non-guru explains how he made $150K with a simple copy hack

what's going on guys I know a lot of you have been asking in this video I'm going to break down my four-step cold email copywriting process this has made me a little over 150k us in the last uh 16 months something like that uh you do not have to be a good writer for this all you have to do is follow a simple formula this works for me and this works for a dozens of other people that have helped produce similar results over the last couple years so if that sounds like something you're interested in let's get into it okay first things first I use instantly. a to manage all of my cold email camp pains it's one of my favorite platforms ever I'm not going to run you through how to get up and running with this platform if you want to watch that I'll leave a video link in the description that covers my actual system from sourcing leads on LinkedIn uh to enriching them and so on and so forth but this is a campaign that I ran uh like eight months ago N9 months ago something like that I don't know my math ain't so good uh it was about two months long we sent about 4,500 contacts uh we had a reply rate of 12% approximately Allin which if you're in the business you'd know is a pretty good reply right usually campaigns get anywhere from like 2 to maybe 42% uh unless they're hyper customized and ours were not customized that's one of the benefits of my email copyrighting approach that led to 187 opportunities is a little bit misleading instantly defines an opportunity as any reply but some of these were out of office replies sort of just like irrelevant ones so about a third of those were somewhat positive replies and then about a third of those actually led to like booked meetings uh I think from this we ended up with like 12 clients something along those lines so they act client you know process in our case it wasn't like Bonkers but this is a reasonable and totally average campaign performance that you can expect as long as you nail the copyrighting steps and that's why I wanted to show you this it's not going to like win any awards but it doesn't have to be uh you know getting 12 clients over the course of two months is like 1. 5 clients a week

for a lot of client agencies that's more than enough so in short this is the copy that I've sent and what I'm going to do here I mean I used to have a bunch of variants I just cleaned them all up for the purposes of this demonstration what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about why this email campaign performs so well um I have a four-step copyrighting formula notion doc that I'm going to just run through and give you guys some background and then I actually also have a couple of email roasts where I'm going to go in and then I'm going to fix and optimize uh cold emails from the community that I've sourced I'm part of a great Community uh started by the founder of fat show his name is Joe Davies uh and so I've been talking to a lot of people there so I got a great uh a great example here then I got a great example from my Twitter all this stuff is just write for optimization and they've all cleared it uh with me that I can roast them and that sort of thing so

any without further Ado uh let's get into it there are four steps that you need to nail uh if you want to run a copyrighting campaign at scale like I do I'm not saying that this is the only way to do it there are a lot of people out there that have had great success with a different formula whether it's three steps five steps 25 steps whatever but I've tried to simplify it and get it down to just as like a reductionist approach as humanly possible and here are what I found were the four non-negotiables number one you have to mention Logistics so you have to tell them where you found them and why they should give a number two you have to show them background a little bit about yourself what are you capable of doing for them you know give them like your elevator pitch in a sentence number three you need case studies at least one preferably two or three this is just demonstrating that you know your stuff you can site specific clients and results given for other people and then four and this is like non-negotiable you need to have some type of risk reversal this basically means guarantee you need to have some type of like money back offer if you don't have this uh you're probably not going to make it past like a 2 or 3% reply rate and so the entire reason why I got 12% is because my I just had an awesome offer I had like 100% risk reversal doesn't cost you anything you don't pay if you don't see the results that you're looking for um if you don't do that you just cannot freaking close Cold clients at scale it's just something that you need and I'll go through kind of the context and the methodology behind all these in a second but simply put Logistics is very easy

I'll give you a quick example from my campaign here that I ran that generated me uh I don't know I think this one made over $20,000 for total investment of like 400 or 500 bucks right so this very profitable uh nobody asked for a refund nobody asked for anything this is how I did it so first things first Logistics who are you where did you find them why should they give a um this is like about the most lukewarm example of that and my copywriting campaign still crushed so hey first name I found you on LinkedIn and I figured I'd reach out what are we doing there we're telling them where we found them which is LinkedIn if you don't do this a lot of the time People's First questions are going to be like where did he get my email from how did you get my information why are you talking to me yada found you on LinkedIn that's the context and then figured I'd reach out that's like the simplest most lukewarm like hey I just wanted to reach out realistically if you wanted to like hyper optimize this you would have some other custom variable here maybe like found you on LinkedIn and saw you were in the UK or like found you on LinkedIn when I was browsing through Niche Shopify store owners or something like that I just did this because my audience is extremely General so I didn't even really need to Niche down but the more that you Niche down the better that your reply rate becomes because the more uh purposeful the more intentional your emails uh get and generally speaking just the more people like you should Niche down as much as humanly possible uh don't necessarily do what I did here and just send to super wide audience if you want fantastic results try and you know get at the intersection of like Shopify dog food uh WordPress website owners or some like that and you'll do way better than if you just talk to like marketing agencies okay great so that's number one uh that's not what I want to do okay great that's number one number two is background so what are you capable of doing for these people so this is my background statement I'm a freelancer who's worked with a number of companies to grow content production incl including company a company B and Company C that is my background super simple um well this is sort of a hacky example cuz I combine two things actually this is my background um I've split test of this I get significantly higher response rates and then significantly higher client acquisition if I frame myself as a freelancer on the first Contact usually contact 2 three four when we actually get on the call I have a sales process that like eliminates this as a hurdle but this is like the highest uh response rate way um to get interested parties in my Niche this may be different for you might want to pit yourselves as we are a Content agency we are a Shopify plug-in developer website we you know we're a Content Marketplace whatever the hell you want to do you're going to need to figure that out for yourself but this is how I do my background so I'm a freelancer who work with a number of companies to grow content production okay number three is you need some type of case study what proof do you have that you can actually do the things that you want to do for them and so the reason why I showed this example first is just so you could see how shitty of a case study you need in order to make uh a campaign that can still generate a 12% reply rate and still generate like a 40x Roi I didn't even really have that good of a case study I just said I've worked with a number of companies to grow content production like nordvpn Sam Russian anded these are relatively big companies right they have a fair amount of name recognition but this isn't actually like specific it's not like I helped nordvpn get 47 clients in the last three weeks that's like a really good case study but all I did was I just threw out a couple of brand names I said I worked with these people that's literally you need to do to have like a reasonable case study so if you don't actually have like super crazy results don't worry about it too much you can actually get pretty far just with a really shitty example like this okay great that's that uh and then the last and the most important thing is risk reversal what is the easiest simplest most no-brainer way you can present this offer to remove the possibility that your client or Prospect I should say will say no so what I did here was I said I would love to have a conversation or write up a free trial piece for whoever currently orchestrates content no strings attached Ed again super simple this is all you need to do if you're running a Content agency extremely straightforward my risk reversal is basically I'll write you a free trial piece no strings attached obviously the exact um circumstances this cooperating like I'd love to have a conversation for whoever Cent currently orchestrates content I am looking for like a specific person in the company I'm looking for the person that like makes decisions regarding this uh my targeting is pretty good so usually that's the person that I'm talking to but not always and this helps me you know get that referral uh and then I just finish with a question de you mind pointing me in the right direction thanks I really appreciate the help Okay cool so that is probably the shittiest example literally one of the shittiest examples of an email campaign that embodies these four principles and it still crushes it now let's look at a slightly more optimized version of one of these campaigns this is the writing example that I just covered if I scroll down a little bit and I go down to lead gen example this is a lot more specific so uh we need those four things we need one context I found you on LinkedIn and I thought I'd reach out two we need a background so in this case I wrote I'm a freelancer and built out a system for agencies that generates 20 sales appointments per month without spending a scent on ads this is another real campaign I don't remember how much money I made off this but it was a fair amount it was for my uh for my AI consultancy third I had a case study that was hyper specific in September I helped one second copy get 124 appointments in just shy of 30 days based on the looks of it I'm 100% sure I could do something similar for your company and then four we need some type of risk reversal which I did with no risk and we even guarantee you 20 or more appointments in the first two months then could I show you over 15-minute call this week super straightforward this is what I would call like a good email to send out um this is what I would call the one that I showed you before like a soft sort of mediocre email to send out but the reason why I started with that is just because I wanted to make it clear you do not need to be like a copyrighting god to do really well with this you just need to follow a couple of core principles and just repeat them now if you're reading this you'll probably notice so there are a few particular things that I'll do usually um at the bottom of my emails always write sent for my iPhone this is just split testing when I do set for my iPhone I get like a 05% Improvement in reply rate I think there's still some Boomers out there that are like oh that guy probably just sat down on his iPhone and typed this out so uh you know it helps um I'll usually say something like thanks I appreciate the help or thanks for the time I don't have like a really fancy email signature because I've tested this out and usually including HTML in your emails is like a no for deliverability a few more of your email else out of like 100 will land in spam and then that'll reduce your reply rate obviously because people are going to look at it um I'll usually have some kind of a soft ass you mind pointing me in the right direction is this worth a call right I like to make the first step as simple as humanely possible for people to take um to make it easier for me to get the next one this is called like the foot in the door technique and then in many cases I'll brand myself as a freelancer on the initial connect because I find that that's just a lot more personable um again this doesn't actually work for every industry I've tried this with a variety of other clients that I work with and then if you say like I'm a freelancer they'll just be like oh okay some companies especially higher ticket things they really want like very high perceived legitimacy they want like a big established company that sort of deal so these are just specifics that work for me um the point of this video isn't that is uh those four principles that I covered earlier okay great so now that I've

covered how that works and I've given you a few examples from my own emails what I'm going to do here is I'm going to scroll down and then I'm going to fix uh maybe fix isn't the right word I'm going to optimize a few emails that I've gotten from two sources one fatos scalers doso community and then another from uh one of the many people that messaged me on Twitter asking me to help them with their cold email so for the scalers at so example we have high first name stumbled onto your website Ur URL and noticed you are using Shopify ever thought of creating a custom mobile app for your store want me to send you a quick video showing how we can increase your store sales by up to 15% within 3 months with an app PS we did the same thing for brand insert name here they do about 9627 million a year now with a significant portion coming from their mobile app great so that's what we'll start with at first glance this is pretty good this does not have the four principles that I mentioned earlier but it has a few of them and it does a really good job of showing that legitimacy and social proof the issues that I have with this are uh they have one of the most impressive pieces of social proof on planet Earth and they left it all the way down at the very bottom of the email what's the likelihood that somebody is going to read this in their mailbox when they receive like 15 or 20 of these sorts of emails a day and then actually make it all the way down to the part that like distinguishes you which is the fact that you've worked with like almost a billion dollar what's that like nine figure or some company um if you have social proof like that got to make sure it's front loaded one of the first things that people see so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to tighten this up I'm going to imply the four principles that I just showed you and we're going to make this email significantly better and uh you know to the person that sent me this um you know and I'm going to send a message after this uh feel free to split test this against the original campaign see what performs better don't just take my word for it maybe yourich is a little bit different but I can almost guarantee you that if you include my four principles it will okay great so first

things first Logistics where did we find them and why should they give a so right now it's high first name stumbled onto your website and notice you are using Shopify this is reasonable this provides a little bit of background context I stumbled onto your website and noticed you are using Shopify I think that you know personally if I were to read an email like this my first take would be stumbled onto I don't really think you stumbled onto clearly you were looking for something so um you know how above I always write I found you on LinkedIn and I thought I'd reach out I would probably write something like hi I found website URL when looking for Shopify stores that do over I don't know let's say like 20K a month and thought I'd reach out something along those lines now you can obviously customize this we could have like a variable in whatever cold email platform so we could say like estimated Revenue or something like that this would depend on the specifics of your data collection process but uh essentially I found website URL when looking for Shopify stores in this Niche or with that estimated revenue or whatever I would be significantly better than like hey I just happen to stumble upon your website in 2024 nobody stumbles on your website it's very clear that you are going to be selling them something so you know operating within that frame you want to make sure that like given that you do really well okay

great background what are you capable of doing for them so um if you see the this sequence does not currently or this one email does not currently include any background so basically you said I found whatever and then have you ever thought of creating a custom mobile app for your store generally you don't want to do the ask until you've established credibility and you know it's very clear that you know your the ask comes at the end after you Peak their interest and you know uh they sort of have an idea of what you're attempting to sell them so what I would do in this case is I'd write something like um we create a custom mobile apps specifically for Enterprise Shopify stores in the blank Niche and routinely generate some multiple or more for them no strings attached so I do something along those lines what do we do well we create custom mobile apps specifically for Enterprise shop if I stores in the whatever Niche and routinely generate this much money for them with no strings attached this isn't you know going to win any awards or anything and I don't fully understand what this guy does for a living I don't really know how his business works but from a first kind of principles perspective this just hits all the notes that you know people want to see uh when they are reading like a high quality email okay great so we did number one we did number two let's see

what number three is case study what proof do you have that you can do that so this fellow uh put his case study at the very end uh again there's no real reason why you should do that why don't we put this up here the way that you write case studies usually is you want to have like some type of time constraint and so you want to make sure that it was quite recent because uh if you were at like 14 years ago we helped this company people don't really give a so ideally you would have some type of time um indicator here so maybe it was like last or I don't know last year I built an app for whatever the company is that now or maybe I do they do 9627 million a year here and a significant portion comes from their mobile app maybe I'd like try and Define this comes from their app I'm confident I could do something similar for you okay great now we have like a relatively high quality Case Study of course this isn't at the very beginning of the email I think if I um like had full cart blanch over this uh and if I could kind of like push my own rules a little bit I would find a way to get that 9627 million year as high up as possible so maybe in the subject line or something you reference that um maybe if we say subject line is quick Q I did um or maybe quick Q uh whatever like client name does 9627 million a year or quick Q I want to design an app for you that does 9627 million a year or something like that I don't know uh basically front load some extremely high Revenue figure just to Peak people's interest the vast majority of the emails they receive on a daily basis are from people that like make no money and have no money uh usually people out of like you know bot farms and India or Pakistan or maybe the Philippines so you can really separate yourself from that by dropping High USD Figures it's very rare that like an app Dev shop in the Philippines or something like that is capable of producing these high gross numbers just cuz the cost of living down there is so much lower and that sort of thing uh than in the US so if you have these super high Revenue figures you should be trying to advertise it as much as humanly possible so anyway that's just one subject line uh you know feel free to split test it when you see this but um you know do like three or four variants and try and just drop that 962 um as often as humanly possible otherwise you can just do something like quick q and then first name uh you can experiment with lowercase a lot of the time I find that keeping subject lines in all lowercase makes people think that like you wrote it by hand and you just made a grammatical mistake that usually improves your reply as well um so all these little hacks and stuff like that can help add the few extra percentage points to that reply rate and ultimately that closing rate but anyway let's get

back to the task at hand uh and then we need some type of risk reversal what's the easiest simplest most no-brainer way you can present it to remove the possibility that they'll say no okay great so um I found website URL with looking for shop five stores that do whatever dollars and thought I reach out we create custom mobile app specifically for Enterprise stores in the blank Niche and routinely generate blank or more for them no strings attached last year I built an that for this company they do ridiculous Revenue a year and more than 30% comes to their app I'm confident I could do something similar for you in this case I would write something like um is this worth a 15min call I'd give you a fully customized let's say like app road map and we need some type of risk reversal so it's like okay what can we give them and then how can we make it completely risk-free maybe we use that no strings attached line a little bit later so this worth a 15-minute call I'd give you a fully customized app road map no strings attached um if you don't love what you hear you don't pay something like that if I can't improve your store sales by 15% in 3 months you don't pay something like that and then in this case um the person that sent me this over did not have anything to end their email so I would just write something like thanks for the time you know whatever your name is and maybe you know if you want you can write like X at whatever app company uh you are yeah so I'll add this copy in the description of the YouTube video just so you guys can have it in case you want to do this for yourself um but if you look back to what we had initially and then now uh this email now follows those four principles it's a little bit longer as you can see because we've added that extra little snippet down here and then we added an extra snippet there uh but I'm confident that longer email although like longer emails are usually typically bad things I'm confident that longer email is going to be worth it in the long run and then if you really wanted to optimize this you'd write something like sent for my iPhone or whatever okay great so that's that so um scalers thato example hope that helps and hope that walks you through some of my mindset when I'm optimizing emails that I think are pretty good but they're just lacking a couple things this is an example I got from uh Twitter uh I've just like written X in front of you know their name and all that stuff so uh something similar to what I did down here what these guys are doing in this case is they basically do lead generation for real estate companies in the UK and this is how their email sounds hey first name I notice that you're located in the UK I want to reach out cuz we've been generating client appointments for Real Estate compan in the UK we guarantee that you'll get a 3X return your investment in the first 90 days or will fully refund you I'd love to share how we achieved 37 appointments for X last month using Facebook ads and AI are you available for quick call this week to discuss how we can replicate the success for a company name now from a uh from a bird's ey perspective this is a fantastic cold email campaign um they got basically every note the only real thing that I would change are the placement of various lines for instance hey first name I noticed that you're located in the UK that's cool um I might tell them where I found them specifically it's not like you can just notice that you located somebody like through where like did you just like open up Google Earth and like find a picture of my face somewhere or something no obviously um I found you on LinkedIn when I was looking for uh Niche companies in the UK and if you really wanted to do you know to get even uh more specific maybe you could do specifically in uh I don't know like District or whatever like maybe Manchester or whatnot I'm reaching out because we generate client appointments for real estate companies let's do UK uh let's add a specific number there so we generate around 30 CLI appointments for UK real estate companies per week uh and I might add some specifics about your system and why it's different how it's differentiated using a system um that requires 0 in ad spend maybe let's just do like a fully automated system that requires zero in ad spend um a lot of the time when people pitch leg gen just from my experience they're doing it through ads and so uh usually it's like oh like you know you pay us nothing except for $5,000 a month media bu campaign so sort of gets ahead of that objection um let's see what else do we got here I'd love to share maybe i' do last month I generated 37 appointments for X company oh I guess this actually do use Facebook ads so never mind that probably doesn't work um I'm reaching out because we generate 30 client appointments for UK real estate companies per week using a fully automated system and I just onboarded an extremely similar client too and maybe we'll just say company name last month I generated 37 appointments for X using Facebook ads um what I like to do in situations like this is offer some type of like specific Revenue this was a I don't know like a 85x ro bu something that just shows them how unbelievably good this could be and then we guarantee that you get a 3X return in your investment in the first 90 days or fully refund you what I'd do here is I'd say something like does this sound like something you're interested in I'd guarantee you a minimum 3x return on your investment in the first 90 days and then uh this is kind of like a tweak and it's sort of like a dark pattern um but a lot of people will say stuff like or we'll fully refund you I find a much better way to pitch this is or you don't pay so specifically just saying uh because it implies that they don't actually pay anything up front a lot of the time they do pay something up front uh but when you get them on the sales call and you kind of explain what your process involves which a lot of the time in this case is going to involve media buy and that sort of thing um they're they're fine with it um so I mean you can use this if you want you could use the refund language I just find that refund already like um frames your product in a negative light it's like refund is mentally con connoted connotated with like poor experiences poor experience is the only time anybody ever gets a refund but if you know I'm guaranteeing you a minimum 3x return on your investment in the first 90 days or you don't pay I think that alleviates a lot of that and although it's not technically correct I think that it's worth making the sacrifice and specificity to improve the conversion rate on the front end explain your offer and then have them sign up on the back end okay great and then are you available for a quick call this week um good rule of thumb anytime you are trying to book a call with somebody is don't ask them if they're AA available for a quick call always just give them a very specific sort of number um let's do could we have a 15minute call this week to show you how I do the same for company name um this person had X or like they had their name and then they had like founder their location uh my advice to them when they sent me this message on Twitter was just to move their location Bali works great if you're selling to a bunch of Indie hackers but realistically it's a relatively esoteric sub Niche um you know that's like mostly on Twitter uh sure it's the digital Nomad Paradise but it's like how many of the people that you're going to be emailing are really in the digital Nomad Paradise realistically when people probably read Bali they're like oh this person's from Indonesia um you know well what do we pattern match with people that have sent us emails in the past from Indonesia hm they're usually asking for credit card information up front they're trying to scam us or something like that uh so just be very cognizant to that when you're designing an email okay great cool so that is that I think that probably fairly reasonably walks through my process walks through my methodology

um as I mentioned I mean my return on investments with lukewarm shitty milk toast emails have been absolutely ridiculous you do not have to be a good copywriter for this stuff um I would consider myself a good copywriter at this point a fantastic copywriter but when I started a lot of these campaigns I wasn't and then I just like ran them for a while made a few tweaks here or there found that you know my rates would go up or down that's sort of just how of like gestated and internalized this knowledge when it comes to language and you know the most Punchy and succinct way to write whatever the hell I want to write so don't think you need to be good at this uh as you saw my first cold email campaign for 1 second copy was not we still generated like uh one and a half clients a week uh with basically like no uh no ongoing cost or anything like that aside from like instantly and uh LinkedIn sales now it's like 200 bucks a month so you could probably just copy and paste that same approach to your own business and do pretty dang well um take these four steps with a grain of salt you don't need to use this in order to succeed this is just what I've done in order to succeed and you'll probably find a lot of people out there on the internet that would either explicitly disagree with this or they'd say that like one of these four steps isn't necessary uh my goal here is just for this to be a good starting point so you guys can actually go out make some real money with cold email and then you know fix everything else later hope you guys like the video if you guys got any more questions about this just leave me a comment I'm more than happy to go through every single one and respond um please like subscribe and yeah let me know if you want me to do anything else thanks so much have a great rest to day