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.