How to Start a Profitable Cold Email Marketing Agency in 2024
Ready to launch a successful cold email marketing agency. Learn how to start and build your business profitably from the ground up.
Are you looking to boost your brand's reach? A cold email marketing agency might be the secret weapon you've been looking for. Combine email marketing and the power of cold outreach to get real results. Cold email marketing agency is a professional service that can help you send cold emails to potential clients and customers, helping you grow your business. Ready to learn how you can attract more customers and boost your sales with cold email marketing? Let's dive in!
What Is a Cold Email Marketing Agency
A cold email marketing agency is a business that helps clients generate leads through cold email outreach. These agencies specialize in crafting personalized, well-researched cold email campaigns that get responses. A cold email agency focuses on the front end of the sales process, so they help generate leads from scratch.
This is different from a lead generation company, which buys lists of leads to sell to its clients. Cold email agencies typically do not sell leads to clients. Instead, they use email to reach out to new prospects on their clients’ behalf.
What Does a Cold Email Marketing Agency Do?
As a cold email agency owner, I spend my time sourcing new agency clients, setting up email campaigns for my clients, and organizing the lead handoff process. If my cold email campaigns attract the right type of leads, my clients will be able to close them without much difficulty and will grow their business.
At the same time, I will also help build a repeatable, scalable process for generating leads. As my agency grows, I might need to hire a salesperson to help manage the lead handoff process. This way, my agency can focus on setting up campaigns and sourcing clients while the salesperson manages the leads.
The Concept of Cold Email as a Service
Cold email is a service that agencies offer to their clients. This means that the agency takes over the lead-generation process on behalf of the client. The client doesn’t have to worry about setting up the software, writing the emails, or managing the leads.
Instead, they can focus on running their business while the cold email agency generates leads for them. Some agencies also offer related services such as content marketing, SEO, and Twitter outreach to help their clients get more leads.
Why Starting a Cold Email Marketing Agency Can Be a Lucrative Business Opportunity
Always in Demand
Businesses are always in need of more clients, making the services provided by a cold email marketing agency constantly in demand. With the effectiveness of cold email marketing in generating leads, businesses are eager to explore new avenues for customer acquisition. By offering a low-risk value proposition of lead generation through cold email, most business owners will be open to discussions about working together.
Doesn’t Require a Large Initial Investment
Cold email agencies require minimal upfront capital to start, making it a relatively low-risk business venture. All that is needed to begin includes a basic website outlining services, an email domain for outreach campaigns, a cold email platform like QuickMail for campaigns, and a simple CRM system to track leads.
In case of failure, the investment is limited to a few hundred dollars and some time. If successful, cash flow can be quickly generated to invest in software and staff for scaling the agency.
Results-Driven Business Model
The cold email agency business model is results-driven, with most agencies utilizing a pay-per-lead model coupled with a setup fee or retainer. Clients pay exclusively for results, making it easier to attract potential clients. Agencies that deliver a high volume of leads will have satisfied clients willing to pay for each lead generated.
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Step-by-Step Guide on Starting Your Cold Email Marketing Agency
Identifying Your Niche and Ideal Clients
When starting a cold email marketing agency, it's essential to identify your niche and ideal clients. Narrowing down to a specific industry helps in pinpointing potential clients and building expertise.
Utilizing prior experience in an industry can streamline the learning curve and enhance results. Prospect Research involves finding accurate lead data, building SQL/ICP lists, and leveraging tools like ZoomInfo for effective targeting.
Developing Your Service Offerings and Pricing
Offering a variety of services catering to client needs is crucial for success in the cold email marketing agency industry. Services to consider include Email List Building, Copywriting, and Cold Email Campaign Management.
Setting competitive pricing involves evaluating market data for service cost benchmarks and factoring in expertise and project requirements. This balance ensures affordability and profitability.
Set Up Your Agency Infrastructure
Selecting the right tools for your cold email stack and documenting standard operating procedures aids in agency infrastructure setup. Leveraging quality email marketing software, like Leap AI, for effective campaign management is essential. Tools like Calendly and project management platforms such as Asana or Trello optimize workflow efficiency. QuickMail is a valuable tool to set up and run cold email campaigns for clients.
Master the Cold Email Campaign Process
Developing a streamlined onboarding process from consultation to custom email campaign creation is pivotal for success. Enhancing client relationship building involves understanding business goals, target markets, service offerings, and pricing options. Mastering aspects such as writing compelling email sequences, split-testing, nurturing leads, and tracking metrics achieve optimal engagement and results.
Implement a Client Acquisition Strategy
Implementing a client acquisition strategy is critical for scaling the business. Inbound marketing tactics like content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and leveraging reviews/ratings sites drive client acquisition. Developing case studies and testimonials quantifies results, garners client feedback, and showcases success stories. Effective client communication through clear expectations, reporting cadence, centralized portals, and consistent nurturing fosters potential upsells.
Related Reading
- Cold Email Deliverability
- Best Time To Send Cold Emails
- Cold Email Tips
- Cold Email Follow Up
- Best Subject Line For Cold Emails
- Cold Email To Potential Client
- How Long Should A Cold Email Be
- Cold Email Conversion Rate
- How Many Cold Emails To Send Per Day
- Cold Email Sequence
- Cold Email Best Practices
- Cold Email Lead Generation
- Personalized Cold Email Examples
- Cold Outreach Strategy
- Personalized Outreach At Scale
- Cold Email Call To Action
- Best Cold Email Opening Lines
Tools and Resources Needed to Create Effective Cold Email Campaigns
Email automation is a way to create emails that reach the right people with the right message at the right moment—without doing the work every time, sending automated messages leveraging a marketing automation tool.
Empowering Work Automation with Leap
Leap helps you to automate your work with the power of AI. Partnered with Zapier, Vercel, and more, Leap enables you to supercharge your work by allowing you to create custom AI automations. Create sophisticated AI automations with no-code. Connect the tools you love with best-in-class AI text, image, and audio models.
Supercharge your existing tools with seamless AI integrations to OpenAI, Microsoft, and more. From summarizing documents, to voice translation, to AI call transcription, to AI avatar and asset generation, to SEO automation, to even automating the cold email creation and sending process, automate anything with Leap Workflows. The opportunities for automation are endless with Leap workflows.
Try Leap’s AI Workflows tool for free today.
Email Verification Tools - Importance of cleaning lists
A build-up of unengaged subscribers in your list means you’re wasting valuable time, marketing energy, and—here’s the big one—revenue marketing to people who just aren’t interested. And, since email list churn (or subscribers who bounce, report you as spam, or never even open your emails) can eat through up to 30% of your list each year, it’s important to stay on top of things. This means doing a once-over email list cleaning a few times each year. Popular tools: NeverBounce, ZeroBounce
Inbox Placement Tools - Maximizing Your Cold Email Deliverability
An inbox placement tool is for businesses and marketing/sales teams who want to uncover and optimize the percentage of the emails they send that are landing in the primary inbox rather than other locations that rarely get opened (such as folders for spam emails, junk folders or unfocused folders).
This technology can be beneficial for any outbound email campaign and follow-up, as these emails are more likely to hit the spam folder than opt-in communications (like email marketing campaigns to subscribers). Top tools: Allegrow, Glock Apps
Setting Up Cold Email Domains for Deliverability and Success
When you’re sending cold emails to clients, it needs to be on a domain that matches their company. You can’t do it on their main domain – if anything goes wrong and the domain deliverability is harmed, it would affect their day-to-day email activity. Part of the process to ensure your campaigns run smoothly is to set up new cold email domains for your clients.
These domains will only be used for your campaigns, and ideally, you need 4-5 per client in case any of them encounter deliverability problems. You can then rotate between the domains to ensure there’s no downtime in campaigns.
Email Inbox Warm-Up - Prepping for Successful Campaigns
Your cold email deliverability is critical to campaign success. Part of that involves warming up any cold email domain you use.
Warm-up Process
The email inbox warm-up process involves spending 1-2 weeks generating email engagement on your new inbox, generating real activity to show email service providers like Gmail and Outlook that there’s a real person behind the inbox. After a short time warming up the inbox, you’ll be ready to start sending campaigns with full confidence that your client's cold emails will land in the primary inbox.
In the past, cold email agencies had to do this manually. Your team would sign up to newsletters, send emails to colleagues and clients, and over time, the inbox would warm up. Today, there is a range of cold email warm-up tools that automate the process. One excellent option is Mailflow.
Sourcing Leads and Adding Personalization - Finding and Engaging the Right Prospects
Once your client email inboxes are warmed up, it’s time to source your prospect list.Based on your client onboarding survey, you’ll already have details on what makes up an ideal customer for every client.
But, you’ll still need to go and identify the right leads.
To do this, you can use:
BuiltWith
Source prospects based on the software they use on their website
UpLead
Identify prospects based on company industry, sales revenue, location, job titles, and much more.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
A powerful addition to LinkedIn that lets you build prospect lists, automatically monitor companies for changes and send personalized InMails.
Tracking Results and Reporting - Measuring Success and Accountability
Your cold email agency needs to have a clear system for identifying interested prospects and closing new meetings with them.To help you track every positive response, you can use QuickMail’s Opportunities inbox.
This gives an overview of every response your campaigns generate. Any member of your team can jump in and respond to leads and help move the conversation toward the result you want – a meeting.As well as that, every key campaign metric is automatically tracked.You can easily build reports for clients, with information on:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Reply rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Bounce rate
- Meeting booking rate
Create Game Changing Automations Today With Leap’s AI Workflows
Leap is an AI-powered tool that helps you to automate your work and supercharge your productivity with custom AI automations. When it comes to cold email marketing, Leap's AI Workflows tool can revolutionize your approach to outreach by streamlining the creation and sending process.
Creating Custom AI Automations
By leveraging Leap, you can create custom AI automations specifically tailored to your cold email marketing agency's needs. These AI automations can help you streamline and optimize your email outreach campaigns, making them more effective and efficient.
Seamless AI Integrations
Leap seamlessly integrates with OpenAI, Microsoft, and more, allowing you to leverage the power of these AI models in your cold email marketing efforts. This integration enables you to access advanced text, image, and audio AI models that can enhance the effectiveness of your email outreach campaigns.
Automating Cold Email Creation and Sending Process
Leap's AI Workflows tool allows you to automate the cold email creation and sending process. By automating these tasks, you can save time and resources while increasing the scalability and efficiency of your email outreach campaigns.
Endless Opportunities for Automation
With Leap Workflows, the opportunities for automation are endless. Whether it's summarizing documents, voice translation, AI call transcription, AI avatar and asset generation, or SEO automation, Leap can help you automate anything related to your cold email marketing agency.
