Freelancer Weekly tip: How to reach out to companies? (Cold Emailing 101)

Tools, Script,Tips and Materials

Hey Freelancers and Agency owners,

In one of our last posts, we spoke about Buyers/Marketing Personna. In other words the profile of clients you would like to work with. However, we did not answer the question “How to approach them if they do not come to us?”. Today we are going to take a look at one of the most basic but still powerful mediums: cold emailing.

Cold emailing is still one of the most popular mediums, although it is getting more and more competitive.

In this article, we are going to look at the basics of how to do it effectively.

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1. Finding Emails

The easiest way is to use the LinkedIn+Email Look-up tool.

You could use Linkedin to find the name of the person you would like to reach out to. For example for developers this could be a CTO, Tech Lead, CEO (if a small business). For designers would be CEO, Product Managers, Marketing Managers.

Email look-up tools would give the email address based on the names you have found in the previous step. I’d recommend Hunter.io, AnyMailFinder and Clearbit as free and reliable ones.

2.Example Script Structure

Personalization is king! I would recommend starting with fewer emails but with a high degree of personalization in order to test what is working. You could send them in a batch of 10 and see which one performs better. Below is a sample example that

Example Script:

Subject line: Hey <Name>-> Helping out the dev team?

Hello <Name>

Came across <Company>, love the work you did with..<personalisation line>

I was wondering would you work with freelance devs, when you are overburdened and need an extra hand?

I’m <Your Name> and I am Full-Stack JS developer with 5+ years of experience. < if you have a portfolio>/ I have helped companies in your sector like….. Happy to lend you a hand if you need extra dev with Angular/Node.js.

Does this sound like something worth discussing further? If yes, happy to send more info and projects across

3. Tips

1. Track open rates. There are tools like Streak, Mailtrack that are free or very low-cost.

2. Your goal is to start the conversation rolling, not aggressively sell.

3. Subject lines matter: experiment with different ones. Usually, if you include a person’s name or company name in the subject line, there is a higher chance to get opened.

4. Follow-up in 1 or 2 days by paraphrasing your email. If your initial email was long, send a shorter one. Do not follow up with “Have you had a chance to look at my email”.

5. Be Patient: it is a long-term game and should not be your only channel for finding clients.

6. From time to time, you could use a tool like mail-tester.com to check the delivery score of your email.

7. Don’t shy away to follow them on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn. You could like or retweet some of their posts first and after some time message them.

8. Yes, you could send cold emails to companies despite GDPR :)

   4. Useful Readings

   Some materials to build your knowledge:

   • Lemlist Guide:

   • Successful Case Studies

   • Alex Berman YT channel

We are barely scratching the surface, there are a lot more things that go into cold emailing that we would explore further down the line. Cold emails is an art, so would be happy to share your tips as well.

Also, a lot more information would be included in the Lancerlot dashboard coming up soon.

If you like what you are reading in this newsletter, please do share it with your friends and colleagues.