4 cold email hacks for financial service providers

Hack #1: The Ultra-Short First Email

The first hack is actually really easy but often overlooked: keep the first email short.

Your first email’s goal isn’t to turn the recipient into a client, that’s too much of a commitment for most people.

Your one single goal for the first email is to get a reply. 

That’s all.

You just want to start a conversation.

Cold email works particularly well if you’re talking to business owners or busy executives. Do you think they have time to read through a huge email from someone they don’t know?

Nope.

So, keep it short and to the point.

There are different structures you can use. The most common is:

• Why you’re reaching out

• What you’re offering

• What the next step is

All of that shouldn’t be more than 5 (short) sentences.

The next step could either be to ask them when’s a good time to talk next week. Or what I’ve personally seen good success with is offering them something valuable for free.

For instance, when I reach out to financial service providers like financial advisors, I’ll offer them a free audit of their email marketing funnel or their online presence up front. If they’re interested, I’ll record a personalized, 5-minute Loom video where I share the result with them. And then only after that I’ll ask for a call.

But that strategy only works if there’s something obvious you can help them with without getting more information from them.

If that’s not the case, going straight for the call is the better option.

Here’s a template you could use (by Jeremiah Desmarais):

[subject] reduce your companies 401k fees in 10 minutes

Hello [Prospect Name],

I have an idea that I can explain in 10 minutes that can get [company] a $10,000 minimum haircut in your 401k fees.

I recently used this idea to help our client [company name] save [insert amount here] even during this downtown.

[First name], let’s schedule a quick 10-minute call so I can share the idea with you. When works best for you?

Wellness to you and your family.

-[Name]

Hack #2: Follow Up Relentlessly

The next tip is probably where 99% of business gets lost:

reminders.

From my personal experience, I can tell you that I only get about a 10% reply rate after the first email. After sending a couple of reminders, it goes up to around 30%, sometimes even higher.

So, if you want to get clients, follow up!

This is especially important if you’re targeting high-level decision-makers or entrepreneurs.

Just think about it: They’ve probably got hundreds of emails in their inbox every single day. And a cold email likely isn’t the top priority.

But if they’ve seen your name come up for the fourth time and it’s actually something interesting, you might actually get a reply.

A study by Brevet has shown that about 80% of sales need at least 5 follow-ups. What I found works great if you’re in B2B is to do 3 to 5 follow-ups and then start the same process again with another decision-maker.

Concerning the content I found it most effective to mix it up between short reminders along the lines of “hey, I’m sure you’ve been swamped, just bumping this up in your inbox” and adding more value.

This could be to offer another strategy or tell them about this free guide that your other clients loved. But don’t send it to them right away, just spark curiosity and let them ask for it.

Hack #3: Focus on Free Consulting (Not Selling)

I used to find cold emailing really uncomfortable. I just didn’t want to come off as salesy, because I did’t like to be on the receiving end of that.

But then at some point I realized that you don’t need to sell in cold emails.

You need to educate.

Many of your target audience might not even know they have a problem. So, it’s your job to educate them on how they could save more or where they’re leaving money on the table.

You can either already incorporate that in your first email. This is particularly effective if you know that 90% of your target audience is making a particular mistake that you can help with.

But what I found more effective is just to have a “free consulting”-mindset for the whole process. Then you’ll find it much easier to send valuable reminders and just genuinely try helping instead of selling.

That gives the whole thing a different energy, which makes prospects much more eager to work with you.

Hack #4: Use Tools like Skrapp to Find Decision-Maker Emails

Now, at this point you might be asking:

That’s all great, but how do I even get the emails of the right person?

Glad you asked.

That’s where Linkedin and scraping tools like Skrapp come into place.

Ideally, you’re only working with a specific kind of business, like veterinarians. Niching down will make it easier for your prospects to think that you’re the right fit for them because you only work with people like them. So you must understand them, which builds trust.

So, here’s what you need to do:

• Install Skrapp as a Chrome extension. You get 100 free searches per month which is enough to get started

• Type in “veterinarian” into the Linkedin search bar (or whatever your niche is)

• Select “people”

• Select your location (if you’re offering nationwide online services, you could just choose “United States”. Or choose your city or state)

• Click on the first person and then click on the Skrapp Chrome extension.

Now you’ll see their email there and can reach out.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work, sometimes the emails aren’t correct. If that’s the case, I like to do some email guessing next. Most email addresses have one of these formats:

• [email protected] (e.g. [email protected])

• [email protected] (e.g. [email protected])

• [first letter of first name][email protected] (e.g [email protected])

• [first letter of first name][first letter of last name]@company.com (e.g. [email protected])

This is more time-consuming but will get you 10x better results than using their general info email. You always want to reach a decision-maker.