Hank's Email Drafts

Today I have some email drafts that I've used at Vercel, GitLab, Neo4j, Laravel, and several companies I've advised. Some variants of them seems to always work. I think they're actually so good that even if the market becomes saturated with these, they will still work. I started using these when I was a junior demand gen slash sales ops person. And AE went out of town for two weeks and the COO asked me to manage his inbox. We didn't have SDRs at the company yet. And there was no way, like that was so in the way of what I wanted to do. This is 2014. We didn't have outreach or Apollo or any of the sequencing tech. So I built my own sequences in Marketo and I used these templates. And when he got back, he said, Hank, what did you do? And I was like, oh, what did I do? He said, I have more replies in my inbox than I've ever had before. Whatever you did, can we keep it on? And then soon enough, we had it rolled out to the whole team and it spiked our opportunity generation because we went from being valuable and being interesting and trying to get replies over just trying to set meetings. So here's the drafts. And I give all that preface, preface, preface, preface. I give all of that story ahead of this because a lot of people don't like these drafts when I show them. So when someone signs up, my rule is timing is the first thing to handle. When someone signs up for a free trial or pro trial or something, none of this, hey, dear SDR or AE, you have 24 hours to personalize a message. No, no, no, no. Let's just give them a relevant message as quickly as possible. So salespeople always argue with me, no, personalized is better. No, scientifically tested emails are better, that are fast. And then marketers always argue with me on this part. They wanna send a nice nurture life cycle series, building their brand. No, no, no. We're sending from a human email address that is an actual human at the company that when they reply, a human will reply. It has to be plain text. None of this fancy HTML stuff. Don't put a logo at the top. Don't use fancy fonts, plain text. Okay, here's what's worked for me for a decade. Despite all the different email trends, somehow these endure. I do a subject similar to this, technical vercel resources for name or email address, whichever you have. Even if you put their email address, like it's okay. They can tell it's a robot emailing them. So just knowing that it's for them specifically is good. And the subject is only part of the open rate. The next part of the open rate is actually this down here, the body. So if we look at the first part of this, this is a little psychology trick I picked up. I'm gonna tell you another story now. There's some behavioral economic paper where they studied how do you get people to donate more in canned food drives? Do you tell people about the cause? Do you tell people how important it is? Do you tell people that people will starve if you don't give them food? The answer turned out to be to maximize donations. If you simply say, hey, on average, your neighbors give two cans, four cans, six cans per person, then people who understand, oh, that's my peer group, that's what's expected, I will do that. This also won Obama the election, by the way. The get out the vote campaign by Obama was using that science. So what I like to do is I like to put people in a peer group. Okay, what's their peer group? For me, it's always developers that I'm marketing to. So I could say most people, sometimes I say most developers who start with product ask me for one of the following. I'm telling them what their peers did. Hey, your peers asked me this, so I'm anticipating your need. And since this is from a human, that's really powerful. Like, wow, okay, maybe this is a robot, but even if it is an automated email, which clearly it is, because I got it within five minutes of signing up for the product, there's some thought in this. The first link, I always put three links. First link, the generic one that everybody expects, the getting started guide, whatever generic resource you have, the most important doc, whatever. The next thing is something a little more long form and consumption. Like, okay, if you don't need the whole getting started guide, why don't you go consume something more interesting that will bring you into our philosophy or our idea or show you our CEO, something like that. And then the third thing is some differentiating feature or lesser known feature that should make them go, oh, that's something I didn't know that this product could do. Think of where they were. They went through your homepage or some landing page to get here. So they don't know everything about the product. And that's a whole other, there's a whole other piece of content to be made about how people try to cram too much into landing pages or homepages. You can't tell your whole product story. Part of you telling your story is giving people the breadcrumbs along the way. You've told them whatever they needed to hear to get into the product. And now you tell them something that will help differentiate you versus whatever they're comparing you to. This paragraph down here sets you apart because most sellers and marketers who are emailing a person are super anxious to get the meeting. It's how SDRs are paid. It's how marketers are measured. Everything comes down to the meeting. We're not gonna ask for that. We're gonna zig. Everybody else is zagging, saying, please, can I have a meeting? Like, here's my Calendly, you're qualified, you're scoring well, whatever. No, no, no, we don't care. We're just saying, hey, I'm your product advocate. I'm your account manager. I'm whatever. I'm happy to answer technical questions because you might have those. We put one little escape hatch here. If your team, you don't say if you because it's so easy if you ask someone directly, do you want this? They can say, nah, I don't need that. But if you help them start thinking about their team, again, we're thinking in peer groups, we're using the psychology of like a sale here. So if your team, not you, but if your team will want security documentation or enterprise plan pricing, please reply. I'll help you. We're saying, hey, if you want this, you're gonna have to sell your team on it and I'm here to help you do that. I'm not here to sell you. That would be gross. And then we plant this little flag. Otherwise, I'll check in on your progress. So there's no pressure to reply. It's really only if you need something. And as an aside, in 2021, we changed one of these paragraphs because we had so many people doing NFT crypto launches that we put an extra hook in here on like, if you have a major launch in the next 30 days, please reply so you can get the appropriate support. Because we had too many people coming to us at the end of their trial and saying, I'm launching tomorrow and it was a massive launch and they needed an enterprise plan and then they're crypto people so they wouldn't pay us. So instead, we figured out how to get them to raise their hand earlier. So you might wanna think about that. Who are the people you need to raise their hand the fastest? What are the flags you plant here for them? Okay, so otherwise, I'll check on your progress in a couple of days. Great. And then yeah, you can always have a PS, mention your next event, whatever marketing's pushing. Just put it there. Email number two. You do it two days later. I love to add a prime number of minutes so that in the thread, because you'll notice in the subject, we are threading these. The prime number of minutes makes it so it's not like exactly two days ago. You know, it offsets a little bit. It's just a little trick to appear more human. And this email, while the first email, we don't care if they think we're automated, we clearly are. This email, we're trying to appear a little more human and get a human response. We're not asking for a meeting. Instead, we put a run on sentence, which is not something GPT will write. Say, just checking on what you thought of the links I sent you a few days ago and what kind of project your team is working on. Have you used products before? This one is what gets the replies. First, you're getting feedback on the links. Like you're kind of saying, hey, a thanks would be nice, you know? And if they're gonna do that, which they kind of feel obligated to, there's a little social pressure here. Like, hey, I was really, you know, kind of thoughtful. I haven't pressured you at all. Just let me know how I'm doing. They're also gonna wanna answer this. What kind of project is your team working on? You gotta word this in a way that helps you qualify. So if you're trying to qualify for an enterprise contract, you wanna know that they're working with a team and they're gonna answer that. Even if it's a disqualifying question, the number one complaint I get from salespeople about this email is a lot of the riffraff and like disqualified people reply. Well, guess what? I want those replies because now you don't have to chase them anymore. You mark them disqualified and it's over. Like there's no more nurturing. Like you do a little work now, right early when they just got an intro to your product. And now you know how to treat them for the rest of the thing and now marketing knows, oh, they're disqualified for enterprise, great. Maybe we'll try and get them on self-serve or something, right? I've done other content on product advocates on using engineers as SDRs because they can actually answer the technical questions and it becomes less of a burden and it raises your self-serve conversion rate, but that's a different thing. Anyways, then you can have another email, stupid, simple, like, hey, making progress or stuck. You know, it's just another, it's kind of the hail Mary to get there. This is the zero to one, get your pipeline, maximize your inbound conversion rate. And it's worked for me many times. So last time I talked about like a dumb tip on unsubscribe pages, but this time was about these emails. Next time I'm gonna talk about attribution and how I think about attribution. I've got a little sheet. If you want these drafts, by the way, I don't know, DM me or comment or something and then I'll send it to you. And yeah, next time we'll do this attribution sample sheet. Cheers.