Cold email is the most hated marketing channel in the world.

Intrusive.

Annoying.

Spammy.

Most people think this way, because they've never seen a good cold email their entire life.

And secretly, they are all craving for one.

Don't take my word for it, hear from people who replied to my outreach:

• “This is an incredible cold email and a punch in the gut, because I've been wasting time on HARO and I wish I knew about you sooner.”

• “Well done on being the first cold email I've ever replied to!”

• “Hi Elvis, Possibly the most impressively targeted sales email I’vereceived this year, thank you.”

• “PressPulse looks pretty cool man, nice work! I seriously NEVER reply to cold outreach - you must be doing something right haha.”

• “Absolutely Brilliant how you hooked, engaged and got me on a trial without me knowing it! Major Brownie points for your acquisition process Elvis, I'm a Fan!”

• “I want to commend you on a solid cold outreach sequence - these are hard to get right. I can't tell you how much cold outreach crap I get every day (being a fellow founder, you probably do as well). I shared your first email with our team because of how well the inbox preview worked (from name, subject and what was visible in the preview) and the strength of the message overall (structuring, level of personalization, specificity of the problem already experienced with HARO, low-friction CTA, etc.).” This one is actually from a copywriting agency owner!! I had the honour of inviting her as a guest author here to buildup (as opposed to breakdown) this exact cold email copy on July 20. Mark your calendar.

• (I keep a running list of compliments on the email itself here.)

Also this week I saw on LinkedIn that a good positive reply rate of cold emails are 1 in 375.

What percentage of positive replies did I get?

1 in 9.

So what's the biggest secret in getting people to love your cold email and buy from you?

Everything starts with list building.

Why generic list is fundamentally flawed

Most people build their list with something like this:

• "CEO at ecomm companies making $1M/yr"

• "small to medium SaaS companies in the united states"

• "sales managers working in companies size 50-1000"

While this kind of targeting can work (1 in 375 maybe), it's fundamentally flawed, and it's the reason why people hate cold emails.

Treating all your customers the same like this is like serving everyone the same dish at a restaurant.

People fucking hate it.

Instead,

To make a sale, you need their trust.

To gain their trust, show that you understand them.

To prove that, demonstrate you grasp their deepest dreams and pains.

That's what list-building is all about.

Finding 19,000 HARO users for PressPulse

Ok Elvis, what does dreams and pains have to do with list building?

To show you what I mean, let me walk you through how I built an email list that allowed PressPulse to scale from $50/mo to $5k/mo in just 6 months.

Finding HARO users was my biggest challenge. Because the product is hyper-niche, I first need to convince people about online marketing, then digital PR, then SEO, then HARO, and finally PressPulse.

Most people are not even problem-aware about SEO, making it nearly impossible to sell them what I built.

I reached out to many people on the HARO forums and social media. Manually read their profile, manually write the pitch and build special demo pages for them. It was lots of hours invested with little to show. It didn’t seem like I was going to take this business beyond a hobby.

The breakthrough hit when I tackled this question:

What's the universal dream of every HARO user?

To get featured.

And what's the outcome?

They get featured!

When I realized this, I felt both genius and foolish all at once.

If I could just find all the people featured on these publications, I'd have my dream email list.

So each HARO question is something like this:

• Query: "Quantum Computing and AI: A Perfect Match?"

• Media Outlet: "Information Week"

  

  A HARO query about AI and Quantum computing

If you put all this into Google in a month or so, you can use Google to find this exact article when it’s published.

From there, you can use AI to mine the article to find the exact people quoted. And guess what, they must have used HARO to get featured.

Then using a person’s full name and company information, you can use tools like DataGMA to find the person’s email.

BINGO!

If you find 3 people on each article, multiplied by 50 questions asked per day, multiplied by 365 days a year, multiplied by 15 years, you'll find tens of thousands of people invested in HARO. You'll even know who the most featured person is!

You might think doing this would require hiring 10 assistants and banging your head against the wall for 2 years. But in 2024, all you need is an AI agent.

Below is the pipeline I built in Clay, where all the magic is orchestrated. You can use Clay to build AI-agents to scrape the web and research just about anything. Then mix and match that information with more data providers to get even more data.

(Stay tuned for a deep dive into Clay. It absolutely deserves its own spotlight.)

A rough breakdown of how this pipeline works:

• Start with a list of HARO queries

• Search for published articles on Google

• Collect the article from top search results

• Use AI-agents to find people featured, collect names and websites.

• Use name and website to find the person’s email from 6 different data providers.

• Combine to get one email.

• Use another AI-agent to research the company website.

• Use all of the above data to create a hyper-personalized email.

See what I did there? I started from my target users’ common desire of wanting to get featured, and just followed the thread to find them where they are.

It’s like a Sherlock Holmes movie! Unraveling clues and patterns about your target, understanding their behaviours, preferences, and online presence, you can effectively zero in on all potential users that align with your product or service.

Today, I challenge you to put on your detective hat.

To follow the thread.

To find your customers.

To build an email list.

To let this email list be your biggest distribution leverage no one can copy.

You might say this only works for this one use-case.

Sure you can say that, the technique may not generalize, and obviously wouldn’t apply to 100% businesses.

But the exact same strategy can be used to create a powerful email list for any company.

In fact I’m going to prove it to you next on how you can build hyper-targeted email lists using the same strategy.

On Tuesday I sent an offer to build a 1000-lead list for free for one of the subscribers here and 2k people on X. Over 50 people took me up on it with crazy interesting businesses they are running. (Thank you so much for all those who did! I’m still working on replying to all 40 people with at least some ideas but it could take some time..)

Was actually planning on talking about one more product today, but decided to show you 3 more examples on how I'd think about list-building for totally different products/services in next week’s issue. Here's what I have lined up:

• Rewritewith.ai - SaaS - Chrome extension to create engaging comments on LinkedIn. (For this I’ve got something both my marketing and computer science professors would enjoy, I think you will too)

• BoringLaunch.com - DFY service - submit your startup to 100+ directories.

• getsuperpress.com - Agency - WordPress site management subscription.

(The 3 examples above are now published here.)

p.s. Should you wish to discuss any cold email strategies or are interested in having your product showcased with its tailored list-building blueprint next Saturday, feel free to reply and share what you're building with some detail. I’ll do my best to help since Sherlock-list-building is my new found hobby now.

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