Hey there, it’s Isaac from Leads to Earnings. Welcome to the newsletter.

(est. 4 minute read)

Today I will be going over:

• Why solving the right constraint matters and the math behind it

• How I improve campaign performance in 1 step

• I will also share a few cold email links and tips.

Hopefully you enjoy it.

Actionable Cold Email Tip

The worlds best A/B split test won’t matter if it’s too far downstream.

Let me explain.

I was having a conversation with a client the other day and we were talking about split tests to optimize campaign performance.

They wanted to improve their interested reply rate to get more meetings onto their calendar.

“Here’s where I think I need to improve,” they said directing my attention to their cold email copy.

I had to stop them. “Hold on,” I said. “How are your reply rates doing.”

“0.6%”

Lightbulb went off - we had our answer.

Reply rates are the furthest upstream conversion measured in a campaign. This means interested replies and meeting bookings are ‘downstream’ in the conversion process.

If you aren’t pushing any replies through the funnel, then optimizing for positive replies isn’t going to matter.

They were spending all this time trying to optimize their copy, but were really having a deliverability issue.

To identify and address your campaign’s performance, you first need to understand how each step in the funnel is performing.

Skipping even one step could force you to draw an incorrect conclusion and cause you to spend hours optimizing the wrong thing.

In today’s letter, I want to show you how important it is to identify the correct bottleneck in your process.

By doing so, you will simply get more leverage out of every single hour of focused work.

This is because you’re focusing on needle moving tasks vs something you think moves the needle.

To do this, I first isolate the upstream variables. These will have the most impact on your outcomes.

If you’re improving your conversion just 1% for something that sees 1,000s of data points per day, that’s going to be a lot more meaningful than creating a 10% improvement on something that sees 10 data points per day.

Here’s the math to show you how it works using the example from above.

Imagine you have a cold email campaign with 1,000 net new prospects.

You enter 1,000 net new prospects into the campaign and get a 0.6% reply rate = 6 total replies.

Assuming a 10% positive reply rate, you’ll get 0.6 positive replies.

Now, let’s see what happens when you improve your reply rates by just 1%.

You enter 1,000 net new prospects into the campaign and get a 1.6% reply rate = 16 total replies.

That is 10 more total replies. Here’s where it gets interesting and you start to see the improvements downstream.

Apply the same 10% positive reply rate and you get 1.6 positive replies or a 167% increase.

That might not look like much on a nominal basis, but let’s push the volume up 10x. This means you’ll get 10.6 positive replies when solving for the reply rate constraint vs 6 interested replies in the first scenario with deliverability issues.

Now, let’s run the numbers assuming you focus improving interested replies without addressing your reply rate constraint.

1,000 prospects entered at 0.6% reply rate = 6 total replies. At 10% reply rate, that is 0.6 interested replies.

Improving your 10% positive reply rate by 10%, you’re now at 11% positive reply rate. This means you go from 0.6 interested replies to 0.66 interested replies, an increase of 0.06. That is barely an improvement and hardly moves the needle.

Now assuming we apply 10x volume, this means you have 6.6 positive replies. Compare this to the 10.6 positive replies when you 10x volume and solve for reply rates first. That is a 61% improvement.

So that is why it’s important to identify and solving the correct bottleneck in your process.

You can get exponential gains if you fix the right problem. You can see by solving the first problem furthest upstream, your downstream problems are immediately solved.

Hope you found some value in it.

As always, feel free to hit reply with any questions about solving your outbound constraints.

Useful Bits

• Tweet of the Day: (link)

• Quote of the week: I think if companies start reinventing themselves and focus on the customer experience more, they will win out in the end. — Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia Capital

• Quick bite-sized pointer:

  A consulting client came to me and couldn't get any results with cold email

  After working with me, they're booking new leads weekly (1 booking per every 500-800 leads). What changed? We focused on the fixing the offer until it worked. They had a clear picture of their ideal customer profile, so we knew who we were targeting. The issue was, nobody was getting back to them. So we kept testing new offers (prospect outcomes) until something stuck. Now that messaging is validated, we're not done. We'll continue to test new offers until we beat the current conversion rate. This is how you improve a campaign's performance. Find something that works, then use the winner as your control group. Keep creating new tests to measure against the control. Keep iterating until you find an outlier.

How I Can Help You

If you like this newsletter and want to work with me, there are a few ways we can do so:

1. I have a ton of free content that will help you get more clients on my YouTube channel. I post insights from operating high converting cold email campaigns for dozens of B2B companies that have added hundreds of thousands in recurring revenue.

2. If you are looking to improve your cold outbound skills but don’t want to hire anyone, I have a free 71-page course that teaches everything you need to know about cold email.

3. If you want a custom cold email campaign specifically designed for your business & ideal target audience, I have a few slots available to show you how it works. Book in here and on the call I will deliver a full 5-angle cold email campaign for you to use to bring on more high paying clients.

4. If you’d like to hear about how I can help you and your company grow, you can book a call with me here. I might be able to help you grow faster, or I might be able to refer you to someone who can.

Share this with 3 people and get a free training showing you how to convert more cold prospects into warm leads with cold email.

I hope you enjoyed this brief email.

Talk later,

Isaac