How to Offer Value in Your Cold Outreach to Potential Clients
With many businesses learning more ways to become virtual, it’s still highly important for service providers to lean into the power of cold outreach. Taking into account your capacity, this can be done by either you or a virtual assistant to reach out to clients or companies that are a perfect fit for your services.
Here are some ways you can build trust, credibility, and make the most out of each pitch.
1. Connection first, ALWAYS. Establish a connection with your potential client. Tell them how you know them. This can be how you’ve subscribed to their newsletter, bought their program, followed them on social media, met them at a conference, heard them speak on a podcast, etc. If you can’t do this, choose someone else to pitch until you can. The goal to keep in mind is to make them feel like you’re a part of their community.
2. Establish your credibility. Share something that you’ve written for a similar client (but not a competitor). Add links. More on a confident tone and less on a desperate or needy tone.
3. Focus on the value that you can offer. Let them know how your work will give them something they don’t have now—they’ll get more engaged email subscribers, more sales using your emails, they’ll get more leads, whatever. Another option: you could share a piece of content that is applicable to their position or industry if you don’t feel comfortable sharing your work yet.
4. Ask something that’s easy to say yes to. This can be something simple as, “Would you be interested in checking out a few of my case studies?” “Would you like to have a 10-15 minute chat on zoom?” “Would you like to learn more about how we can potentially work together?”
5. Inject humor whenever you can. Think of this less as pitching for a project and more like the first step in building a relationship. Be human. Or funny. Be conversational. Or relatable when you can.
6. Keep it on the short end if you can. However, if you know the person or know that they value long-form emails, then go all out. But keep it relevant to them (have each paragraph serve as a “what’s in it for them?” purpose).
7. Practice sending out as many outreach emails as you can. And follow up after 7-10 days.
8. People love to be flattered. Starting off with something flattering and ending it with something lighthearted is always a great tip. Use flattery to your advantage. :)
9. Sometimes, outreach doesn’t have to be email-only. Experiment with reaching out to potential clients in their social media DMs. No audio messages though if it’s your first encounter with them. Nobody wants to open an audio message from someone they don’t know yet!
10. Rejection or no-response is a part of the journey. Don’t get discouraged. I can’t promise it’ll get easier over time, but you can detach yourself from the outcome by sending pitches at a high volume.
11. Spell-check can make a difference from making $0 - to thousands of dollars. Grammarly is a great free tool that can be added on as a Google Chrome extension to check your grammar in emails and in Google Docs.
Hopefully, with these tips in hand, you're able to take away the uncomfortable feelings that come with reaching out to other business owners. You have services that you've spent lots of time crafting and improving. Now it's time to go from draft to send so that other people can experience them.
Hi! If we haven't met before, I'm Tori Autumn--website and email copywriter. Aside from helping my clients grow their audiences and sales, I teach how to grow your visibility and how to be engaged with your audience for the long run.
If you'd like to know more about being more engaging with your audience, you can grab my complimentary checklist here: https://bit.ly/3NxxgLh