Mastering Cold Email Success: Insider Tips from Daniel Fazio

Even in the reign of social media platforms, cold emails yield 40 times more customers than social media channels combined. 

It means small and medium businesses can grow their customer base and drive profitability with the right cold emailing approach. Given such higher conversion numbers, cold emailing can be hard for two reasons. You have no prior communication with your target audience and you can’t change your approach in real time. 

Already getting cold feet? Fret not; Vaibhav Namburi, the founder and director of Smartlead has interviewed the Cold Email Wizard, none other than Daniel Fazio. 

With over 340+ clients, Daniel has created the most popular cold email course on the internet. He’s helped agencies and B2B companies to add $10k-$50k/mo in profit with cold email. 

In this Q&A article, Daniel spills his secret to succeed in cold emailing. So, get ready to master the art of cold emailing to drive more conversions and generate higher revenue to your business. 

So, without further ado, let's jump right in. 

The first and probably the most important thing you need to consider before you start sending cold emails is what exactly you offer and how it’s going to impact your prospects’ businesses. 

Watch the full interview with Daniel Fazio. Watch Now! 

Q1: Why do people pay you?

In Daniel’s words, “If you were to imagine any reason why somebody wants to purchase something, it's because they exist at some current state and they want to arrive at some end state. And you are the gap between the two. So a very big problem some people have when they're selling something is they don't always know the exact end state that a prospect does want to arrive at.”

He gave a quick example of how he changed his Instagram offer based on the clients he was working with and added that “You need to point with the positioning of the offer and actually find out what people want and what's what's actually extremely interesting and very useful.”

Daniel also added, “If you put their demographic and kind of like a description, like a hyper description of who they are, what they're running, the kind of business it is, how big their team is, how old they are, where they're located.” 

And we can’t agree more. A SuperOffice study has proven that 33% of email recipients open an email solely based on the subject line. This means your demographic study and email personalization will be super effective in generating more email opens. 

In fact, a Woodpecker study shows that multiple personalization fields can improve cold email reply rates by 142%. This surely proves Daniel’s points. 

Q2: How do you systematically find out what will work for your cold email recipients? 

Daniel: “You're always going to make some kind of claim like, I can help you do this. They're just like stating some relevance where you found them and just making some claim like would you be interested in this?”

He also stated, “I do hundreds of split tests over and over again until I find the one thing that works. It's an order of magnitude better than everything else in it.”

While talking about understanding what people (B2B clients) want, Daniel fazio, quite interestingly mentioned, “I have found that ChatGPT is actually pretty good at extracting what people want if you put their demographic data and a hyper-personalized description of who they (target audience) are, what kind of business they are running, company size, location, etc.” 

Read more: How to Use ChatGPT in Your Cold Email Strategy? 

Q3: You’ve built arguably the most popular cold emailing course in the market. Now if you have to start from scratch, what are the three things you will do to repeat the same success?

Daniel: “So you're selling something – you make a claim, like I'm going to help you do this. Then reverse the risk. So it's like if you don't get this claim, you'll get your money back or you're only going to pay while it works. And sure enough you need social proof. So there's basically three things that make people purchase things from you on the internet (actually anywhere). You have to make a claim. Then you reverse the risk and provide evidence that you can.” 

Sure, there are businesses that are just starting out and don’t have any social proof to back up their claims. For businesses like that, Daniel suggested, “What you need to do while you don't have evidence is amp up the risk reversal. And what I mean by that is saying something like you're only going to pay as it's working on a performance basis or you're only going to pay after it works.”

Adding further on how to gain social proof, Daniel shared how he did it initially, “I would go and email everyone who got success saying hey, if you're getting success with this, I will make you a trade. I will get on a free consulting call with you. In exchange for that, I want you to tweet your quantifiable results. Now I would screenshot it and then put it on the landing page.”

Also read: 101+ Cold Email Templates to Nail Outreach

Q4: Where does social proof come in as a lead gen agency in the context of cold emails? And how do I even implement that?

Daniel: “There are different subsections with which you can inject the social proof. So I'll assume you're a lead gen agency, and you are probably using cold email to get your leads. So your front end is the cold email itself (top of the funnel) and the kind of the mid funnel is your landing page. So you could write like, P.S. I've worked with these people and got these results.”

This works like a charm to build credibility and trustability of your cold email recipients. What other types of social proofs can be used you ask? 

You can mention the big clients you’ve worked with, your previous achievements, customer testimonials, etc. 

“The best form of social proof is getting one of your clients on an interview and then straight up asking how much money you’ve made with this (service/product)?” added Daniel. 

Testimonials can increase conversions on sales pages by 34%.

An impactplus.com study proves that 50% of all customers visit a company’s website only after reading positive reviews. The same study also states that customer testimonials increase conversions on sales pages by 34%. 

Q5: You've said a good offer can change your business. Now I want to understand what's your process of offer experimentation? Is there a methodical way for me to systematically arrive at a working offer?

Daniel: “So you have to start with a specific claim. This is just the easiest thing I've told people to do. When someone gets on a call with you, assume that they would prefer to give you money in exchange for a solution. And if you pitch them an offer and it doesn’t interest them, simply ask what would a perfect situation look like for you? And typically what'll happen is they will give you some context by which they want you to execute a service.”

Daniel further explained it with an example. If you have a lead gen agency, and a prospect who has recently hired a SDR booked a meeting from your cold emails. Now the prospect naturally doesn;t want to pay you as they have hired a professional for that. 

So, what do you do in such situations? You can simply go on to offer training to their sales teams or offer more leads for the sales team. This is how you customize your offer based on your prospects' needs. 

Q6: I read in a previous interview you’ve mentioned that writing ‘32% increase in leads’ is poor social proof and instead you provided a solution as to how to do that. What is that solution and how do you suggest people to turn around?

Daniel: “So you have to think for people. Everything you write, you just have to go to the next level deeper. And what I mean by that is every time you write something on a page or a kind of claim, ask yourself, where do they start? Suppose, they were making a hundred thousand leads a month. Now they got 32% more leads. How fast did you do that? Suppose you do that in 47 days. Now add the better angling to put an extra 32% generated in 47 days. It just makes more sense.”

We’ve seen positive results (more meetings bookings and more conversions) with more specific and intent-based CTA. This leaves out guesswork from your prospects’ minds, builds authority of the claim, and generates more sales. 

Q7: What’s your opinion on performance based models vs prepaid models? Let's take two scenarios, someone starting and someone established?

Daniel: “What typically happens is a beginner will start on a performance basis and then they'll want to gather enough social proofs to be able to go to a retainer basis. And then as you become extremely competent over time, you'll want to switch back to a performance basis because you're so good at your job.” 

Daniel also added that eventually an established business should have both – a fixed pricing model and also performance based pricing plans. 

Q8: I want to run a bit into client accession and sort of drive a bit of your perspective as someone who's a coach. You've got a lot of successful customers. So what do you think has made them successful?

Daniel: “There are two phases with which someone would elapse through inside client accession. It's like we're starting with cold outreach, writing your scripts, and giving you leads and software to do it.”

The cold email wizard also added, “And now you start getting some people coming through, you sign some people. And give importance to creating a mechanized system to deliver.”

“It's just a mechanized structure that is like, okay, spin some social proof, and then start distributing an enormous amount of content on the Internet. And that's literally all you do.”

Q9: A lot of people focus on acquisition, but retention is a massive revenue driver. So what strategies do you suggest to increase the lifetime value of your customers as an agency? 

Daniel: “I always put a very heavy emphasis on getting results for them. But there's an unspoken thing that you can't really measure and it is the experience of it. And what I mean by experience is a system by which you will be telling people what is happening. People want transparency that you are actively trying to improve continuously.”

According to Daniel, the key to successful customer retention are a transparent communication channel and accountability. It’s way simpler than you think. 

For example, if you have a cold emailing agency and you charge $1 for every $10 earned. Even if your service is great, someday a competing agency might come up and steal your clients. Make sure you project yourself as someone they can trust and update them from time to time. You may inform your customers what you’ll do throughout the week and at the end of the week, you can reveal what you’ve done. And maybe twice a month you reach out to your clients and ask how they are, how’s business, and how else they'd like to improve. 

That’s it. This builds trust among customers and increases the chances of customer retention. Basically, you offer your customers a human-like experience. 

Q10: You spoke about sentiments and cold emailing in your course. Would you like to elaborate a bit? 

Daniel: “What a lot of people do is like their first foray into cold email has a lot to do with scale. So what they're doing is they're writing a message to a thousand as opposed to writing a message to one and trying to extract it to a thousand. And what I have found extremely useful is focusing more on relevance and not (just) personalized first news.”

Conclusion

The interview with Daniel Fazio (the Cold Email Wizard) sheds light on the effectiveness of cold emails as a highly effective strategy for SMBs to expand their customer base and drive more sales. Despite the fact that we are living in the age of social media, cold emailing offers higher conversion rates than social media channels.

Daniel emphasized the importance of understanding a prospect’s desire and customizing the offer based on that. With proper demographic study, businesses can create engaging and personalized cold emails to increase conversion rates. Also, Daniel gave special focus on A/B testing (split testing) email variations. 

In this interview, both Daniel and Vaibhav agreed that social proof is a key factor for building credibility and crucial for getting more high-value clients. Crafting specific claims, reversing risks, and providing evidence of value further strengthen the effectiveness of cold email offers. By implementing Daniel Fazio's proven strategies, entrepreneurs and marketers can unlock the potential of cold emailing as a powerful tool in their marketing strategy.

‍

‍