🦾Eric Nowoslawski

Growth Engine X

Founder

Clay

Certified Expert

Smartlead

Instantly.ai

REITIUM

Advisor

Gated

Advisor to an exciting Startup called Gated. Gated challenges unknown senders to donate to charity in order to reach you - so everything in your inbox is worth your attention.

It's like a postage stamp for email. 

As a huge email sender, I'm most excited for the ability of our messages to cut through the noise, prove to our prospects that we are being intentional and we want to solve their problems, instead of relying on fancy copywriting and sending 10s of thousands of emails.

Gateway Regional Chamber of Commerce

Vice President

Help Chamber Members grow their business
Facilitated Connecting Members through observed Synergies
Public Policy Research and Advocacy
Negotiate discounts on behalf of the Chamber
Engaged with Local Municipalities in Economic Development and Business Policy

The Gateway Regional Chamber of Commerce is the largest business association in the New York Metropolitan Area with about 1,200 members. We hold approximately 150 events per year from large 600-person dinners to small 10-person breakfasts, and everything in between, with a great emphasis on networking and business promotion.

The Gateway Chamber has a long history dating back to 1911 when it was founded as the Elizabeth Chamber of Commerce by John D. Rockefeller and other New Jersey industrialists.

Today, the Gateway Chamber serves as an umbrella organization for a number of regional and local chambers and networking groups including: the Union County Chamber of Commerce; the Central Jersey Chamber of Commerce; the Route 22 Chamber of Commerce; the Kenilworth Chamber of Commerce; the Roselle Park Chamber of Commerce; the Clark Chamber of Commerce; the Linden Chamber of Commerce, the Somerset Hills Business Network; the Black Business Alliance; the Gateway Warehouse Association; the Gateway Hospitality Alliance; and The Irish Business Association. When you join the Gateway Chamber you automatically become a member of ALL these groups at no additional cost.

The Gateway Chamber is a strong advocate for its members. It works at the federal, state and local levels on both legislative and regulatory issues.

We consider it to be core to our mission to help our members grow their businesses, and as a result our retention rate has averaged 95% over the last five years. 

Members of the Gateway Chamber run the gamut from large corporations like Merck, Comcast, Verizon and Continental Airlines, to small and medium-sized business, to a very active home-based business group.

Director of Special Projects

CCFGiving

Operations Associate

Eastern National Academy

Instructed, refined, and improved skills for gymnasts of all levels
• Earned a 100% retention rate for all Recreational classes 3 months after starting
• Created Ninja Warrior Program that retained 180% of students over 9 months
• Manage employees and planning for Birthday parties and special events

Men's Gymnastics Coach

I am a direct response outbound lead generation expert. And by that jumble of words, I mean that I leverage cold email to build predictable revenue pipelines for my clients. 

I leverage over 20 databases to merge Firmographic, Technographic, and Persona data to build highly targeted playbooks with my clients. 

I believe we need to arm sales teams with the knowledge of their total Target Addressable Market and teach them how to score that Market for which companies have the most pain and need their solution. 

The best way to do this is to look at public indicators such as open jobs data, employee growth/attrition, social media growth, web traffic, new product launches, employee sentiment, individual employee tech investment, company tech stacks, etc.

With this data, not only are you only messaging with people that you know have a problem that you can solve, you also are armed  with powerful messaging that cuts through the noise. 

I teach sales teams to embrace technology and multiply what is possible per employee.

Today, Clay announces their valuation of $500M from a Series B fundraise. As you can tell from my posts, I'm a pretty big fan of the platform and think everyone should be using it. 

This post really goes out to the Clay team and in particular the cofounders Kareem Amin and Varun Anand who the company could not be where it is today without them. 

My interactions with Kareem has always been amazingly insightful. Whether it's discussing growing a company or philosophy on life and what gives it meaning, Kareem is deeply wise. When problems happen at the company, he shows little emotion and just thinks about how to solve the problems. 

Varun is one of the best operators I've ever seen at a company. Recruiting, Sales, Customer support, marketing, HR, networking, everything. Varun can do it all and he brings those skills to the team. 

Also an insane amount of kudos should be given to the team with their quick ability to launch new features and solve customer problems. 

Congratulations to everyone. Well deserved, the platform you are building is changing my life and the sales pipelines of so many others.

This course is still up and free forever for anyone looking to get into or improve their cold email skills.

🌀 Kyle vanArtsen 

A big congratulations to Vaibhav Namburi and his team for Smartlead's birthday this week! And of course the celebration has some giveaways!

Back when we met and you were running Smartwriter, we connected immediately and I got to see you launch Smartlead.

Getting to meet in real life at the Acquisition.com workshop and hear about your vision for the company was amazing. 

Today you can celebrate a milestone! 

For everyone looking for some free gifts you can follow the link in this post to get...

15% OFF on Smartlead Monthly Subscription & 6000 FREE Email Verification credits.

 10 FREE Ready-to-Use Automation Templates from the great Noel Maniraguha.

3000 Additional Clay credits on any Clay Paid Plan to supercharge your campaigns.

10% OFF on Sendspark paid plans & 1000 AI Video Credits to enhance your video outreach.

Grab the offer until July 31st!

 https://lnkd.in/edHhjmPN

I had a cold email copywriting framework hit me the other night. I ran it past Elyse Savaki the other night and she loved it. So I launched it as a test for ourselves and it's already working well. Here it is.

If this keeps working well, we will add to a full rotation for clients. 

Lately I've been thinking about cold email copywriting as a set of "rules" that we all generally agree on. 

Under 100 words
2-3 word subject line
Light CTA
Etc.

Then 1 by 1, I think of a "rule" and how I would break it. 

Why do we have to make emails less than 100 words? 

Well because people don't have time to read a novel. 

But then if what we decide to say doesn't resonate right now, we are out of luck.

So what if we paired a super short message with even more content below the signature so

- they can quickly skim and decide whether or not to respond to our main offer
- if they are on the fence with responding, they can get more information immediately
- it's still short enough that if it really isn't relevant, they can let us know or pass without wasting their time. 

Copy format goes something like this (this is still in testing by the way but we are getting early success so I thought I'd share).

{{First_name}} - {{relevant first line generated with Clay}}

We just helped {{case study}} accomplish {{outcome}} and after reviewing your company I think we could help you as well. 

Specifically, I think we can help {{AI generated idea about how our service could be applied to their company}}.

Let me know if you'd like to chat. If you haven't decided, I left a ton more about what we do below my signature. 

Signature

{{3 sentence Case Study}}

{{3 sentence Case Study}}

{{3 sentence Case Study}}

{{3 sentence Case Study}}

{{3 sentence Case Study}}

{{3 sentence Case Study}}

{{3 sentence Case Study}}

{{3 sentence Case Study}}

If you've read all of these by now and don't want to book a call, what more proof could I send you to earn that call?

___________

The reason I personally think this is working is because we are overwhelming the prospect with proof that we do this a ton and we do it successfully while also sending messaging relevant to their business. 

Comment what you think. 

We sent 200 emails and got 2 positive responses for Growth Engine X's offer if you'd like to know the metrics of this.

The time has come to redo the email data provider comparison. We have a list of 1,000+ positive responses in the past 3 months from one of our customers that runs across multiple industries that is perfect to use. 

We will use the full name + domain input or a linkedin profile input depending on the provider. If the provider allows both, we will use both. 

Each email we test will be a verified email (because we literally have a positive response from them). They are all work emails.

The responses range from a ton of different industries and employee headcounts. Transparently, there are no enterprise accounts in the list. 

We will be testing

Prospeo
LeadMagic
Findymail
Datagma
ContactOut
People Data Labs
Nimbler - B2B Contacts, AI-Powered Outbound Campaigns, and Contact Data Enrichment
Dropcontact
Icypeas
Snov.io
Hunter.io

And maybe I can make a special request to the ZoomInfo team to get some enrichments pulled in.

Who else should we be testing? 

***Limitations of the test***

Last time we did this, the post went crazy and people critiqued the process. I'll admit the limitations now and be extremely transperant with our process. 

1. the data is sourced originally from people data in Clay and then we use the Clay waterfall to find the data. 
2. We will use responses that have been tagged manually as positive. The reason we do this is because then there's no way an SMTP validation service could screw this up. If an email data tool can't find the email of someone that has passed an email validation service previously AND they positively responded, I don't want it. 
3. Some of these providers have features that include catch all verification. Every email we send at Growth Engine X is validated with Debounce before we send and we only send to Valids. The test will not include the catch all verification. 
4. I could increase the sample size because technically we have 2500 leads to work with but they are over 3 months old and I don't want old data to skew the results. 
5. All of the test data is from the United States, CEOs, at companies under 200. I understand this is a limitation of the test. The industries range from SaaS to laundromats. If you want data outside of the US, I believe 🤖 Jacob Tuwiner is working on that. 
6. The results will be displayed by total emails found, total emails that match the email we got a positive response from, and cost per valid email found. 

Any other questions I can clear up before we run the analysis? Maybe I'll live stream it so everyone can see the full process. All APIs will be connected using Clay

Don’t be afraid to send images, links, or videos in an email if it increases responses. 

If you’ve been following advice on LinkedIn about cold email, you have to have seen everyone saying don’t send links etc. 

Which for sure is the best practice. But if you have an asset that prospects see in the email and it changes their perception of your product or service, send the freaking link. 

Basically if you have the opportunity to show, not tell, do it. 

If you send an email campaign with no image, you get a 70% open rate and no responses vs. getting a 50% open rate including the link and 3% responses. Why on earth would you not send the link? 

There are of course best practices in cold email but if something is working better, you can bend the rules as you need. 

Cold email is like instagram, not the post office. There aren't hard set rules of what gets delivered and what doesn't. It works off of how everyone else is interacting with your message.

The new GPT-4o mini announcement has gotten me thinking about how such an extreme cost decrease can affect AI written cold emails. 

Of course, AI written lines are going to come down in cost and that's great. (Don't use AI to write your whole email if you haven't been aware). 

With such a big cost decrease, I think the next phase of AI in cold email will be to double check companies for the correct fit line by line before reaching out. 

Traditional methods of filtering don't account for incorrect self reported data. 

For example, many data providers report the industry from the company linkedin profile as their Industry in their database. You know what every 50% or more of software companies reports their industry as? The industry they sell into. 

If you look up companies in a Banking industry, you might still get consultants for banks etc. 

This can be cleared up with tools like Clay  by setting up if/then type workflows or data providers that have manually reviewed data and industry tagging as well as better AI analysis and keyword research like Ocean.io, ZoomInfo, Owler - A Meltwater Offering etc.  

But then this leaves edge cases. Companies that are tough to filter by if/then statements and that are so niche, the standard data providers haven't made filters for them. 

Lists like 

Construction companies with large fleets
Gaming companies with games on every platform
Gyms that only do Yoga training
etc

With the models getting cheaper, it's going to be extremely cost effective to build a prompt that checks each company for true fit before you reach out and then you can even send a batch API to get the cost down 50%. 

There can be a review of everything company, every contact, every email before it gets sent out and it would still be cheaper than hiring full time people. 

The fact that Open AI keeps dropping their prices makes the usage so exciting.

Aaron. Reid

Another use case for Clay that would take someone hours to do manually is to add leads to multiple campaigns. 

For one client, we are testing over 12 versions of copy (it didn't fit in the screenshot) and if we had to upload to all of them manually it would have been a nightmare.

Doing it one time would have been fine but on a weekly basis would have been ridiculous. 

Now with Clay we just use a formula generated with their AI formula generator to output a random number (we input "if {{first_name}} is not empty, output a random number between 1 and 12" to get this formula generated.)

If you wanted to even send 25% of your leads to one campaign and 75% of your leads to another campaign, just output a random number between 1 and 4 and run a conditional formula that only leads with 1 in their row go to campaign A and leads with 2, 3, or 4 in their row go to campaign B. 

Nothing to do with Enrichment but it makes our lives easy.

Knowledge of no code tools are a must for every department these days. Make is my go to. I made a 40 minute video going over some of the basics.

When I first started Growth Engine X, I was struggling looking for guidance on how to use Make. I am by no means even an advanced user, but I make this video for anyone who was in my position and just needed to learn the ropes a little bit more. 

Link to the YouTube video below!

youtube.com

Make Beginner's Tutorial

Understand your customers, understand what cold outreach is going to resonate with them. This is 80% of the battle in outbound today. 

Full video from my chat with Peter Kang at Clay coming soon.

"Clay is expensive and it's too complicated." I hear this all the time and wanted to make a new long form tutorial on how to use Clay to help those getting started. Here's what I cover. 


- Basic table creation
- How to save credits with conditional formulas
- How to manipulate data with formulas
- How to find a list of companies
- How to find a list of people and enrich for emails
- Another example workflow of how to find a list of jobs and then find hiring managers at the company

All to show you that Clay is just as expensive as your other tools if you use their API on the $350 plan which if you consider the time saving just pays for itself.

And Clay is just a spreadsheet connected to other tools. The same process would have to be done if you downloaded a list from Ocean.io, uploaded to Prospeo to find emails, then uploaded that list to find keywords on site using ZenRows. But instead of switching tools it's all in one. 

Find the link to the video below because it's too long for LinkedIn!

https://lnkd.in/eM4mz4zY

101 Tutorial for Clay.com -- 2024 Beginner's Guide

Now you can track job changers automatically in Clay. It works so simply that I'm typing this from my phone and not making a video. 

Step 1: upload a list of people that you want to be alerted the moment they change jobs. 

Step 2: Add a table in Clay with the Track Job Changes Signal workflow

Unite your original table with this workflow

Step 3: Add any enrichments or filters you need to do in order to send your best email. 

Want to check if they have the same title as their last company? Done
Check if they got a boost in seniority? Done
Check if their new company is in your CRM? Done
Check if they posted on LinkedIn? Done
Check if their new company is in the same industry? Done

Any other workflow you would use can now be done as soon as a person is detected to have a new role.

We are seeing demand increasing for Clay experts across Job Boards, Upwork, and LinkedIn. Even your Mother's book club is talking about it. More education has to go out about becoming a Clay expert. 

Join me July 25th in person in NYC to talk about how you can become a Clay expert. 

We will discuss 

1. The technical requirements needed to become a Clay expert
2. How to practice without burning credits
3. How to attract customers who need your services

We might even share APIs that can reduce your overall credit usage entirely for yourself and customers. 

Register at the link below. I'd be honored for you to join us. I want this to be filled with the right people so Andreas Wernicke is vetting registrants and limiting the overall in person count. 

Reach out if you think we should accept your registration but we didn't!

lu.ma

Clay in NY + Livestream: Become a Clay Expert w/ Eric · Luma

80% of cold email knowledge can be learned in 3-4 hours. Maybe less than that. 

Here's a oversimplified guide for people looking to just get started. 

There are three things you need to get right in order to launch a cold email campaign. 

Your email infrastructure, the list you are going to send to, and what you are going to say. The first two are a science; the last is an art. 

Email Infrastructure

If you stick to regular Outlook or Google accounts (right now we are preferring Google with no hard science, just preference) you're going to be pretty set. 

Follow the guide that Instantly.ai or Smartlead have on their websites on setup. OR Instantly will do the Google account set up for you now on their platform and for a dollar less than what Google is charging. 

As someone who manages over 9,000 inboxes there's really no secret sauce to email infrastructure other than following those guides and using a proper warm up network. If your results start decreasing, set up new inboxes and domains, don't mess with trying to save the inboxes. You'll just waste effort and time. 

List Building

Again, another problem that has generally been solved. Couple of rules to look out for. Most list building tools are scraping linkedin, so if your audience isn't on LinkedIn you might have to find a specialty list. You should check any provider against a third party tool (we have been sending to emails Prospeo marks valid for months now and never had a problem). 

Here's a cheat sheet of tools to build lists of companies

Niche industry categorization and Lookalike Audiences: Ocean.io

Ecommerce data - Storeleads

Companies using certain tech - BuiltWith and PredictLeads

Funding Crunchbase and Harmonic (Harmonic also has great industry categorization.)

Local Businesses D7 Lead Finder or Andrew Elsakr

Use Clay to grab unlimited companies as well as people data

ZoomInfo for great intent data and their industry classifications are great too. Most SaaS companies on their list out of everyone I've seen. 

Use tools like Datagma, Prospeo, Findymail to find emails on people or from the websites. 

Copywriting

The art of cold email and the toughest to nail down. 

-Under 100 words (75 is better). Try playing with longer emails after you did short ones. 
- I just made a video on some templates we use on my YouTube. If people want it, I'll link it in the comments. 
- Show your prospect that you can be trusted and that you can create a great outcome. 

Honestly, there's so much to say about copywriting here that this will be oversimplified. 

I post about all of these topics in depth on my YouTube channel. There's a free cold email course and a free Clay course.

If you focus on these 3 areas, there's really nothing stopping you from getting started. What other questions would you have about cold email.

Super easy Clay use case that has nothing to do with outbound but can help companies save their SDRs tons of time. 

At the end of a call I just had with a customer, they told me they are having someone manually check how many sales and customer success employees a company has on LinkedIn. 

I set up the whole workflow to update their Hubspot in less than 2 minutes. 

We just used HubSpot as a source and then used the Get Employee Count by Criteria integration to do keyword searches. 

Then we finished it off with a Hubspot Integration to keep everything enriching as the data is streamed in. 

Now anytime a new company is added to their HubSpot, the data will be enriched daily.

Clay isn't just for outbound use cases. Remember, the mission of the company is actually to give regular people software programming skills.

Played with 4o mini a lot this weekend. Some takeaways as AI is applied to outbound email. 

By far the biggest advantage is cost. It's unbelievably cheap. And it works just like the release notes said. Better than 3.5, not as good as 4o. This post probably won't surprise anyone but here's somethings I tried. 

For reviewing data from tools like PredictLeads and Claygent, it does a great job reducing the information down into custom first lines. 

Also with Claygent, the research Claygent was doing was remarkably better. I have 20 websites that for sure have case studies listed on them. 3.5 found 12. 4o mini found them all. 

I switched out the model from something I've been working on to check if we should even be reaching out to a company and it did ok but not as well as 4o. I think this can be fixed with prompting and more examples as of course the cost is worth the extra effort. 

We've been working on an AI that looks at a list of companies and years and outputs positive news events from those companies at those years. It seemed to accomplish this task just as well as 4o. 

I built an AI to categorize industries for an Enterprise customer that we have. I just switched the model and ran the first 100 rows. It only changed 4 of the outputs. I already manually reviewed the data for accuracy and turned the project over to the customer so the fact that it did that well and is so much cheaper was great. 

Anecdotally, it seems to be better than 3.5 for copywriting but not as great as 4o which is exactly what they said in their release.

Overall, I see this as a huge win for people who build with AI. It's a great model at an even better cost per execution. 

This is going to allow for more tools to train their tech stack on exactly what they would do as a human. The cost would allow for more input in the prompt and more examples for it to reference as well.

I showed a mentor of mine how to double response rates using AI and Clay yesterday. Here's a quick breakdown. 

When you see people saying that AI messaging brings no increase in response rates, when I've dug deeper, it's usually because they are using AI to say something that you wouldn't really say if you were writing the message manually. 

I always ask my customers, if you were to research a prospect manually, what would you be searching for and how would that change the message?

That way we aren't using AI for the sake of AI, we are using it to write as similar of a message to a human as we can. 

In this case, someone who actually got me started in cold email was looking to increase responses for his virtual assistant offer. 

Luckily, I had already made a video on what I would do. 

The TL;DR is that we use AI to look at what that person's role is, what the company does, what are fulfilling parts of that role, and what are most likely tedious tasks in that role. 

We use AI to message them about how they might love certain parts of their role like speaking to successful customers or making new marketing campaigns. Then the AI also talks about tasks that they most likely would want to outsource to a virtual assistant. 

That way instead of sending a Virtual Assistant offer like everyone else, we send a message giving the prospects ideas of tedious tasks they can off load to someone else. 

Check out the full video on how the campaign is put together here. 

https://lnkd.in/ey96YW7E

Me to Me: "This should be a fun quick workflow"

The workflow

Taplio

🦾Eric Nowoslawski's Linkedin Analytics