Appreciation post: I thought cold emailing was a total waste of time for getting freelance clients

For two years, I refused to do it, thinking it was just spam, but after a dry spell in January, I sent 20 specific emails to small design firms in Portland and landed a project that paid $2,500. What specific approach made cold outreach work for you when you tried it?

3 comments

3 Comments

jana_hernandez23d ago

Describe exactly what you wrote in those 20 emails. Did you just say you liked their work and offered your services, or did you point out a specific problem on their website you could fix? Give us the real template you used.

linda_owens223d ago

Trying to reverse engineer a template from someone else's success story never really worked for me. I once spent a week copying a "proven" cold email format and got zero replies. The only time I got a real response was when I mentioned a broken link I actually found on their blog. Maybe the real trick is just looking at their stuff and saying one true thing you noticed.

haydenc1011d ago

Wait, you sent twenty emails with that broken link thing and it actually worked? That's wild, I would have guessed people get annoyed by that. Guess a real, small detail really does cut through the noise.