Mastering Copywriting in 2024: Trends and Best Practices for Future Success
Dec 5, 2024
Video Walkthrough:
More than 25% of CEO’s come from a sales and marketing background. I’m writing this guide in the aim to help the 18-year-old version of myself that just started in sales, lacked any real sales knowledge or skills but knew sales was ultimately one of the best vehicles to become successful. If you know how to sell, there will always be doors opening for you. Go get paid. The world is yours for the taking.
Thesis on Cold Email Copywriting:
Demand Capture v Demand Generation
Less words the better
Speak in simple layman’s terms
Sometimes you gotta skip the shit and get to the pitch
Speak 2:1 about them v you
Keep it on one scroll of the phone
The first line preview is worth just as much as your offer
If you use bullet points, make them incredibly relevant or value-driven
AI should be your assistant, not your crutch
Meme’s make people laugh. When people smile they’re more inclined to say yes.
Offer Creation
So you want to do cold email?
First, we have to figure out what we’re going to sell…
The best part about cold email is you can sell 90% of things over the internet or get someone to engage with you.
In most cases, we’re looking at products, services, software, etc.
Based on my experience with cold email lead generation your sales units whatever that might be fall into two categories. This will be the baseline principle that we’ll utilize in our cold email campaigns.
Those two categories:
Demand Capture
Demand Generation
Demand Capture occurs when prospects are already problem aware and they take action on their need or pain. This is things like marketing agencies, SEO, accountant, payroll. You know you have a problem or have a need so, you go to the market in search of answers.
Demand Generation occurs when you make your prospect problem aware and shift them into action. You’re able to shift them into action by showing that they’re input will have a significant multiple ROI in the form of time, money or energy. As for positioning that end-state, it usually revolves around saving them time, money, making more money, raising status, or bringing them into an exclusive group.
These sales pitches are structurally different in your outreach.
Demand Capture
We want to focus on what can we do to either capture that attention with the right timing (trigger events) OR, we make them problem aware by composing a creative angle to uncover gaps in their existing strategy or processes
Right Timing:
Timing is everything in life. The light turns green, we hit the gas. The fastball comes, you hit the pitch. You meet the right partner, and say “I do”. All of those events have trigger events right before them to indicate after this one decision is made, you have a high degree of certainty you know the impact of the event.
Let’s take the case of marriage. After you get married, it is fair to assume that you'll be moving into together, some blending of finances between both parties, start planning the future together, etc.
The wedding is the trigger event. With a high degree of certainty we know what will follow after the said trigger event. And while it’s not copy and paste for every party there are some commonalities that we know because we’ve either engaged with people there
(customer interviews) or learned from those that have been there (research)
Leveraging trigger events is knowing when certain shoes are going to drop and how you can position yourself effectively when this does take place.
How to identify trigger events:
There’s a phrase called skating to where the puck is going to be at. I feel like it fits nicely here. In cold email, you’re able to skate to where the puck is going by either doing customer interviews, researching competitors' marketing activities, or other general research.
If you have existing customers, they were all going some variation of the same journey that led them to partnering with you to solve a pain point inflaring from the trigger event. Ask them questions to understand what exactly transpired that made them want to start working with you.
“What was your life like before working with us?”
“What made you want to work with us?”
“How was your day to day before engaging with us about X?”
These questions will begin to paint a picture of what exactly they were going through that made them want to engage with you in the first place.
The answer isn’t always black and white. Don’t expect it to be me. However, there are commonalities to identify and deduce creatively what exactly their world looks like pre and post our service. Take a copious amount of notes then have a white board session to see what were the commonalities or deeper correlations.
There is always a common thread in your ICP. If you haven’t found it yet, you’re not asking the right questions. Go back to the drawing board and have more conversations or, do more research with AI or online.
Once we have the trigger event, extract the value the client gained from working with us…
“What’s your favorite part about working with us?”
“What's been the biggest benefit of working with us”
“What impact have we had on your company?”
The questions will all come back to the form of saving or making more time, money, energy, resources, stress, etc.
It’s all going to vary but, you’ll figure out pretty quickly the biggest wins and position those as something repeatable in your core offer or just sell that alone. When engaging via cold email, we’ll want to capture the trigger event and sell the case study as similar beneficial impacts.
It’s the combination of the trigger event + killer case study that makes your offer relevant and impactful.
Let’s run through some scenarios of public-facing trigger events…
Company announces funding:
Company expands headcount for marketing and sales to drive in more revenue for the business
Expanding the system quickly requires some sort of material injection to support the future growth…leads, software, marketing spend, events etc.
They’re in hyper-growth mode which comes with growing pains that you can solve b/c you’ve done it before for a similar company, sell the case study.
Releasing a new product:
Expanded efforts around production, delivery, support, marketing and sales efforts.
With new releases comes more customer requests and support tickets about the new product launch.
If you can capture that trigger event and share how you’ve nailed similar launches with your support or sales team, a conversation will be 10x more relevant than just a carpet bombing approach.
Hiring for a CFO:
We know that they have an active gap on their executive suite
We’ve been a CFO before and now offer fractional CFO services to similar size companies because we have a proven successful system in place.
We then sell our system as a potential alternative to get them the same goal at a 50% price reduction.
Identify the trigger event. Sell the case study and outcome. Make it clear the impact you would have and show your acquired knowledge and trusted experience to make this a no-brainer.
How you can find this information:
Usually a quick scan of their LinkedIn, Twitter, or even the company website is enough to give you some nuggets to use. Just to show that it’s not a copy-paste email. If you’re feeling fancy, tools like Clay, Hunter or Clearbit can help automate a lot of the data collection on a larger scale.
Starting off with zero customers:
If you’re starting at square 1. Don’t worry, we were all there too. You’re in the unique position to leverage cold email at a time when it’s never been more effective and affordable. You also have the added benefit of not having to service any customers so 100% of your time should be devoted to getting customers in the door.
The best way to do that when you’ve proven absolutely zero proof that you can deliver on your promises?
Work for free.
Everyone hates the idea of it, I know. The simple fact of it is, if you don’t have some sort of experience or testimonials to call upon, you’ll have little to no success with cold email.
Why should people trust you?
You wouldn’t. Why should they?
Give them a reason to earn their trust in exchange for a customer case study that we then turn around and sell to others.
When we started Buzzlead, we offered people their first three meetings free and if we don’t book you 5 in 90 days, you get your money back.
We had a ton of success with some companies and couldn’t sell a meeting for our lives with others.
We quickly found out what we were great at selling and what we weren’t. It was the fastest feedback loop to identify our ICP, collect the case study, then sell the case study to the larger market.
Identify the trigger event. Sell the case study and outcome.
This is 50% of what works well in pitching demand capture via cold email.
Recap:
Engage customers to figure out what their trigger event was
What benefit have your customer received from our service
Use AI and Clay to identify similar trigger events personas
Sell the case study as your offer by being incredibly relevant
Working for Free
The other 50% here of pitching in a demand capture market is offering a reduced version of your service for free. While the idea of working for free is not sexy for 90% of businesses, feel free to complain while the other 10% are gobbling up your market share.
You don’t have to give away the moon. Just give them something of innate value that would make their lives easier to some degree. Take work off their plate to earn their time.
The world runs on reciprocity.
Your mind should be asking: what is something that has a decent market value, costs me very little, is repeatable and allows me to display my acquired knowledge?
Think audits, competitive takedowns, free content, and looms/video reviews. The list goes on…
Examples:
“Share your top three competitors and I’ll give you a competitive takedown strategy”
“I signed up for your email newsletter and noticed a few gaps in your email marketing campaigns, mine if I share that with you here?”
“I was on your website today and noticed a few items on your site that might be leaving revenue on the table, mind if I send over a quick video showing you?”
“Is your accountant using every legal tax loophole to maximize your 2024 return?”
Presenting your DC Offer:
In most cases for Demand Capture where you’re offering a reduced version of your service for free, this will typically be presented as a direct pitch or a value-driven CTA at the end of the email.
Let’s pretend you’re a marketing agency pitching SEO, content, ads, etc... You would lead with some aspect of role call out to specify why you’re speaking to them (or why you’re reaching out now). We’ll call this relevance in our outreach. You’ll then quickly flow into your offer or question…typically starting with “if we could…” or “would it be interesting if…”
Example:
“I noticed you head up marketing efforts for ACME inc. If we could provide you a comprehensive media guide based on your top 3 competitors, would that be interesting?”
Alternatively, we can call out said trigger events, present our offer then flow into our value-driven CTA.
“It looks like you run a lean marketing team over at ACME Inc. I'm with Digital Design Media; we work with other high-performing organizations when their marketing team is spread too thin.
We’ve been working with them to close the gap on their marketing team's efforts and boost website traffic by 30% month-over-month through a tailored approach of content, web design, SEO, and SMMA.
If you send me your top 3 competitors, I'll give you the keywords they're outranking you on and prepare a competitive takedown strategy to get you to the top page of Google. Open to sharing?”
Demand Generation
The fundamental difference between Demand Capture vs Demand Generation is that YOU make your prospect problem aware and shift them into action. You’re able to shift them into action by showing that they’re input will have a significant multiple ROI in the form of time, money or energy.
Based on experience, the most formulaic approach I’ve seen is from Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers. This offer creation framework helps easily portray to our audience how we help people save time, save money, make more money, raise their status or invite them into an exclusive group. It breaks down into 5 key components.
Quantifiable End Result: What are you going to give me and by when?
Niche: Identify the target audience or market segment that benefits from your offering.
Mechanism: Highlight the unique approach or methodology through which you achieve the desired result. (blueprint, system, launchplan)
Timeline: Specify the timeframe in which your offering produces results.
Risk Reversal: We want to use a risk reversal to put the customers mind at ease and increase the perceived likelihood of achievement for them, while having a safe fallback in case we don’t.
You then simply implement those variables in this sentence…
We help {niche} {benefit} by {unique mechanism} in {timeframe} or {risk reversal}
Examples:
“We help B2B SaaS book 8-12 meetings every month using our Outbound Prospecting System”
“We partner with single mom’s to get back 10 hours a week cooking with our food preparation and delivery services”
“By partnering with us, restaurants add $5-$10k/m to their bottom line with our Point-of-Sale system.”
Breaking Out From the Offer Framework
While Hormozi’s framework works great for a baseline for presenting your ‘offer’ to clients. Don’t let it be your crutch. Some of the best results (which I’ll share later on) are just simply presenting the customer case study and seeing if they’d be interested in doing the same for them. No real fancy presentation to it, just pitching the outcome we derived for a similar business and see if they’re open to achieving similar results.
If you can draw up laser sharp lead lists from tools like Ocean + Clay, and hit them with a hyper targeted case study on how you helped a similar peer, that just screams relevance and is costly to ignore.
Selling Over Cold Email
Relevance
Trigger events will be limited to a significantly smaller group compared to the total addressable market (TAM) that exists. If we’re targeting the TAM, we’ll want to refine again what that ICP looks like by some commonalities amongst the parties that aren't as bright as the flashing red light of a trigger event.
It’s something as small as a lean development team headcount, they just transferred companies and used you previously, their first time being a C-suite member, etc.
Previously, this used to take hours upon hours of tedious research and market analysis to identify these relevant trends.
Now with AI and things like clay.com, we can quickly search given those parameters or pre-load copious amounts of data to deduce and identify what specific persons in that market are fitting that theory of relevance.
I won’t be digressing into AI in lead generation. I have larger articles on that topic and complimentary videos.
A few ways you can personalize based on relevance:
Web traffic
Hiring
Headcount
Recent event or conference
Personnel changes
Relevance is incredibly impactful and a second step down from trigger events in conviction of how well they’ll work.
Campaign Structure and Flow:
Right now, we’re typically only contacting people 2-3 times before removing them from a sequence. This is counter-knowledge to when I first started and learned that most B2B buyers require 7-8 touch points before they buy your service. That’s true but, that’s across all mediums, marketing, sales, customer support etc.
So, we keep our campaigns short, personalized and impactful for what they’ll do for the end user. Typically we separate these out over the course of a couple of days a piece. Below is an example sending schedule
Email 1
Wait 2 days
Email 2
Wait 3 days
Email 3
Wait 7 days
Email 4(nuke)
A lot of cold emailers try to use templates that online guru’s share and while templates are helpful for getting started, you won’t see outsized results for them. This guide is meant to teach you how to go from zero to 6/7 on the cold email knowledge scale (out of 10), so I’ll share a few that’ll aid in your creative process.
That said, let these guides be a crutch, not an anchor. They can be used in most cases but not all.
The Observation
Hi {{first_name}}
I noticed {{current problem that most of your clients have}}, even though {{why it’s so crucial}}.
Decided to reach out because we’ve {{achieved result X for Y similar company}}
We’re now helping a handful of companies like yours {{achieve dream result Y}}
Can I send you more information on how we do it?
Cutting the BS (Relevance)
Hi {{first_name}}, {{relevant personalized first line}}
In my experience, business that reach this stage have their attention on {{goal 1}} and {{goal 2}}
We’ve been providing unique solutions for companies like {{competitor 1}}, {{competitor 2}}, and {{competitor 3}}
I don’t suppose you’d have a few min to jump on a call and see if we can do the same for you?
WYWYN
Hi {{first_name}}, I noticed you oversee {{position}}, I'm sure you're {{pain point or ideal outcome}}
We establish {{industry}} as {{ideal outcome}} in {{time frame}} by {{unique mechanism}}
Recently we {{case study}}
Mind if I send over a quick resource on how we did it?
Direct Pitch
Hi {{first_name}} - I noticed you oversee {{vertical}} at {{company_name}}. If we could {{offer}}, would that be interesting?
Recently we {{case study}}.
Let me know.
Follow-ups:
Your follow-up should come across organically in that you’re thinking of this person again or wanted to remind them of something. Typically what this should take the form of is:
More free knowledge
Elaborating more fully on your offer
Share moring about the impact of your service
Make your follow-up email sound natural, don’t just dive in and pitch again. The follow-up should relate to some natural questions or concerns that your prospect might have when initially receiving that email. Your goal in that follow-up is to close that chasm and compel them to take a call to learn more.
“Hey {{first_name}} - I was thinking about you and wanted to share a bit more on X and why it would help out with Y that you’re working on…have a few minutes on Wednesday to show you around?”
AI Implementation Ideas
Hi {{first_name}}, I had reached out the other day about how we could {{ideal outcome}} but, likely, didn't fully show how we'd help.
I was back on your site today and had a few ideas come to mind…
GPT idea 1
GPT idea 2
GPT idea 3
I'm of course sharing these without knowing your {{vertical}} goals for 2024.
Are you open to speaking briefly next Tuesday at 3pm EDT about your {{vertical}} goals and if we can help?
Future State
Hi {{first_name}}, I noticed you oversee {{X position}}, are you currently struggling with {{common industry pain point}}?
We’ve been working with {{industry}} to {{offer that solves pain point}}
Picture this:
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3 and ideal outcome
That’s not a fantasy, that’s what we just did for {{client 1}} and {{client 2}}.
Are you totally opposed to me sharing a resource on how we did it?
Subject Lines
The unsung heroes of cold email campaigns. No matter how strong your offer is, if the subject line doesn’t get them to open your email, it’s game over.
So, what makes a subject line irresistible? Here are a few elements that work like magic:
Curiosity: Leave them wondering. “{{First_Name}}, quick question” creates just enough intrigue and is all lowercase, casual format. OR, simply just “quick question”
Formal: use all lowercase in your outreach to give the impression that it’s a peer-to-peer or internal email.
Personalization: People love seeing their name in the subject line. A simple “Hey {{First Name}}, made this is for you” makes it feel tailored.
Relevance: Speak to their pain point. A subject like “Struggling with [Pain Point]? Check this out.” will get them thinking…
Quick Tip: Keep your subject lines under 50 characters. Most people open emails on their phones, so make sure your message is short and punchy.
Test It Out
Next time you send out a cold email, A/B test a couple of subject lines to see which one gets more opens. You’d be surprised at how much difference a little tweak can make.
Apply Spintax
Apply spintax to your cold emails so it protects domain health and will vary for each receiving party on the other end. Simply apply brackets as such { {{company_name}} // {{your_company}} | quick question }. This will enable it so person 1 get’s {{company_name}} // {{your_company}} while person 2 gets {{your_company}} | quick question. We also created a spintax GPT that will do this for you, you can find it here: Spintax GPT.
Creative Writing Styles and Elements
In this guide, we’ve shared how to do research, position your product, and some generalized templates for outreach. While there is some standardization that you can employ in your outreach, when you truly get outsized results with cold email is when you have your personal creative writing style come to life!
After writing and sending 8-figures worth of cold emails, I’ve noticed some common elements that have made my creative writing style effective. I’m going to share some of those fun writing styles here.
Challenge the status quo:
We’ve firmly established that your prospects are inundated with emails. So, how do you get them to 1) open your email and 2) read/respond to your email.
When we’ve engaged with very difficult ICP’s (F1000 C-suite for example), we need to provide them with information or insight that adds to the daily value of their life and career. Not some blanket pain-oriented question or statement that they are already aware of or know to be true.
Your ability to challenge their status quo comes from your unique experience and understanding. Chances are, if you’re selling to this persona, you’ve at least researched or worked with the exact same persona before.
So use the insight you know was eye opening to your previously engaged clients! What stats truly shocked them that compelled them to move the deal forward. What truth did they believe that was shattered by counter-compelling evidence you shared with them. Marketing insights that are unique or unknown to them now.
The real goal here is to give them something they can take back to their water cooler and say “did you know that…” and once you’ve nailed that effectively, you’ve earned mind-share and mutual respect.
Examples:
Marketing insight
Technology evolution related insights
Why their project might fail - backed by stats or case studies
Competitor related insights.
Speak to their pain points/Poke The Bear:
I can’t take credit for this one. Josh Braun shares a lot of content like this on LinkedIn. We want to take a known pain point being faced by our ICP and push the pencil in their eye a bit about that pain point to see if it truly is stinging for them.
It shouldn’t be a super intense question by any means but, we’re leveraging our unique insight about their world to speak to them in a persuasive manner.
You can come up with these questions on your own or even use GPT to help you out.
Some GPT flow prompts you can use to get these questions are:
What are some typical pain points being faced by ICP when trying to do X
How painful are those challenges
Change the most powerful pain points into engaging but casual questions to be used in a cold email. Keep your tone casual
Ideal output here is at least 3 to 4 questions that are going to lean into the pain that you’ll directly solve with your offer.
Examples:
Are you too struggling with…
Are you finding that…
Is it annoying that…
Likeability:
The World’s Greatest Salesman, according to Guinness Book of World Records, Joe Girard sold over 13,000 vehicles in his sales career. That’s no small feat. One of his standout strategies was his personal touch—he would send out thousands of handwritten cards each month to past customers, prospects, and people in his community. These cards often contained simple messages like “I like you,” helping him build relationships and trust, which led to repeat customers and referrals. This approach, combined with his exceptional work ethic and charisma, made him a legendary figure in sales history.
Everyone likes to be complemented, plain and simple. So, how do we employ this in cold email?
You’ll want to come across organically as to how you found them or identified their brand or business. This is easy when you’re trying to speak to one person, easily complimenting their background, recent post on LinkedIn or marketing effort. At scale, this becomes increasingly difficult. So, we’ll need to employ more blanketed statements.
Examples:
Came across your brand today, I see the vision.
Came across some of your marketing content - love what you’re building at {{company_name}}.
Came across your store on Google today, love what you’ve built!
Be a Familiar Peer:
With being a familiar peer, we’re going to deploy the unique insight we have already acquired to speak to the target persona as someone we seem to already know and understand. The pain point or trigger event we’re going to highlight should flow directly into our offer and why it relates to why we’re reaching out.
Use the pain points and trigger events you’ve collected to put this knowledge on full display.
Examples:
We’ve from other X that Y can be a constant headache
If you’re like some of the other X’s we work with, you might be frustrated with
Working with other X, we’ve heard just how frustrating/challenging/scary Y can be without Z.
Paint The Picture of The Future:
This creative element is typically applied more so in follow-ups but, we’ve begun testing it in initial outreach with some success. The ultimate goal here is to help your prospect visualize what their world would look like if you were able to come in and solve their problem or help them make money, save money, raise status, etc.
Powerful language you can utilize is “let’s pretend…” for example, “Let’s pretend we were able to fill your sales calendar every day with qualified leads so you don’t have to make a cold call again.”
We want to shift the prospects' frame into what that ideal state would look and feel like. Try not to make this feel cheesy and cheeky like you’re some snake oil salesman.
I shared two templates on how to use this in your follow-up emails above with AI Implementation Ideas and Future State. These are two great examples that share more on your solution/service and what that would look/feel like after working with you.
Sell The Case Study:
We talked about breaking out how we can break out from Hormozi’s offer framework earlier by simply just pitching our case study as the core offer. When we’re able to access hyper-targeted lead lists through Clay or Oceans.io of almost identical lookalike audiences, this angle will print 90% of the time.
It’s really simple, just a quick intro and run directly into your case study and ask if they’d like to achieve a similar result.
The introduction you use in the email can be either a question, statement, compliment or being a familiar peer. Something to get them to correlate what you’re about to pitch them. Here’s an example that’s done incredibly well below…
“{{first_name}} - overseeing growth, are you happy with the lead flow your sales team is currently receiving?
We just helped COMPANY, a SaaS tool add $105k in ARR within 90 days using our outbound prospecting efforts.
{Would love to do the same for {{company_name}}.|Fairly confident we can do the same for {{company_name}} }
Are you open to speaking briefly about your lead generation?”
There’s no traditional offer there. Just a presentation of the case study and asking if they want similar results.
If you can spin up all 5 of these angles, your campaign will be in a great place to test which variant is going to stick and scale.
Call-To-Actions (CTA’s):
So, you’ve made it this far in your cold emails. You’ve done your research on your prospect, you’ve shown you know their world and have a solution that will help them save time, save money, make money or raise their status…now is the time to make your ask!
Your call to action should either be front loaded in your email or at the end of your email.
What do I mean by front-loading your CTA?
With some offers, sometimes you need to just go for a direct pitch and at the end say “...would that be interesting?” or some variation of that question.
Quickly and effectively portray your offer and see if it’ll grab their attention. This works best in cases for B2B services not SaaS.
Alternatively, if we’re employing a CTA at the end of our email, this can take two different forms:
Value-driven (email 1)
Direct ask (email 2)
What’s a value-driven CTA?
Some like to call it a cold email trojan horse but, essentially you’re leading with something of value to your prospect that would make their life nominally easier that’s easy for you and low-friction. By leading with something of value, we’re then going to use the rule of reciprocity to earn their time in our second ask. How? Well, we just gave them something of value and human nature is going to compel them to want to return the favor.
Don’t believe me? Studies show that wait staff that leave a mint on their tab, receive a 20% larger tip.
Use this tactic to your advantage. You don’t need to give away the farm here but, something that they would find of value or interesting.
Examples:
Free ad samples
Email marketing workflows
Free leads
Audits/competitive takedowns
Build a lead generation system
Direct Ask CTA:
We employ direct CTA’s in email 2 and onward. After you’ve offered to lead with the free value and that doesn’t garner any attention, we only have 1-2 more emails to get them to book a meeting or take a step to them completing our ultimate goal. There’s no need to mince words simply just outline what your ask is here
Examples:
Book a Call
Watch a Demo video
Visit our Website
Read On…
Now, you’ve watched this entire video and read the document you have a few choices to make…
You can spend your own time, money and energy to learn lead generation from scratch, including domain setup, buying email accounts, extracting hard to find data, writing your offer, scripts, and managing replies OR…
You can learn how to do cold email like a pro in our Skool Community for $19/m. Link here.
We can build this entire system for you for a one-time $2,000 fee. Link here.
I can write your scripts for you for a one-time $250 fee. Link here.
The choice is yours!
Until then,
Troy Aitken
Buzzlead.io