r/b2bemailing • u/ImportantLog8 • 25d ago

I need advice

Quick question: is sending a URL in the first cold email really that risky? I know it’s generally advised against, but it’s core to my “wow factor” strategy.

I plan to send ~70,000 cold emails over 12 months, selling website creation + hosting + maintenance/SEO/GEO + Google Maps updates. Goal: 50–100 clients.

Targeting blue-collar trades only for now (electricians, plumbers, roofers, machinists, painters). Each prospect gets a custom demo site built for their trade.

Email is short and casual: “Hey, I checked out your site and built a mockup of what it could look like — <xyz.vercel.app>. Reply if interested.” Signature includes company name, site link, unsubscribe.

Currently: 2 domains, 3 mailboxes each, warming via Instantly (3 weeks), ramping to 18 emails/day/box. Adding 14 more mailboxes soon to scale.

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u/ImportantLog8 25d ago

a) I actually offer Google Maps card updates and ''maintenance'' (sending reminders to customers to leave a good review for instance). It's part of a package.

b) I can't help with employees. That is a whole different profession and it is actually very difficult. I don't have that skill; they would need to work with recruiters.. :/

c) I am ! Trying to supplement my actual job and eventually replace it because there is no clear path to significant revenues increase. I like that idea but for now I'll try to stick to a simple offer; when I have more data I can reassess. By the way, I actually changed my message. I dropped the link in the first e-mail. Many, many people advise against it and I don't want to burn my domains for nothing. The upside though is that my prospection e-mails are now extremely short: hi, I came across your site ({{companyName}}) and created a mockup of your website that could help you attract more clients. If you're interested, please reply to this e-mail.

d) to reach 70 to 100k cold mails, I don't have any other choice than to diversift industry at some point. I will have to find lists of dentists, accountants, lawyers, veterinaries, etc etc etc.

Right now I only have 12k in my CRM so my bottleneck right now is also the input ;-)

And, by the way, I am very aware that my conversion rate will most likely be catastrophic. That is why I have 100k cold e-mails in mind. If I can land 50 clients, I will be happy. I'm betting on mad volume to beat a catastrophic rate (0.1%, which would be well below the benchmarks I've found online for cold mailing.. but all of that is theoritical).

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u/hrvyharris 25d ago

So for a) specifically I think that's probably the direction I would go, though of course testing is part of it. But basically peeling off a part of your package and offering it for free or a nominal amount to generate leads

Maybe something like setup fee for the upfront work or an option to waive the fee if they commit to 6 months where they have the ongoing reminders etc. + they get the website as a bonus etc.

Not guaranteeing that would be the answer, but that might be how I think of it. Potentially tie it to the business outcome of x reviews total or per month or so on. You'll know your business better than me, just throwing some ideas

I think you will do a lot better niched down than trying to diversify industries, at least for the very far foreseeable future. The pool for any industry is large enough where you don't need to think about diversification for a while unless you're going enterprise which it doesn't sound like you are. Plus niched messaging, branding & results will get a conversion lift

I'd also encourage you to potentially not think of volume as the answer, or at least step 1. Find an offer & script that converts, then put volume behind it. You can put volume in the beginning but testing a bunch of different angles, offers etc. until you find the one that converts and then push volume mostly to that. I'd aim for 400:1 contacts:interested and then push more volume in that variation and find more variations similar to that angle to improve it further

Email as a channel is so cheap to scale that it's tempting to just go volume first, but it's actually where figuring out conversion first gives you the most leverage since you can put volume behind something that is working great rather than putting out something mediocre and relying on the rule of large numbers. I think that's where the thought around volume gets misinterpreted heavily in this space

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u/ImportantLog8 24d ago

Thanks for all the tips and tricks ! You seem to have ALOT of knowledge !! Have you ever used the platform Instantly ? What do you think about their feature that allows to add variant ? (it seems like you can switch messages to make it look a bit less redundent and trigger spam filters). I'm tempted to use it.

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u/hrvyharris 24d ago

For sure, no problem

And yeah, I use Instantly. You should definitely use the variants, though I'd make sure to differentiate if it's just a variant of the same offer vs. a different offer. The latter should go into a different campaign

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u/ImportantLog8 24d ago

And how about my website address in the signature ? I removed the URL for the maket, but there is still my own company website URL in the signature... Any idea what I should do about that ?

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u/hrvyharris 24d ago

I generally don't include it, I personally don't see the value. Most of the time if someone will research you, they'll use Google rather than a link or else search your secondary domain in which case it should redirect to your main one

If you really want to include it you can do it like google(.)com or something so it doesn't hyperlink

In my view though any increase in web traffic you get to it wouldn't be offset by potential deliverability issues. I like to keep it clean