How This Company Used Cold Email To Go From £0 - £500k ARR In Just 10 months

Okay, so I admit, the company in question is my business, Linked Hacker.

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That doesn’t however make it any less true.

In 2017, I had just given up a role as a freelance marketer as I packed my bags for Australia, with less than £5k to my name. I landed in outback Australia with no working visa, and I knew I had to find a way to make money online, and fast. I had recently been getting some good results sending a handful of cold emails for one of my freelance clients, so I decided to explore further. Then I remembered something from one of those marketing groups on Facebook (who knew they could actually be useful) about scraping emails from LinkedIn.

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I found the tool they mentioned and I scraped a list of 100 emails from LinkedIn, emailed them all (using an automation toll I also heard about in the Facebook Group) and asked if they’d be interested in paying me to run a cold email campaign for their business. Three companies responded and asked me to give them a call. All three signed up to pay me £99 ($140) per week to do it for them. Fast forward 3 months and I was doing £100k in ARR. 10 months in and I was doing £500k ARR, with just 3 employees (plus me).

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Over the next 5 years, we perfected the process and became leading experts in the field of cold email, growing our revenue to £1m ARR. To date, we have sent over 5 million emails for 1,300+ companies, generating in excess of $1B in sales pipeline for our clients.

Most people we speak to are super sceptical about cold email, usually because they have tried it themselves without success. To those people, I say that’s like trying to cut a tumour out of your leg and declaring it’s hopeless because you’ve already tried. It’s a little known fact that many of the fastest-growing tech startups in the world attribute much of their success to cold email, including AirBnB.

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However, cold email is a minefield at the best of times, and the rules of the game change constantly. Only those sending thousands of emails every week across multiple domains get an inside view of what’s working and what isn’t, who the best email provider is, how long your domain needs warming up for, what the sending limits are, the best frequency and timing of your emails, what words are getting picked up by spam filters and the types of copy that are getting results.

Cold email will continue to be one of the best B2B lead generation growth hacks, you just have to know how.

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