August 29, 2017

Cold email outreach experiment

For the past month or so, I’ve been prepping an outreach campaign for my mobile consulting business. So far I have:

Picked a target market (i.e., Credit Unions)
Picked a target buyer (i.e., CMO)
Revised jonathanstark.com and my LinkedIn profile to appeal directly to my target buyer
Picked two target cities (i.e., Atlanta and Chicago)
Made a list of 87 credit unions in my target cities
Added assets, number of members, and number of employees to list
Started personally researching CUs on the list one-by-one on Google, LinkedIn, and the iTunes App Store
Sent connection requests to three ideal buyers on LinkedIn (two accepted so far)
Set up a research call with one ideal buyer (booked for Sept 6th)

As I continued my research today, I found that I had amassed enough info to be comfortable sending out a couple of cold outreach emails. So I decided to do an experiment. I picked two CUs that are in very different areas of the “mobile spectrum” and sent them each an email:

CU1—My first message was to the CEO of a credit union that has about 15 full time employees. They have an iOS app that has very poor reviews. Their website is virtually unusable on mobile.

CU2—My second message was to the CEO of a credit union that has about 150 employees. They have very highly rated mobile apps on both iOS and Android. Their website is mobile-friendly on the surface (e.g., marketing stuff) but as soon as you start drilling into it, it starts to become “desktop only” (e.g., joining the credit union, applying for a loan).

Thoughts:

I am quite certain that I could dramatically improve the condition of CU1 in relatively short order. However, based on the condition of their mobile apps and website, I suspect that they simply don’t care enough about mobile to devote the required resources to it.
CU2 is not in desperate need of mobile expertise but based on their actions, they value mobile. Overall, the organization is pretty mobile friendly, but I did uncover a few specific areas that I could improve.

I probably won’t even hear back from either of these folks, but... my hypothesis is that CU2 is a much more likely prospect for me than CU1.

CU1 needs my help way more than CU2, but CU2 has demonstrated that they value mobile, and CU1 has demonstrated that they do not. The odds of me getting hired by an organization that doesn’t seem to value mobile are close to nil.

I need to send about 50 more messages before I get any real idea about where the sweet spot is, but I thought this would be interesting to you. Stay tuned!

Yours,

—J

P.S. Do you know you should be doing outreach but just can’t make yourself do it? My mentoring program provides the direction and accountability you need to finally start making steady forward progress with your business -> https://jonathanstark.com/mentoring