In my past four email outreach campaigns, I sent 154 emails and got a reply rate of 22.7%.
Nine out of every 10 replies were positive and I ended up with 32 new partnership opportunities.
Which ended up translating into $24,000 revenue for my company.
That's the power of cold email.
It works for any business—and in this guide, I’ll show you how you can use it to fill empty desks in your coworking space.
Let's go.
The Essence of Cold Email Outreach in Boosting Your Coworking Space Business
In the cruel world of coworking business, you either grow or die. Therefore, more entrepreneurs are looking for new ways to reach new audiences.
Cold email outreach is one of them. Fortunately for you, not many entrepreneurs consider it a powerful way to scale.
What they don’t know is that it comes with so much benefit you would anticipate. Here’s a brief overview of what you get.
Easily Reach New Customers
You already have a pool of existing customers, which is excellent.
But you know flexible workspace business is a fluctuating business. Your customers can decide to work from their home office or the nearby cafe, thus leaving you with empty desks.
Cold emailing taps into new markets that don’t even know your business exists. It creates the best avenue to build brand awareness and convert promising prospects into paying customers.
Near-zero Operating Costs
Email outreach is the most affordable form of marketing. If you manually search for prospects, you don’t need any capital.
But if you want to do intensive email outreach, you must purchase an email finder tool and maybe, an automation software to quicken your outreach.
This also makes scaling to reach a wider audience possible. You only need to add more contacts and create campaigns targeting multiple audience segments.
Predictable Outcome
As you do multiple cold email campaigns, you get to know the right approach that guarantees better open rates and close rates.
This makes cold emailing a reliable source of leads. Why? You’ll be sure to close customers any time you launch an outreach. You can also compare the best cold email softwares to plan your emailing process more effectively.
Less Annoying than Cold Calling
Cold calling is on its deathbed. The most common reason for this is that it interrupts prospects and is not sustainable.
While cold-emailing has a similar theme, it gives the prospect the required privacy and time to think about your message.
This creates a good impression about your brand, which is what you need on that first interaction.
Striving for your coworking space to become a recognized brand?
7 Steps to Find Clients with Cold Email Outreach
1. Research Your Target Market
It might seem easy.
After all, you’re just targeting people who need an office-like environment to do their tasks. Well, that is true, but it isn’t the perfect market.
Every business has a general market. For example, a company offering roofing services will be targeting homeowners.
However, more precise market research should go a little bit deeper through consumer research. It focuses on understanding customers within a particular segment better.
In the case of the roofing business, the company should consider the location, their target audience income, and age.
In our case, you should ask yourself if you’re entirely looking for freelancers, students, remote workers, or traveling professionals.
A perfect way to do consumer research is to understand your buyer persona. This is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer.
Instead of just saying, “we’re targeting remote workers, aged 25-45, you make it a point of digging a little deeper to get impactful answers.
Here are some questions you might ask yourself:
- What is their job title?
- What are their goals and motivations?
- What challenges are they facing that make them look for a co-working space?
- How will my business help them?
- Do they have the budget to pay for my services?
- Where else could they find solutions to their problems?
Understanding buyer persona not only helps in cold email outreach. You can also use the data to develop the proper pricing structure, marketing methods, and your coworking space physical design.
2. Create a List of Qualified Prospects
Once you’ve identified the right audience, it’s time to source them from wherever they are.
Ideally, what we’ll do in this section is bring your buyer persona to life. And since we won’t be looking for companies but individual users, this might get a little tough. So hold on.
Now, I’ll assume that you are targeting freelancers and remote workers. They are the most popular when it comes to co-working spaces.
Google won’t help us here, so we'll use two popular platforms where most of your prospects hang out - LinkedIn and Facebook.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn harbors 63 million decision-makers for companies.
As a result, the platform has become a haven for freelancers looking for contracts. And for you, it’s the perfect hunting spot.
All these freelancers lurking on LinkedIn could use your coworking space to run their businesses. You just need to know how to get them.
The first thing is to head over to LinkedIn. Log in to your account and go to the search icon. Use a couple of keywords to search for prospects. These include:
- Content writer
- Freelancer
- Content marketer
- Designers
- Virtual Assistant
- Freelance editor
In short, search for terms that circle remote workers. Also, make sure you’ve filtered your search based on your geographical location.
(You don’t want to contact a freelance writer in Mumbai while your office space is in Chicago).
Here’s a sample search I did for content marketers in the San Francisco Bay area.
As you can see, you’ll get hundreds of content marketers from the Bay Area. The next step is to find their contact information.
(We’ll do that in the next section.)
Facebook
Most businesses ignore Facebook because it isn’t too professional like its cousin LinkedIn.
While that’s partly true, Facebook has something unique that even LinkedIn can’t compare to - Facebook groups.
Currently, the platform has more than 620 million groups; all spread across everything you can think of.
And most importantly, there are endless groups with thousands of freelancers and remote workers near your business location.
So how do you get these prospects?
First, open Facebook and on the search tab. Type your keyword as we did for LinkedIn. Make sure you’ve chosen “groups” under filters. This also gives you an option to type your city.
As an example, I searched for “content marketers” groups in San Francisco, California.
The action above suggested multiple content marketers groups from my chosen location.
Note that the groups’ names don’t have my exact search term. But most important of all, they have the prospects I’m looking for near my business location.
The next step is to join relevant groups. But before you do that, check out the engagement rate and how active the members are.
3. Search Prospects Email Addresses
There are multiple methods of finding your prospects’ emails.
For instance, you could browse WHOIS... Search on Google... Or guess their emails based on a combination of first and last name.
Well, these methods can work, but they’ll take you ages.
Here are more efficient methods to find prospects’ emails on LinkedIn and Facebook:
On LinkedIn
The more straightforward method to find emails on LinkedIn is by checking out your prospects’ profiles on the contact section.
Open your prospect’s profile and click “contact info.”
You’ll see a popup like the one below with the prospect’s email address.
If it’s not available, check the “about section.”
Why?
Most freelancers and remote contractors are always in client-hunting mode; thus, they leave their emails out in the open for potential clients to contact them.
If the emails are missing, then you need to use an email finder.
For example, a tool like Voila Norbert finds valid emails on LinkedIn by automatically pulling the company’s name from your prospect’s profile.
This takes less than 30 seconds.
Another alternative method is to use the LinkedIn sales navigator to extract email addresses. This is actually a lot quicker than manually looking up the email address of each contact.
On Facebook
Now that you have joined the groups with thousands of potential prospects let’s get their emails. You’ll search for emails on each prospect profile.
There are two ways to do this.
1) Check the prospect’s profile.
In the about section, click “contacts and basic info.”
Here you’ll see all the essential information you’ll need. And hopefully, you’ll find the prospect’s email as shown in the screenshot.
2) Use an Email Finder
Third-party email finder tools, like Voila Norbert, come in handy because they’ve gathered public information for a long time.
Therefore, it’s a sure bet of getting emails even if the prospect hasn’t put their email on their profile.
Simply enter your prospect name and company URL and Norbert will spit back a valid email address in seconds:
Once you’ve collected all your prospects’ emails, create a google sheet with two sides. One side should have the names and their emails on the other side.
Generate recurring revenue and offer exceptional customer experience at your shared or coworking space
4. Launch Your Cold Email Outreach
You now have targeted leads. It’s time to reach out and start building a relationship.
The average response rate for cold email outreach is between 1% - 5%. But with a compelling message, you can push that rate to incredible percentages (like mine).
On the other hand, if your cold email is infused with power words, or it sounds generic, choppy, and too salesy, most prospects won’t read it.
So this step is crucial.
Ideally, you need two things:
- A powerful headline that talks about what your prospect needs.
- A good (FOMO) offer that’s too hard to reject.
Here is an email template that has proven to perform better. You can copy and optimize it to your liking.
TemplateSubject Headline: 30% off your next rent
Hey (name),
If you’re like most [what the prospect does], you know how frustrating it can feel to have your time wasted.
We don’t want this to happen. That’s why we put up a coworking space just around the streets of the San Francisco Bay area.
We just thought it would be nice to reach out and inform you that we’re giving a 30% discount for the first month ending on Monday.
If you’d be interested in this, reply to this email or walk into our offices before Friday to claim your discount.
We’d be happy to hear from you.
Cheers
[Your name]
As you can see, the message is short and to the point.
Additionally, make sure you’ve stated a problem the prospect resonates with. Once you’ve sucked them into your idea, hit them with FOMO (Fear of missing out).
It creates a sense of urgency which makes them pay for your services on the go.
5. Follow Up on Prospects
Some prospects will reply to your first message; the majority won’t.
But it’s not time to give up yet. Research has it that if you don’t follow up, your reply rate might as well not go beyond 9%.
If you do, the reply rate goes to 13%, bringing 3% more sales.
Now, the big question is this - how many follow-ups should you make if you don’t get a response to your first email?
From what I’ve gathered and personal experience as a content strategist, 2-3 follow-ups are enough. Furthermore, it’s what most expert email marketers advise.
You don’t need to overdo it. Once you’ve followed twice or thrice and got no response, just leave it at that.
The prospect has shown you that he isn’t interested. It’s good to respect that.
Besides, writing each follow-up would take much of your time since you must personalize it and include it on your schedule.
So, is it worth following up on a disinterested prospect for the sixth time or is it better to spend that time searching for new prospects?
Well, I think the latter makes more sense.
One more thing, it’s advisable to use email tracking tools. These let you know if prospects have engaged with your emails by either opening, reading, or clicking any links inside your email.
6. Automate Your Cold Email Outreach
What’s interesting with email outreach is that you don’t have to do all the work manually.
You’ll likely be sending hundreds of emails at once. Doing so one by one will probably take ages.
But with automation, you can send bulk emails in less time. Plus, you can set the tools to make automatic follow-ups based on a prospect’s behavior.
There are many cold emailing tools to incorporate here. A perfect example is Mailshake: an automation software that lets you generate personalized messages and send and follow up on them in bulk.
First, import a CSV file of your contacts using their CSV importer - that’s a list of their names with email addresses. Once done, write your templates.
Mailshake will automatically pull in the data from appropriate columns to personalize each email and send it.
The tool also has a robust analytics section showing all the campaigns and messages that are performing well.
You can integrate with other tools to send automated follow-up sequences. With everything set, you can pull out a complete email outreach, with you doing far much less work.
7. Close Deals And Retain Your Customers
Email outreach isn’t just a fancy way to reach your prospects. You have to bring most of them on board to rent a space in your co-working business.
If you’ve followed all the steps described above, you must get replies from prospects who are either ready with their credit cards or some who want to get more information about your service.
Now, if you get many prospects who want to get more information, focus on building relationships.
They might not be ready now, but constant emails may change their minds. In this regard, email marketing comes in handy.
You might need to send them a weekly email, not necessarily coercing them to buy your services. But on something related to your business with a call to action.
If you can’t come up with killer copy, hire an email marketing expert to do the hard job for you.
Over To You
Cold email still works.
You just need to get the right strategy. You’ll only learn about this when you start sending cold emails to the right prospects.
With more practice (and patience), your coworking space soon won’t have any more empty desks.
The article was written by Mihael D. Cacic, a freelance content marketing consultant at 21writers, and a content strategist for Voila Norbert.
