Justin asks: If I'm doing cold outreach, how much information about myself should I include? Should I mention my background? Companies are getting a lot of cold outreach, so I don't want to be part of the noise. I wonder if mentioning that I'm a mathematical statistician would help or just add noise.
[gasps] Yeah. Uh, you know what? It's a very nuanced thing because the core idea in cold email is you are competing for a very scarce set of attention, and [snorts] you really have to optimize every word in your cold email to be at least providing value or providing the perception that you have value and you're a valuable person to know. And then when you start including things like by the way you know I did my PhD at whatever and I I you know love walking dogs. People look at that and then they're like you know the the the value ratio dips and then that's where they jump off the email. But in the last couple years AI has been increasingly sending and managing people's email inboxes. And as a result, a lot of the spam that people get is like perfectly written AI emails that are super optimized for this where every line is just value, value, value, value value. And so a common thing that people in communities like Maker School are doing is they're actually like purposefully reducing like the value density of the email by including some weird personal anecdotes. And some of my best performing campaigns include like weird one-off mentions like that. Like um uh I don't know like yo Justin man, I've been following your channel for the last couple years and it's really changed how I look at my my career. Uh and I just wanted to thank you. Um you know I'm from Vancouver originally. Um I just wanted you to know and then you dive into your pitch and it's like what the hell is that? Well, it turns out that a form of rapport building like that has been documented in literature is voluntary disclosure of information. And a voluntary disclosure of information when you give somebody information about yourself without being necessarily prompted makes them think that you are closer even though you know nothing else about them. And so sprinkling in a little bit of this stuff without obviously screwing up your email can actually be powerful. But that's the nuanced answer. I wish I could just tell you yes or no, but um yeah, things have gotten pretty pretty interesting and complicated recently. [gasps] [sighs]
First, a 2 % reply rate isn’t terrible, but there’s room for improvement. Personalizing only the first line of an email is no longer enough—everyone does that now. Think of personalization as a foundational strategy rather than a tactical tweak. The core idea is to build an icebreaker that shows you’ve actually researched the prospect, not just scraped their name.
Start with an icebreaker that combines a genuine compliment with a paraphrased reference to something they posted on LinkedIn, Facebook, or their website. For example, “Hey Nick, I deeply respect your work, especially your recent post about AI‑driven marketing.” To create the paraphrased part, pull a specific detail from their content, feed it to AI, and ask it to rewrite it in your own voice. This makes the prospect feel you took the extra step to understand them.
Next, add an identification line that tells who you are and why you’re reaching out. Keep it short: “I’m a marketer who helps agencies like yours generate $1‑5 k of monthly revenue using AI‑enhanced outreach.” Mention a concrete credential or past success—e.g., “When I ran PR campaigns for Forbes‑level publications, I saw 20 % reply rates.”
Follow the icebreaker and ID with social proof: cite a recent win that’s relevant to the prospect’s industry. For instance, “Last week I delivered $8,390 in revenue in two months for a Sydney‑based marketing agency similar to yours.”
Finally, present a clear offer: “I’m confident I can replicate—or even improve—those results for you.”
Test multiple variations. Write at least ten different icebreakers and identification lines, then pit them against each other to see which combination yields the highest response. By focusing on deep research, personalized paraphrasing, concise self‑identification, and strong social proof, you’ll move well beyond the 2 % baseline and achieve much higher reply rates.
I've come to realize that personalization isn't actually necessary; it's just the illusion of personalization that's needed. From the client's perspective, all emails could seem personalized because they only get one of them, so it just has to seem personalized. This leads to the concept of cold reading: you can make statements that seem very personalized to the reader while you know nothing about them. For example, as a content creator with my email online, I often get emails like 'Yo Nick, love your channel, man. Helped me quit my job back in 2024 and just wanted to shout you out.' When I read that, I think the sender knows who I am and that I help people quit their jobs—just my thing, using bro language. Obviously they're bullshitting, but the point stands: you can be extremely precise and specific without any personal info by sending to enough people and applying the law of averages. Most business YouTubers make content that helps people make businesses, and most viewers of business content want to quit their jobs—it's a numbers game. So you don't need AI personalization; just improve your cold reading and understand the reader's mindset. About 80% of the people you target with business YouTube content are a great nugget to build assumptions on; you don't care when it fails, only when it works for those who think you've been watching their content a while. Regarding your offer of 1.5–2K emails via Instantly, I don't know if that's per day, week, or month, but the offer lacks a quantifiable metric. You say you build and run an outbound system that gets qualified sales calls onto your calendar, but qualified sales calls technically means more than one call—people assume it's the fewest, i.e., two. That's not very many. If you instead guarantee a minimum of, say, 50 qualified booked sales calls per week with pipeline values averaging $100,000 a month, and you only pay per call booked with no upfront cost, that will seem much sexier. That's my recommendation. All right, hopefully that makes sense. My favorite creator's back in biz posting—thanks to my editor Johan. Also, shout out to Nick, who joined Maker School 30 days after leaving my channel, now making at least $12K a month (maybe $25K) and has gone into business with his brother, and his brother Jack just joined Maker School and they're crushing it.
First, open-rate tracking is unreliable these days because many email clients either auto-open messages or block the tracking pixel, so a low open rate below 25% isn't something to worry about; instead, run a deliverability check with tools like Glock apps or Mail-Tester to see if your emails are landing in spam. Moving to the numbers, with 2,000 emails sent and 8 positive replies you have a 0.4% positive reply rate. In cold email a positive reply is any response that isn't an outright rejection (e.g., 'this sounds great' or 'more info please'). That rate isn't stellar but it's not terrible—I've seen campaigns in the 0.5-1% range still generate good revenue, and my best campaigns have hovered around 20% (I hedge and say 20% because I don't recall the exact figure). The gap between your 0.4% and my best results shows a major opportunity to improve, and a very low positive reply rate usually points to weak copy. To lift that rate you can work on three areas: copy, audience strategy, and tactical details like send times, days, spin-tax, and deliverability. Of these, copy is the biggest lever; I've had campaigns where everything else was poor but the copy was strong and the campaign still performed. My copy framework rests on three principles: make the message information-dense (use as few words as possible to convey the point), make it feel hyper-personalized (hand-crafted to the recipient), and optimize for the platform—specifically cold email, where you can control the profile preview, subject line, the first ~100 characters that appear in the inbox, any attachments and their file names/types, and use those as levers to boost opens and replies. Most people fail by writing long, generic introductions like 'Hello Nick, I run a super cool company…'; instead, treat the email like a handwritten note to a lover in the 19th century—customize the opening lines heavily. Once the email avoids looking like spam, the recipient's next questions are: who are you, why should I care, and what do you want? Answer 'who' with a brief, personalized intro (you can use AI to help) that establishes relevance; answer 'why' with social proof—e.g., a recent Microsoft project or $133K earned last month using this approach; answer 'what' with a clear call to action (chat, sell, call, video). By anticipating the reader's needs through radical empathy you'll see higher engagement. Beyond copy, make sure you're targeting the right audience (avoid blasting contractors who are unlikely to have time), pay attention to sending times and days, and follow deliverability best practices. If you're getting meetings but no closed deals, the problem shifts to your sales process: adopt a standardized consultative sales script that uncovers pain points, guides the conversation, and presses on those points; I provide such templates in Maker School and in the Make Money with Make.com community. Ultimately, you need to sharpen your consultative selling skills and standardize your sales process so it's not ad-hoc.
What a great question. I'm glad you're asking me that. If this is the demo of people you want to be working with, generally speaking, I don't like DM voice notes. I like Loom videos insofar as they on the thumbnail of the Loom video are clearly visible on some aspect of my profile; they're clearly customized. I can usually smell a non‑customized AI‑generated piece of outreach from a mile away, and because I'm in the AI generation industry I assign lower value to such outreach. For me, you want to reach out to people presumably in my space or at my level. I can kind of squint and feel like I'm part of a sequence, and if I'm part of a sequence I just want to do it less—that's why I teach everybody to make their outreach seem like it's not from a sequence. Text is fine as long as you can grab my attention, and the way to do so is by frontloading value. I've shown this email many times: there was a guy who emailed me forever ago (I think it was 22 emails from me) offering to improve CTR by 1–3% and providing a list of 22 titles that increase CTR. He acknowledged the outreach, said he wasn't here to steal my time and money like cheap copywriters, and linked a doc. That's solid outreach. To improve it, fix spelling and grammar; lowercase is okay and implies he wrote it himself. Avoid saying 'unoutreach'—it's not grammatical. Instead, say something like, 'Yeah, this is outreach, but unlike all the other people in your DMs, I'm not here to steal your time and money to prove that.' Another effective line I like is, 'I know the way to get ahead in this industry is to provide value up front, so here's a bunch of value,' then link the asset. In this case the asset is a big list of Google Doc titles. The benefit of the Google‑doc approach is that inside the doc you can list additional links without hurting deliverability more than the one link in the initial doc, and you can customize sections like “for you Nick,” “emails for Nick,” “questions for Nick” to make the outreach look personal. I also received an awesome outreach where someone built me a SAS app in Lovable based on the video’s principles and reached out with it—if you really like the founder/influencer, that kind of gesture makes sense. Ultimately, as long as you frontload value and show you understand my predicament when I have to look over emails like this, you're doing a pretty good job.