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👋 Today, I’m sharing some real-world examples of templates that have driven millions in sponsorship revenue.

Easy fuel for naughty hooks aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

Cold email 101

I recently spoke for the newsletter seminar, by the inbox socialites at Who Sponsors Stuff.

The session made me realise that beginner (and experienced) media salespeople easily get caught up in overcomplicating how to sell ads.

So today we’re breaking down the fundamentals of cold emailing and proposals.

Let’s do it.

🚀 Domain Set Up

Whatever you do, don’t, don’t, don’t! Use your main business domain. This is crucial for ALL sales now, but especially so newsletters-first media companies.

Even if you’re sending well-crafted cold emails to the perfect people, it’s nearly inevitable that you’ll get a couple of spam reports or excess bounced. So don’t risk your main digital real estate!

If your main website/email is example.com, buy domains such as readexample.com, example.net, readexample.com, examplepartners.com, and examplemedia.com. You get the point!

I like to use GoDaddy or Namecheap for domains. If you’re doing it at a large scale Mailforge can be a great option.

🚀 Mailbox Set Up

Google technically has the best deliverability/reputation. So setting up various Gmails is a safe bet. Outlook is great of course too.

If you need more mailboxes easily at a good price point, again Mailforge is good.

I typically set up 2 mailboxes per new domain. We cap the number of emails sent to 30-50 per mailbox.

Make sure you warm up all mailboxes for a MINIMUM of 2 weeks.

We use Smartlead. Warmy is also good. Apollo recently relaunched their warm-up feature, I haven’t used it but the fundamentals seem to be good.

🤖 Deliverability

As mentioned, 2-week of good warm-up is essential before starting cold email.

You should also limit the amount of emails that each mailbox is sending. The limit can vary depending on various things. But we stick to 30-50 emails per day per mailbox.

Monitoring deliverability is important. Open rates are a good directional indicator, but for various reasons, they’re not super accurate anymore.

Smartlead is good for this too, but not fantastic.

The best deliverability monitoring tool that I’ve used is Glock Apps, but it is expensive.

✍️ How to write cold email…

Keep. It. Concise.

Get to the point ASAP. Don’t start by justifying your own existence, tell them WHY THEM and WHY NOW.

Talk about their problems and goals. Yes you do have to inevitably talk about your audience, but you need to also mention them.

Finish with a question-based CTA. They get more replies.

These can be as simple as, would you like to learn more? Can I send our media kit? Seem like an interesting audience for company? Are you free next week? And so on…

⏰ Sequencing

3-4 emails to a sequence. After that replies fall off a cliff. Less than that and you’re not doing enough.

Email 1 will usually be the most replied to, that’s normal!

Spaced out every 2-4 days. We do 3. No magic number.

Smartlead is good, especially for agencies. Instantly is good I’ve heard. Apollo is great too.

Don’t forget to use Spintax. It varies between platforms, but usually quite easy! Here’s how to do it in Smartlead. Here’s how to do it in Salesforge.