Email it's harder than it looks
Messaging
After reading through this great article by Suthen Siva on sourcing deals. It made me rethink the idea of flyer attachment. This led me to ask the wonderful community at Searchfunder for some advice from brokers. Here is a summary of the advice provided:
Simple and concise
Provide details of what I am looking for in a company
Ask to be put on their list
Make a compelling case why I am worth their time as most buyers never buy a company
Have and SBA pre-qualification/comfort letter
Check brokers site to ensure they sell the type of companies I am looking for
Create a drip campaign with consistent and fresh messaging
Include my qualifications
My sister also provided me with some excellent advice on messaging with a one liner. Which is basically state the who’s the character, what’s the problem, what’s the solution, and the reward. My rewrite of my intro to my email is:
Are you tired of dealing with tire kickers wasting your time looking at businesses they are not interested in, and those unable to close a transaction? I am going to buy two successful service businesses in the next 6 months. Below are my background and criteria. Lets connect -calendy link?, and please add me to your list of qualified buyers list.
I will then have the rest of the flyer in bulleted form to provide the business metrics and background. I will also add a bullet on prequalified amount after I receive a comfort letter from and SBA lender.
Email Configuration
Since my email will be more visually boring than a flyer, I want to add a nice signature. Using Canva, I was able to make what, I think, is an impressive email signature, although I am not sure about the QR code. Does anyone actually use them? The issue is that Gmail for some reason won’t let me use it. I tried several formats, uploading it to google drive, and all I get is a ? box.
This did surface another issue with my email. I had never heard of DKIM authentication, but if I want my email not to go to spam, I needed to configure it. Because I am using GSuite, it required me to get a text code from Google and provide it to my website host, 1and1. I did that, so now hopefully my emails won’t be considered spam.
Email Blasts
Sending out emails can be a bit tricky. In my political activism days I used MailChimp, but back in those days spam filters were not as good as they are today. What I discovered was the first thing I needed to do was run my email list through a service that checks if they are valid email, otherwise if too many emails bounce, my domain could get flagged as a spammer.
My first thought is most of mine are probably correct because Business Brokers want to be found, right? Well, I ran 10 through this free checker to see if I should pay to clean them, and I was wrong. Three were bad, and 2 were labeled as catch all email addresses. Needless to say, I will be paying for this. The cost of this varies widely, and the one above seems to be decent at around $10 to check 10,000 email addresses.
Next up is to figure out if I should use a specific email sender service such as MailChimp, Woodpecker, Outreach, Gmass, or one of the other many specific tools for email marketing, or do I go with Hubspot or another CRM that offers email outreach? I figure I will send approximately 100 emails a day for roughly 30 days. Then, if the broker has not responded, send another slightly different email, and keep the drip going at once every 3-4 weeks until they respond, or I buy a company.
Either way, you can see that I most likely need a CRM to keep track of these interactions. Or I will spend all my time updating a spreadsheet.
Should I have a QR code in my email signature?
Turns out the email signature image need to be uploaded by chrome instead of safari.