Most advice on hiring a cold email agency is about vetting the agency. This video is about the other side of the table: four decisions that sit with you, shape every campaign an agency sends for you, and are best made before you sign. Ali’s advice is blunt: don’t sign with a cold email agency until you have them figured out.
What should you prepare before hiring a cold email agency?
Four things: your ideal customer profile (ICP), your pain points, your lead magnet and your call to action. The ICP comes first. The other three are worked out while you finalize it, because each one depends on who you’ll be writing to.
| What to prepare | The question it answers | Ali’s rule of thumb |
|---|---|---|
| Ideal customer profile | Which companies, and who at them? | One or more ICPs adding up to 30,000+ companies in your primary market |
| Pain points | Which problem do you lead with? | One pain point per campaign, matched to the job title you email |
| Lead magnet | What do you offer first? | Value first, with nothing the prospect must hand over to say yes |
| Call to action | What do you ask for? | A reply, like “Reply yes and I’ll send it over” |
1. Define your ideal customer profile
Your ICP is two lists: the companies you go after, and the people inside them you’ll email. At the company level, Ali works through four questions:
- Where is the company headquartered?
- What kind of company is it?
- What products and services does it sell?
- How big is it?
Then, at those ideal companies, decide who you’ll reach out to: the job titles, and how senior they are.
You can have more than one ICP. What matters is that together they add up to more than 30,000 companies in your primary market, our threshold for cold email. How to build a TAM list for free shows how to count yours.
2. Pick one pain point per campaign
Shortlist a couple of pain points that connect to your value proposition, then build each campaign around just one. While you finalize your ICP you’ll come across plenty of problems you could logically tie to what you sell. Ali’s advice for narrowing them down:
- Cherry-pick a couple, keeping your value proposition in mind.
- Test them in cold email campaigns in-house first.
- Mention only one pain point per campaign, and build the value proposition around it.
- Pick a pain point the reader feels directly: the actual job title you’re emailing, not only their company.
3. Choose a value-first lead magnet
A good cold email lead magnet gives value first, and asks for nothing the prospect would hesitate to hand over. Ali’s example of what doesn’t work: you sell CRM hygiene and offer a free audit as your lead magnet. To accept it, the prospect has to share proprietary data with someone emailing on behalf of a company they’ve never heard of. That friction makes “yes” hard, however useful the audit would be.
Whatever you choose, test it through cold email too. Our cold email lead magnet case study shows a $6,000 lead magnet that got zero positive replies, and the change of angle that turned it into 16 opportunities.
4. Write a call to action that’s easy to say yes to
Ask for a reply, not a meeting. As you finalize the job titles in your ICP, ask what you could say that makes it effortless for that person to respond positively. Ali calls it a “call to communication”: once someone has said yes, the meeting is the implied next step.
- Instead of: “Would you like to hop on a 15-minute meeting?”
- Try: “Reply yes and I’ll send it over,” or “Reply yes and I’ll send the link.”
What if you haven’t tested your offer yet?
With all four in place, the last unknown is whether your offer works through cold email. If it hasn’t been tested yet, we can run a free campaign for you for an entire week: apply below. Comparing agencies? These are the questions to ask a cold email agency about who owns the setup and who pays for it, and this is how we run cold email.
Questions
What should I have ready before hiring a cold email agency?
Four things: your ideal customer profile (the companies, and the job titles you'll email at them), a couple of pain points tied to your value proposition, a value-first lead magnet, and a call to action that asks for a reply rather than a meeting. Ali recommends settling all four, and knowing whether your offer has been tested, before you sign.
How many companies does my ICP need for cold email?
We look for more than 30,000 companies in your primary market. You can have more than one ICP, as long as together they add up to that. Below it, there usually aren't enough of the right accounts to test messaging and keep campaigns running.
How many pain points should one cold email mention?
One. Shortlist a couple of pain points that connect to your value proposition, test them, and build each campaign around a single one. Choose it for the job title you're emailing, not just for their company, so the person reading feels it directly.
What is a bad lead magnet for cold email?
One that adds friction to saying yes. Ali's example is a free audit offered by a company selling CRM hygiene: to accept it, the prospect has to share proprietary data with a stranger emailing on behalf of a company they don't know. A value-first lead magnet gives something useful without that ask.
What is the best call to action for a cold email?
One that asks for a reply, not a meeting: "Reply yes and I'll send it over" or "Reply yes and I'll send the link", instead of "Would you like to hop on a 15-minute meeting?" Ali calls it a call to communication. The meeting becomes the implied next step.
Read the video transcript
Do not sign with a cold email agency until you have these four things figured out. For context, the first one is ICP, and then pain points, lead magnets and CTAs are what you need to think about while finalizing your ICP.
Number one, ideal customer profile. So on a company level, where is this company headquartered? What kind of a company is it? What products and services do they sell? What's the size of this company? And then at these ideal companies, who are you going to be reaching out to? Think job titles, think seniority of these job titles. You can have more than one ICP, but make sure it adds up to more than 30,000 companies in your primary market.
Number two, pain points. So in the process of finalizing your ideal customer profile, you might come across a lot of different pain points that you can logically connect to your value proposition within your campaigns. Having said that, keeping your value proposition in mind, cherry pick a couple of pain points and launch cold email campaigns in-house first. Within cold emails, best to only mention one pain point and build your value prop around that inside of one campaign. Also, ideally it's best to find a pain point that directly resonates with the person that you're sending the email to, the actual job title that you're reaching out to.
Number three, lead magnets. So while you're in the process of finalizing your ICP, you have to think about this: what is a value-first lead magnet that I can add to my cold email campaigns? To give you an example of what a good lead magnet is not, consider this example. Let's just say you're selling CRM hygiene to companies. Then you are offering a free audit as your lead magnet. Now this is not a value-first lead magnet because, think about it, this company has to share their proprietary data with this person that is sending them an email on behalf of a company that they do not know about. So that adds a lot of friction to saying yes. So make sure that your lead magnets are well thought of and tested via cold email campaigns as well.
Number four, call to action. So when you are in the process of finalizing the job titles of your ICP, you have to think of what can I actually say to this person, finally, for this person to easily respond back to my cold email positively? Think of "Reply yes and I'll send it over," or "Reply yes and I'll send the link," instead of "Would you like to hop on a 15-minute meeting?" Your call to action should technically be call to communication, and as a consequence of the same, a meeting would be an implied next step.
If you figured all four of these out along with your offer and you've not tested this yet, we can run a free campaign for you for an entire week. Link for the same is in the comments.
Lightly edited for clarity.