Sales is a challenge for most businesses. If you can help people generate more leads with cold email marketing services, there are thousands of potential clients out there for you.

In this guide, we're going to break down the different business models you can follow to sell cold email marketing services, channels to source clients, and share a step-by-step process to start conversations with potential clients.

  1. What are Cold Email Marketing Services and Why Do Clients Pay for Them?

  2. 3 Proven Business Models for Selling Cold Email Marketing Services

  3. 3 Channels to Source Clients For Your Cold Email Marketing Services

  4. 6 Step Process to Starting Conversations with Potential Clients Using Cold Email

Let’s dive in.

What are Cold Email Marketing Services and Why Do Clients Pay for Them?

Selling cold email marketing services involves sending outreach on your client’s behalf to help them generate warm leads for their business.

In return for your lead generation efforts, your clients will pay you a fee per lead generated, or keep your services on a retainer.

Business owners are happy to pay for cold email marketing services if you prove that you can get results.

3 Proven Business Models for Selling Cold Email Marketing Services 

1. Pay Per Lead

The first way to sell cold email marketing services is on a pay-per-lead basis.

First, you need to define what a ‘lead’ is. For most cold email businesses, it’s a meeting booked on your client’s calendar.

Depending on your industry, you can charge different rates per lead.

For example, an B2B SaaS selling to an enterprise may be willing to pay $500-$700 per lead.

On the other hand, smaller niche businesses with lower contract values may be willing to pay $200-350 per lead.

The mean cost per lead across all industries is $198.44. 4% of businesses spend $1000 or more per lead. Spend time researching your target industry and learn what they’re willing to pay, then base your price around that.

2. Retainer Model

A retainer model is simple. A client pays you a set fee per month (say, $3,000) in return for a minimum number of meetings booked per month.

This is simple to manage but does come with an element of risk.

No cold email marketing business can guarantee leads, so you need to have a contingency plan in place for what happens if you don’t hit your targets.

There’s also the consideration that if your outreach performs well, your business’s upside is capped. For example, if you were charging a $3,000 per month retainer fee and generated 10 leads, that would work out at $300 per lead – which is similar to what most pay-per-lead agencies charge.

However, if your system is more effective than the average agency and you generate 20 leads, you’ll only be charging $150 per lead and are underselling the value of your services compared to the market average.

3. Commission Based

Another option that’s attractive to some clients is a commission-based system.

As an example, you can pitch a business saying that you'll charge them 10% of the gross revenue generated from every sale you secure for them.

This is attractive to businesses like startups or local businesses, as it involves very little risk to them. They may not have the resources to hire a sales rep, but they’d be happy to pay a commission if someone like you was generating leads for them.

If you use a commission-based system, make sure to have rigid contracts with clients. As well as that, because you won’t be getting paid until the sale is secured, it’s vital that you have a way to track sales.

3 Channels to Source Clients For Your Cold Email Marketing Services

Cold email marketing only works in B2B industries. Cold email laws prohibit you from sending outreach to the general public, so all of the prospects you reach out to will need to be B2B decision-makers.

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn is one of the best platforms for B2B lead generation for several good reasons:

  • Over 875 million B2B contacts use the platform

  • People include their job title, company, and work history

  • You can either export emails or reach out on the platform

To get the most out of it, you’ll need to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

This paid add-on gives you access to more granular search filters, the ability to save lead lists in the platform, and even set up company alerts to monitor for changes at companies you think will be a good fit as a client.

Source: The Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn Sales Navigator Search Filters - SalesBread

As long as you know what your ideal customer looks like, you can quickly filter through the millions of prospects on the platform to find the ideal ones for you and save them to a list.

To export contact emails from LinkedIn, you’ll need to use an email finder like RocketReach or AnyMail Finder.

These tools scrape the internet for public emails and match them to company domains.

After adding in the basic details about a contact, such as their name and company domain, these tools show you a verified email address for them.

By combining LinkedIn with an email-finding tool like this, you get the benefits of LinkedIn as a prospect discovery platform, and the benefits of being able to reach out to them with a personalized email.

2. Use B2B Data Providers

If you want to sell your cold email marketing services to an established industry, then B2B data providers are an excellent way to prospect.

Some good options include:

  • ZoomInfo: Extensive database of B2B contacts that you can sort by any criteria you want to.

  • BuiltWith: Identify companies based on the software used on their website.

  • Lead411: A B2B database and intent data platform to identify prospects when they’re showing positive buying signals.

Source: BuiltWith

All of these platforms work in a similar way.

They scrape business data from across the web and bring it all into a central database that you can filter through to find people matching your criteria.

Once you find someone who looks like a perfect fit for your cold email services, you can export their contact information from the B2B database and save them to your prospect list.

As well as being used to source your own clients, these tools will also come in handy when you’re running client campaigns.

3. Your Existing Professional Network

Another powerful way to acquire clients who want to buy your cold email marketing services is by contacting people in your professional network.

If you know decision-makers from previous companies you’ve worked for or with, you can reach out and let them know what you’re offering.

This is a powerful way to get early clients for your cold email services, as people in your network will trust you and be more willing to take a chance.

You can even consider offering to run your process for them at a lower cost in exchange for a case study to use as social proof early on in your business journey.

6 Step Process to Starting Conversations with Potential Clients Using Cold Email

Now you know the basics of setting up your cold email services business. 

As you’ll be selling cold email services, it only makes sense to source your own clients using the same channel. Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow to create high-performing cold email campaigns to grow your business.

1. Create Your Prospect List

First, you’ll need a list of prospects. We’ve already looked at some tools you can use to identify prospects, such as BuiltWith and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

You’ll need to create a spreadsheet to save prospects. To get started, you can follow a prospect list template like this. 

It includes all the main fields you’ll need and you can customize it to your needs.

Once your prospect list is ready, you can import it into cold email tools like QuickMail as a CSV, or through QuickMail’s direct integration with Google Sheets.

2. Write a Personalized Opening Line for Every Recipient

You won’t be the only person cold emailing your prospects. In order to stand out, you need to add extra personalization to your cold email templates to prove your email is worth your prospect’s time.

The best way to do this is with a custom opening line.

This is a fully unique intro to your templates that reference something specific to your prospect.

An example of an opening line would be:

  • Just saw the new case study you published about [their customer]. Awesome how you helped them increase conversions by 24% with the landing page update.

  • Loved the article you shared on LinkedIn yesterday about recruitment best practices for startups, I sent it straight to my HR team in Slack. 

  • [mutual connection] said I should reach out to you as you’re the go-to person when it comes to [topic].

As soon as your prospect receives that, they’ll know you’ve done your research into them and be more willing to respond.

3. Follow a Formula for High-Performing Templates

Your cold email templates are important to get right. As well as helping you start conversations with prospects for your business, they’ll also be what you’re sending on behalf of your future clients.

If your template is good enough to get a response from clients, your recipients will know you can successfully run cold email campaigns for their business.

There are several key elements in a high-performing email marketing template:

  • Your subject line

  • Your opening line

  • Your value proposition

  • Your social proof

  • Your call-to-action

Your subject line needs to be simple.

For example:

  • Helping {{company.name}} with sales

  • 30 qualified leads per month for {{company.name}}

  • Question on {{company.name}}’s cold outreach process

Simple cold email subject lines are best. They show you’re a real person and they don’t look like marketing content. As well as that, make sure to align the subject line with the rest of your email copy. If you try to get more opens using a clickbait or misleading subject line, it will just cause your prospect to trust you less.

We’ve already looked at the opening line in the previous section. If you need more inspiration for writing them, check out our complete guide to writing cold email opening lines here.

Your prospects are busy and you need to immediately show why you’re reaching out. Consider keeping your value proposition condensed to one or two sentences at most.

For example:

  • “I help businesses book 30 meetings per month with warm leads using cold email outreach.”

Here’s an example of this from RepurposeHouse:

They quickly and clearly explain what they do. If you received that email, you’d have no questions about why they’re contacting you.

Next, your social proof.

The average buyer wants to read up to 10 reviews before making a purchase decision. You can start the process by adding social proof to your email template.

This can be a one-sentence example of a time you helped another business get results with your cold email marketing services.

Here’s an example:

  • “Last month, we booked [your client name] 150% more meetings than their best ever month before working with us.”

Adding social proof to your templates is a powerful way to instantly build trust.

Finally, a call-to-action (CTA) is essential.

This part of your template guides your prospect’s next action. If you want them to book a call with you, you can use a CTA such as “Do you have 15 minutes on Tuesday to discuss?”.

If getting a response is the priority, you could keep the CTA even more simple and use one like “Sounds interesting?”.

For more CTA ideas, check out our cold email CTA swipe file here.

There are no secrets to writing great email templates. If you can successfully put these five elements into a cohesive email template, you’ll get responses.

4. Scheduling Your Emails in QuickMail

Once you have a set of email templates that you’re ready to send to potential clients, it’s time to schedule them.

QuickMail makes it easy to build out your personalized campaigns.

First, you’ll import your prospects into QuickMail. During the process, ensure that every field from your prospect list is correctly imported.

Then, go into the campaign builder and add your first email step.

You can write your template and include attributes wherever you want your email to be personalized. 

In the template above, the {{prospect.first_name}} and {{company.name}} attributes would be automatically replaced with your prospect’s real name, taken from your prospect list. The {{=day+2}} would automatically provide a day based on the day the email was sent, plus two days into the future.

You can also choose to enable open and click tracking on your emails.

This will give you extra data but isn’t always necessary. The main metric you need to focus on is your reply rate.

Once your first email is ready, it’s time to move on to your follow-up email.

5. Send Personalized Follow-Ups to Boost Response Rates

55% of responses to cold outreach come from a follow-up step.

To get the best results, add three to five follow-up emails to your campaign.

After your first cold email step, add a Wait step.

After this, add your next email step.

Your follow-up email needs to repeat the benefits of working with you but with a different angle.

You can incorporate a new case study, name-drop new clients, and explain the benefits of your cold email marketing services in a different way.

As well as that, you can experiment with a lower or higher commitment CTA.

It’s a simple way to ensure you never need to set reminders to follow-up. If someone does reply, they’ll be removed from your campaign and won’t receive any other emails.

6. Moving Someone From Warm Lead to Client

When you get a response, it’s time to continue the conversation.

To ensure you never miss a response, QuickMail tracks every response in your Opportunities inbox.

You can easily jump in and manage your replies directly from QuickMail.

This also enables you to segment replies based on the campaign, and track details like:

  • Tags you’ve applied to the campaign

  • The team member in charge of the conversation

  • The time since the last response in the thread

As well as that, QuickMail has native integrations with CRMs like Pipedrive and HubSpot. You can set up any custom workflow that you want to help you stay on top of your replies and give you the best chance at closing deals.

Wrapping Up

Selling cold email services is an excellent way to build a business. There is flexibility over your business model, the type of clients you work with, and the way you source your clients.

As soon as you know which market you want to sell to, you can use cold email to reach out and start conversations.

Once you’re getting responses and generating new clients, you’ll be on your way to having a cash-flowing business selling cold email marketing services.

The best thing about the process we’ve shared here is that you can replicate it step-by-step to run your client campaigns.

The process and tools you use are exactly the same, with the main difference being that you’ll run them on your client’s behalf.

When you’re ready to start running your campaign, start your free 14-day trial of QuickMail to see how it can help you get more replies.