The cold emails I didn't send
3 min read
This was meant to be a post about which cold emails got replies. It's a different post, because most of them never went out. Here are the versions, in order, and what happened to each.
Version 0: asking my own customers
Before cold outreach, I tried warm. I emailed seven paying customers and one who'd cancelled, with five questions:
How did you find QuickStaging? … What almost stopped you from paying?
None of them replied. I followed up with a single question under the subject line "one number, that's all". No replies either.
Lesson: five questions is homework, and people who've paid you $15 don't owe you homework.
Version 1: photographers
My first cold audience was real estate photographers. Two angles: QuickStaging saves turnaround time, or it lets you sell staging as an extra. Each had follow-ups on day 3 and day 10, and I'd written answers to the objections I expected.
The plan was 500 messages. It stopped in two days. A smaller plan, 100 messages, sent zero in three weeks. I wrote a separate post about why.
Version 2: agents, not photographers
When I looked at who'd actually paid, all nine of them at the time were individual US real estate agents. So the next sequence went to agents, with a much smaller ask:
Send me one empty room from any listing and I'll run it… No charge, no account.
There was a second version for California, built around a local hook: checking hundreds of listings for how they disclose edited photos. Both were written, sequenced and ready.
Neither was sent. The sending tool didn't fit into a $200 monthly marketing budget.
Version 3: the demo goes first
The version I'm sending now flips the order. Instead of asking for a photo, I take one from a photographer's own site and run it through QuickStaging first:
I took [photo] from your site and ran it through QuickStaging… Your original and the [dusk version] are side by side here.
A script finds leads through Google Places searches for real estate photographers in 15 US cities. It found 397. 117 of them had a public email. For each one, it prepares a demo from their own photo, and I approve it before anything goes out. It sends at most 20 first emails a day, with follow-ups on day 4 and day 10.
I'm testing two subject lines: "one of your photos, turned to dusk" against one that names the photo.
So far I've approved five demos and sent four, all on the same day. No replies yet, which after one day means nothing.
What I learned before sending anything
- Writing outreach can feel like doing outreach. It isn't. Count sent, not drafted.
- Look at who already paid before choosing who to email. I spent weeks on the wrong audience.
- Make the ask smaller than the gift. "Send me five photos" asks for work. "Here's your photo, already done" asks for a click.
- Make sending cheap enough that you'll keep doing it. Twenty a day with an approve button is a lot easier to keep up than five hundred by hand.
I'll update this post when the replies are in, or aren't.