Sell Hack Blog

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7 Ways to Stay CAN-SPAM Compliant

For those of us who send unsolicited emails and wonder or have been accused of sending SPAM, here's 7 ways to ensure your are NOT sending spam. 

 There are more details in a post I did on LinkedIn here: linkd.in/1GcWUPr

tl;dr below

Don’t use false or misleading contact info

Don’t use deceptive subject lines

If your email is an ad, then label it as such

Tell the recipient your address

Give recipients a way to opt out

Honor opt outs

Monitor what others are doing on your behalf

For more info, check out this PDF from the FTC.  Now, go find some emails and try this out!

- Ryan O’Donnell

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2 Minute Subject Line Drill

Subject lines are the gateway to your cold email’s success. You could have the best email list, a personalized ‘hook’, low-commitment call to action, and a value prop that induces fear or solves the prospect’s problems but if your subject line sucks, your email doesn’t even have a chance at getting acted on.

If you haven’t spent a lot of time analyzing your subject lines, don’t worry, you are not alone.  Most folks send email thinking about how to position themselves or their company as a superior option to the prospect. We call this the ‘why me’ method and it’s the completely wrong approach. ‘Why me’ subject lines highlight what’s important to the sender and read like this: ‘sales acceleration software’ or ‘website design services’ or ‘partnering with xyz company’.

PRO TIP: Starting today, pay attention to all the unsolicited emails you receive so you can learn from them. Every cold email sent to me goes in a ‘Vendor Cold Email’ folder and is tagged with ‘opened’, ‘bad’, or ‘replied’ tags. Try it. You may be surprised that the emails you flag as ‘bad’ sound a lot like the emails you are sending. 

Here’s a two minute drill to create subject lines that get opened. Open a blank document or grab the google doc template here and make a copy to edit. 

Goal: Get the email opened (don't change this, this should always be your first goal when thinking about subject lines)

What's the purpose of this email? Download an app to help take a nap without falling into a deep sleep. (change to your CTA Outcome)

Micro-Conversion (CTA): Take a quiz on sleeping habits

Subject Line Brainstorm: Start Writing (2 minutes max). Don't over think this. Just write. If you need more than 10, then keep going.

Subject 1: Take a nap

Subject 2: Take a nap & grow your business

Subject 3: qq - do you take naps?

Subject 4: get paid to take naps

Subject 5: 4 hour nap week

Subject 6: how to work less, sleep more

Subject 7: I took 5 naps last week and increased productivity 300%

Subject 8: Mark Zuckerburg takes naps, do you?

Subject 9: Put your business on auto-pilot and take a nap

Subject 10: Learn how to be more productive by taking naps 

Now, go to your email account and send yourself 1 message for each of the subject lines. Look at the emails you sent yourself on your computer and phone. 

How do they look? Which email(s) would you open? Show them to other folks on your team and take note of their feedback. Pick two subject lines for your first A/B test and start writing your email. 

Bonus: Here’s the first draft (longer than most emails I send, but remember it’s a draft). 

Hi {FName},

You had to have that second cup of coffee today, right? Ever wonder why some people just seem to have more energy than anyone else in the room?

You feel tired because your body isn't getting the sleep it needs to recover and prepare for the next day. Don't worry, you are not alone, most people don't get enough sleep.

Business leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Warrent Buffet share 3 things in common: they sleep less than 4 hours a night, run the largest companies in the world, AND they all take naps! If you want to be more productive at work, start taking naps. 

Take this short quiz to see if your body shares the same nap taking ability as Bill Gates!

Cheers, Ryan from SellHack 

ps - want to know the formula we use when writing emails? Claim a spot for our ‘Email Like a Boss’ crash course here.

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We geek out on all things email. Subject lines are the gatekeeper!

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Wild that email has a $40 ROI almost 2x any ofther channel. This is from 2013 MarkTheMarketer post.

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8 Ways to Hack With SellHack

1. Hack Your Industry Conference

Ever go to a conference where they give you a list of attendees but no contact info? Or worse yet, did they give you a list of companies and people’s titles from the companies then try to sell you the contact info for more than you spent on the conference in the first place? If you have a list of attendees, you can upload the list here to automatically find all the valid email addresses.

2. Mine Twitter for Leads

Most people stick to LinkedIn for prospect list building, but our most creative customers are starting to use Twitter as a place to find fresh leads. You can search twitter and build a list of prospects by going here . Pro Tip: Have a conference or event coming up that you may or may not attend? You can search the #hashtag, build a list of people who are using the #hashtag and email them without ever having to set up a booth or scan badges.

3. Clean Up Your CRM

Ever caught yourself saying something like: “the data in our CRM is old”, “this phone number doesn’t work” “the company got acquired” or “I just called someone who’s been retired for a year.” CRM contact data decays somewhere in the vicinity of 2.8% to 5.5% per month. You can upload your CRM contact data to SellHack. We’ll automatically 1) find email addresses if they are missing for a contact and 2) verify all existing email addresses you have on file. 

4. Test a New Market

Have a hunch about a new market segment that would be perfect to sell in to but you don’t know where to get started? Go build a new prospect list in List Builder then write an email with a simple/low-commitment Call To Action while we automatically find all the email addresses. Then send individual emails or use a marketing automation tool like Outreach.io. If you don’t hear back after your first email, keep following up with the prospect every few days.

5. (re)Segment Your Prospect List

Do all of your prospecting emails have the same value proposition or Call To Action? Think about the company where you work for a minute. Does the CEO have the same concerns or motivations as an Account Executive or even a VP of Marketing? Probably not. So why are you emailing the same thing to all of these people. Re-segment your prospect lists to get really granular on the target company and job title profile you are targeting. Figure out what scares each prospect group, create custom emails for each, and watch your response rate increase.

6. Automate Your Email Verification

If your business is expanding and it’s time to step increase the number of prospects or leads you produce on a weekly basis, it’s time to look at List Builder or our Batch Upload. Need more help? Send us a note if you want to learn more about our custom list building service. ps - we even help some clients write, send, optimize and track their emails.

7. Look For a New Job

Earlier in my career, my job search process looked like this. 1) Find a job posting that looked promising. 2) Search for the Executive or Manager in the group you’d be reporting in to. 3) Research the company, position, and come up with a creative solution to present. 4) Find the execs contact info, tease them into a meeting where you can present the work you’ve done and like a rockstar for taking the initiative. Don’t do what everyone else is doing unless you like being average.  So, if you are bored in your current job, you can use SellHack to find the email addresses for hiring managers.  Happy Hacking!

8. Never Pay For SellHack Again

There are SellHackers out there who pay us $0 a month and have over 500 free emails a month. Want more emails for free? Refer your colleagues today! 

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Recruiters are some of the best salesmen and saleswomen I've ever met. It's a two sided sale. Selling the client on why they should give you a placement and selling the candidate how great an opportunity the position is.

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Great Email For Pruning Your List

We all want to have healthy and robust subscriber lists for newsletters or other content nurturing programs. For some, sending an email blast can be like going to the ATM especially when there is an offer to buy something enclosed. For others, email can be a form of passive lead nurturing on the path to moving the recipient one step closer to engagement or conversion. As a student and practicer of online marketing, I'm always on the lookout for new resources. In fact, I sign up for so many newsletters that I have a hard time keeping track of them. (ps - if you have a solution for this, please let me know!) The number of subscribers you have is a vanity metric. The response or engagement rate your subscribers have per communication attempt is a much more telling metric. The numbers vary by industry but a 20% open rate and 3% click rate is a good benchmark. An email from Social Fresh caught my attention last week and I wanted to share if here. These guys share content and provide insights on leveraging social media to improve your business. I've been a 'long time listener' without being a 'first time caller.' Here's the email:

So, now what Why I opened this email: 1) It was in my primary inbox, not promotions or social. 2) The subject line was 'real quick...' It's a subject line I use and allowed me to quickly apply my FARD filter. (forward, archive, reply, delete...more on this later). 3) The reply address was the CEO/sender's email not '[email protected]' (I hate that) Why I forwarded the email from my catch-all email address to my primary inbox? 1) I'm an email geek! 2) This is the first time I've been asked to unsubscribe from a list. Most of us are too nervous about upsetting a subscriber and losing more folks than gaining for every email sent. You are probably thinking: 'who cares, they may convert at some point in the future, why ask them to leave now?' There are a few psychological tactics in use here including reverse psychology. 3) Curiosity - why would a company want to ask customers or prospective customers to remove themselves? My mind started racing. Maybe they are segmenting their subscribers and want to know which segment is most engaged with the content so they know what topics could yield the highest engagement rates. (say what?) Maybe they want to drop into a cheaper tier for their eMail provider. Maybe they wanted to see if a big ask would impact open and click rates. We'll save the analysis paralysis for another post, but suffice to say one, some, all or other factors could be at play. This tees up a question I often ask of folks who hire us to consult: 'if you owned an auto-repair company, would you rather have 100 leads who owned cars or 10 leads who are stranded on the side of the road?' Ok. Enough speculating on my part. I sent an email to their CEO Jason Keath asking for him to comment. Here's what we got: "Once a year we clean up our email list for several reasons. It gives us a chance to reengage some of our audience that may have forgotten about our emails or have our newsletter going into a folder they do not check anymore. Also, if someone is just no longer interested in our emails, it is better than we remove them for our list. It means we won't annoy them moving forward AND we prevent a possible spam complaint. It is better to be proactive and constantly cut your list down to who is truly listening and engaging with your content. This most recent series of emails was sent to everyone on our list who has not opened an email or clicked on an email in the last 120 days. About 30% of our list fell into that category. Of those that manually chose to opt-in or opt-out, 40% stayed on the list and 60% chose to leave. Those that do not select either option will be automatically opted out." I love Jason's rationale for why a startup would ever want to prune their list. Whether or not you agree with this approach, I'd love your feedback. quick question - are you sending enough emails to your prospects? Cheers, Ryan Growth Dude at SellHack

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Emails are a great way for Sales Development Reps or New Business Development Reps to create lists of target accounts to hand off to closers. Thanks to http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/predictable-revenue/ for a great post on this.

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Stats for email on mobile.

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Want to Email Like a Boss? (spoiler alert) use Yesware!

We’ve been working on SellHack for a few months now. Ever since getting picked up by in the tech blogosphere here and here, our inboxes were flooded with emails from supporters and a few detractors. We soon discovered that the subject matter for the inbound emails fell into one of three categories: 1) ‘this is awesome, keep up the good work!’ 2) ‘how do I get an account?’ 3) ‘please delete my information’.

We committed to responding to each and every email within 24 hours, which proved to be more overwhelming than we ever expected. My total email word count that dat was ~40,000 and I type ~50 words per minute. Using back of the envelope math, these replies would have taken 13 hours of nonstop typing and that’s not including the time it would have taken to read the email.

Fortunately, we had Yesware in our toolkit.  For those not familiar with the company, Yesware is an email productivity platform that helps salespeople work more effectively, right from their inbox.  The product is intuitive and there were 4 specific features that rock!

Templates

Reporting & Real Time Notifications

Send Later

Reminders

1) Templates rock because they save you time.

Leveraging Yesware templates saved us a ton of time in conveying the core messages with a couple of keystrokes by crafting templates for each topic. Yesware templates, built for speed and flexibility, enabled us to start with an email foundation that could be customized as needed effectively cutting the reply time by 80%.

2) Reporting & Real Time Notifications rock because you’ve never had this degree of transparency.

Once that fateful day in late March passed, we were able to log into Yesware reporting to understand which categories the emails fell into. 35% of the emails were in support of the product we were building, 60% were inquiries on how to get an account and the remaining 5% were folks spooked by the coverage and asking for their accounts to be deleted. We made sure to set tracking on each email we sent back to this remaining 5% and when we received confirmation that they opened the message, we immediately followed up with a phone call. (pro tip: with Yesware, you can see what device a person opens the message on. If it’s a phone and they are reading your email…CALL THEM NOW!) The 5% of folks who wanted their account cancelled or info removed were so surprised that we took the time to reply directly and call them that we were able to save most of them from canceling.

3) ‘Send Later’ rocks because you’ll never forget to send a follow-up email again.

Business has been steadily growing for us and we’ve had a chance to meet lots of interesting folks. Timing is not always right for companies or people that we speak with, and just today I was asked to follow up with a prospect in mid-August. With Yesware, it’s easy to manage follow-ups without ever leaving gmail. Before Yesware, I would create a new calendar event on the given day and time to follow-up. This was messy and often created calendar conflicts with setting meetings and the events were easily overlooked. Now, as soon as a customer or prospect asks me to follow-up within a certain time frame, I compose the follow-up email and schedule to send on the right day and right time in the future leveraging the ‘Send Later’ option.

4) Reminders rock because without them, you are not as organized as you could be.

Reminders are another really useful feature. We’re a startup without the luxury of a back office, and customers have all sorts of special needs including custom invoices, reports or account tracking. Our business is SaaS and each customer has their own rolling monthly usage cycle, so due dates for some of these special asks can vary. Reminders is a bulletproof was to keep on top of this.

Even if you don’t have a traffic surge from trending on ProductHunt or getting mentioned on TechCrunch, Yesware’s templates, insights, reminders and ‘Send Later’ can be home brewed into a really effective business automation engine for any growing company. and insights are a great tool for managing day to day tasks. Whether it’s an automatic follow-up email to biz dev prospects, customer service inquiries and even a reply occasional person probing how our algorithm works, we have a template for that.

Note: If you are interested in trying out the product, Yesware is pleased to offer a special trial of their product, available exclusively through this post.

2 Free Months of Yesware Enterprise ($150 Value)

*Available for new users/teams only 

Keep an eye out for more blog posts about hacking the sales process. We’ll be highlighting the best of the best tips, tricks, apps, services, people and more. If you don’t have SellHack installed to find hidden emails, download the free extension here.

Cheers, Ryan O'Donnell

Growth Dude at SellHack

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Sales Thought of the Week

This post originally appeared in an email from CustomerCentric.  I couldn't find a link to it so re-posting here with due props.  Great Read!

How many times, after a three, six, or twelve month sell cycle, have you lost a sale that's critical to making your number for the quarter? The worst thing a salesperson can do is 'go the distance' and lose the business anyway. In the twelve months you've spent 'competing' to stay busy, how many real opportunities walked right past you?

When you do the forensic examination of a lost opportunity, I believe the cause of the loss almost always comes down to one word - qualification. Something wasn't qualified effectively as part of the sales campaign. As we teach in our workshops, there are six (6) key qualifiers in any given opportunity:

Goal/Problem/Need: Is there an identifiable, quantifiable business goal, business problem or business need? If the salesperson cannot articulate the business driver of an opportunity, chances are they don't really have an opportunity in the first place.

Vision of a Solution: Does the prospect believe that the capabilities your company offers will help them achieve the goal, solve the problem or satisfy the need? Can the salesperson not only explain the capabilities the prospect requires, but have they also documented them, in writing, back to the prospect to confirm accuracy?

Value: Has the salesperson identified and quantified the business metrics associated with the prospect's current environment and created a cost/benefit analysis to help the prospect understand the value of moving forward?

Champion: Is there one or more people in the prospect organization that is doing the selling for you when you're not there and helping you get to the right people?

Key Players: Has the salesperson proactively engaged with other key people within the prospect organization to get their perspective on the issues and ideally, created some vision with them as well?

Implementation Solution: Has the salesperson, as part of the sales campaign, proactively identified and sought out the people who will be responsible for implementing your offering? In many cases, salespeople wait until the "yes" before they engage with the people who are actually going to have to live with the offering and make it work on a daily basis. If those individuals don't have a clear understanding of how they are going to get it successfully implemented, they will often derail an initiative at the last minute due to resource constraints, lack of training in a specific area, etc.

No one likes bad news, but I'd rather find out today that I'm not getting a piece of business in six months rather than going the entire six months to find out exactly the same thing. How about you?

--Frank Visgatis, President & COO, CustomerCentric Selling®

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My First 7 Days on LiveChat

First, LiveChat is a game changer!

At the suggestion of a friend Ryan Schmidt, we implemented LiveChat on July 17.  Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with 144 different people around the world.  Some customers, some prospective customers, some tire kickers and one troll.  

What we’ve learned…

 - These are people on our website that are engaged and may not have otherwise sent an email with their comment or question.  

- Our onboarding sucks and we didn’t realize how bad until we saw how many people were asking how it works and how to get started.

- Our name is polarizing.  Some people love it but it scares others.

- 50% of the questions are about pricing and we didn’t display a pricing link on page.  We’re going to run A/B tests for a few of the scenarios we have.

- 25 of these conversations led to direct signups and subscriptions.

- Managing these conversations take time and I don’t know if it will be sustainable for me to be the only one managing our queue.  

- A lot of our traffic is stemming from articles written on us back in April.

- People aren’t patient when they start a chat and I’m not able to reply within a few seconds.  Managing expectations here with a queue is important.

My wishlist for LiveChat:

- I wish there was an easier way to share a file or screenshot.

- I wish there was a way to do country level targeting.

- I wish there was a way to initiate a voice call or screen share.

I can’t think of a single business that wouldn’t benefit from having LiveChat installed.

Cheers,

Ryan 

Growth Guy at SellHack

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Asking For an Email Introduction

I get asked by lots of folks to make intros to others in my network.  With more connections to nurture than physically possible, I actually enjoy making intros.  Why?

Introductions give me an opportunity to check in with a connection without sending a weak 'just checking in' email that wastes everyone's time.

Introductions give me a chance to position myself to either party as a benefactor.  Unquantified reciprocity is the new quid pro quo.

Introductions are a way to demonstrate my understanding of a potential market/opportunity/problem for the recipient solved by something the requestor is bringing to the table.

On a daily basis, my inboxes fill up, and while I try to get back to every email within 24 hours, there are some that get parked for later.  Introductions can sometimes fall into this category especially when (respectfully):

We haven't talked in a while (or ever) and I can't remember what it is you actually do.

You don't have any social capital built up with me and I don't want to risk a losing social capital with the person you are requesting an intro to.

I'm busy and don't want to stop what I am doing to research you, your company, or try to remember how we actually met and what I thought of you or your company.

Timing isn't right.  For example: if you want an intro to an investor and I'm raising money from them, your 'new and great' opportunity could get in the way of mine.  Same is true for a biz dev deal where a partnering company only has bandwidth to engage with one or two new projects/startups in the next 3-6 months.

This is the most selfish reason and one I wouldn't suggest, but it can happen.  Did you ever ignore or refuse an introduction that I asked for?  Maybe I'll use this as an opportunity to see if there is anyone you are connected with that I could benefit from meeting.  

Depending on how well I know the person you are trying to meet, I may ask for permission to make the intro before actually making it.  Save me a step, when you ask for the intro, make it forwardable.

So, how do you actually compose the best forwardable email intro?  I've broken down the optimal structure (from my experience).

Subject Line: Intro Request: Jeff Lebowski

Intro or Introduction doesn't really matter here, but I take into consideration the character length limitations for a mobile email client and usually go with Intro.  

First Line of Email:  Hi Ryan, I can't believe it's been two years since we sat across from each other at WeWork.  I hope you, Corrie and Jack are enjoying your new home in Cleveland.

Whether I want to admit it or not, the face that you remembered personal details about my family indicates that you a) know me well b) are thorough and detail oriented and/or c) interested enough in the intro to track down the information you think may sway my judgement or time to respond.  You can sweeten this intro with something like, "I have Cavs season tickets and I'd love for you to be my guest at the home opener."

Next Line: MyCompanyName (http://mycompany.com) works with widget makers like Widget Express and Widget Emporium to automatically scan for defects.  We just did something great and our new product (http://linktonewproduct) is driving some tangible metric that will agitate or excite the intro recipient.

Play to the intro recipient's interests or motivational points:

We work with Competitor A, Competitor B, & Competitor C.

We've helped a company in this space increase some metric by x% or better yet x dollars.

Some other tangible or vanity metric that is going to make your prospect look like a rock star for 'discovering' you or at least like a super connected and relevant person for someone to have brought him/her your introduction request.

I see on LinkedIn that you are connected to Jeff Lebowski, VP Operations at WidgetsRUs (http://linktosocialprofile).  Would you please connect us via email?

I like asking for an email intro because, in my experience, automated intros via other 'social networks' tend to get lost in the shuffle, ignored, or responded to much later than email.  When I get asked for intros, often they are to people I don't know incredibly well or haven't worked with in a while, and I may need to do a quick refresher on how I know that person. I like to include the link to the person's network profile, so, if the person is like me and wants to do quick research, they have a link at their fingertips.

Cheers/Best/Regards,

 Ryan O'Donnell                                                                

Growth at SellHack.com                                                                        

Rest of Contact Info

I prefer not using 'Thanks in Advance' as it's an assumptive close and runs the risk of being negatively perceived.  Your personality can really be summed up in the words you choose in the sign off.  I don't read a ton into it but some folks do.

Ultimately, know who you are reaching out to for an intro and who the end recipient is.  You are a person, not a robot.  People buy from and invest capital in people they know like and trust (capital comes in many forms - time, money, attention).  

The last intro I requested was blocked when the recipient declined an intro.  It happens and I have thick skin.  I also hack SellHack to get his email address, so there will be a politely persistent follow-up a few weeks from now to the gentlemen with a better approach and value proposition.  

*This post has no scientific basis other than my own personal experience.  Please share your tips, tricks, advice and hacks in the comments.

Cheers,

Ryan (& the SellHack Team)

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Sometimes, it's just better to email.

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‘We’re baaaaaack!’

So, this whole ordeal with LinkedIn may end up being a blessing in disguise. We got to meet some really interesting folks who used or want to use our technology. The legal team at LinkedIn was cordial, professional and were quick to re-activate my personal/professional member account after we complied with their requests. Before getting shut down, our costs were growing day by day and we were going back and forth trying to sort out a pricing model so we could at least cover our costs. We spent that last few weeks focusing on what we did really well (verify emails) and how we can get the basic functionality back into the hands of people who need it to do their jobs better.

Everyone will have a free account on SellHack which has a limited number of email verification credits. We priced our service starting at effectively 2 Lattes per month to make sure that everyone had fair access to a service depending on their monthly needs.

We had to make a few changes to the workflow and I PROMISE, this is just the beginning of a much more robust product. Our API will be ready this week, so drop us an email if you want access. We have a solid product development plan, but if there is functionality you can’t live without, please let us know.

Email verification by SellHack is open for business.

- Cheers,

SellHack Team