How to Get Competitors’ Clients with Cold Outreach (Cold Email Teardown)

An easy way to find prospects interested in your product or service is to check out your competitors' users out.

Targeting your competitors' clients = targeting people who obviously have pain points your solution solves.

But how do you approach them? How do we catch their interest and push them to change their choice?

In this article, Charles, CEO of Devlo, reveals key strategies that led to successful replies and how just a few tweaks can lead to even better results.

Cold email insights to book more meetings

Here's a cold email that targets mid to C-level employees that use competitors’ software👇

Here are Charles' insights on why this cold email brings replies:

Tip #1: It shows research

The first sentence is personalized with the name of the competitors’ tools and shows that the person reaching out understands the leads’ background.

Tip #2: There’s a “what if” question

Using these questions prompts people to put themselves in a situation where their pain point would be fixed with your solution.

Tip #3: Mentions clients

It’s always a good idea to name-drop your clients similar to your leads and show before/after to boost your credibility.

Tip #4: There’s interest-based CTA

Before booking meetings with your leads, you can use the first email to confirm their interest and build rapport.

Tip #5: It’s short

If you want to make your email readable, use a shorter format or, as in this example, around 80 words.

How to write a cold email for a high conversion rate

Hungry for more? Here is how Charles would rewrite this cold email and his tips for even better results!

Tip #1: Use liquid syntax

You can use liquid syntax to boost your email deliverability and personalization at scale.

Tip #2: Describe clear pain points

Remind your leads about their pain points by clearly describing them. This will make them more prone to listen to what you have to say to fix them and book a meeting with you.

Tip #3: Mention a colleague

You can go on LinkedIn and try to find a colleague from the same team, department, or company (if it’s small). Charles’ team got 5-10 x more replies with emails that mention leads’ colleagues!

Tip #4:  Use only 1 CTA

Give leads only one option as the next step so they are sure what to do to get the value and avoid any friction.

Tip #5: Use more spacing

Adding more spacing between email paragraphs makes your message more scalable and value more visible.

Cold email template to replicate for more replies

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{% assign ampm = "now" | date: "%P" %}{% if ampm contains "am" %}Good morning{% else %}Good afternoon{% endif %} {{firstName}},

Noticed [Company] uses [Competitor] and [Competitor]. Using these, our clients were losing hours trying to get info out of their system for reporting.

Imagine if you could access and translate your essential business data in near real-time.

[Past client name], CIO at [Other company] went from 4 hours to around 3-4 seconds to gather information from JDE (his words, not ours).

[Name], are you or your colleague [FirstName LastName] open to see if we can do the same for you
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The key takeaways

Here are Charles's cold email tips for stealing clients from competitors:
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-> Personalize with competitor tool names to show thorough research
-> Pose a "what if" scenario to highlight your solution to their pain points
-> Boost credibility by name-dropping similar clients and their success stories
-> Use a single, concise, interest-based CTA to build rapport and encourage replies

You can watch Charles' complete cold email teardown here!

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PS: Want more tips? Request outbound experts to review your cold emails here!