrepreneurship. So I’m all about entrepreneurship propaganda. Entrepreneurs are not born, they’re created. So that’s my most important message. That’s the impact I want to have on this planet Earth. You absolutely need to become an entrepreneur, else you don’t have a shot against AI and oligarchs like me. So go start a business. Okay? And there’s no coming back.

Charles Cormier [00:24:22]:
Avoid that. Nine to five thinking a job is not going to save you. It’s only diminishing returns from now, right in the AI age. Second, have that experimental mindset. And third, the way to do it is cold email.

Jeffro [00:24:37]:
All right, I love that. Thanks again for being here, Charles, and thanks to all of you for listening. Think big, play big, and I’ll see you in the next episode.