HOW TO WRITE THE PERFECT OUTREACH MESSAGE

Morning!

I’m never sure where to start these newsletters. Whether to jump right into the marketing, talk about my week, or waffle on about things I’ve been thinking about.

Today, I think I’ll go with the latter.

Because this week I’ve been thinking that copywriting might just have a renaissance. I thought A.I. had killed it. That it was dead in the water. But I’ve spent the last week working with the team on our outbound systems and I realised that it’s more important than ever.

Anyone can prompt A.I. to write a cold email or a LinkedIn message. But there is something special about writing a perfect email that converts. Mainly because it has to be different from all of the other emails or messages that person is receiving. And if there’s one thing A.I. isn’t great at… It’s being different.

Anyway, this week I’ve been obsessing over the “Perfect Outreach Message”.

Something that is attention-grabbing, valuable, but most of all gets someone to do the thing I want them to do.

I haven’t written it yet, but I think I have all of the pieces of the puzzle. I’m going to use this essay to try to put them all together.

Let’s see how we get on!

THE ESSAY

I was probably 18 years old when I first discovered “Copywriting”.

I was entering the world of marketing for the first time and a late night rabbit hole led me to a YouTube video that talked about these crazy people called “Copywriters” who could make people do things by writing words.

The video talked about how Gary Halbert was making $ 60,000/day with his coat of arms letter, how Ogilvy redefined Rolls Royce’s public perception with one line and how Berbach helped sell 570,000 Beetles in the US with just 2 words.

They were like magicians. Magicians who made a shit ton of money with their tricks. They could write words and make people take action.

To me, that was incredible.

And this week I was reminded just how important copywriting is when attempting to craft “The Perfect Outreach Message” with the team.

But let me start by clearing up what I mean by an “Outreach message”.

I’m talking about any direct communication you send to someone to start a conversation or prompt an action.

That could be:

• A cold email

• A cold LinkedIn message

• Even a cold text to someone

In this case, I am focused on our 2 core outreach channels: LinkedIn & email. But no matter what channel you prefer, every outreach message needs to do 3 things:

1. Get opened

2. Get read

3. Get them to take action

Ironically, that sounds pretty simple when I put it like that. In reality, each individual task I’ve outlined there is incredibly hard.

So let’s break it into the 3 objectives as we work through this, starting with…

1/ How do we get people to open our outreach?

When it comes to questions like this people always seem to go too tactical too quickly. They try to hack their way to getting people to open their messages with tricks they hear from gurus.

Instead, I like to go back to first principles and just start by asking, “What messages do I always open?”

For me, the messages I open have a few core things in common:

• They’re from friends or people I know, usually with a casual tone

• They pique my curiosity

• They have something that directly involves me in the subject line or the preview message

Which means our perfect outreach message would need to tick all of these boxes.

Let’s see what that looks like in action…

Why I think this works:

1. I purposely used 3 question marks at the end to seem more casual and removed the initial capital letter to make it seem like it came from a friend.

2. The curiosity part comes from the mention of the competitor’s campaign - everyone cares about what their competitors are doing.

And honestly, I think that’s a subject line that would get our message opened. But now what?

Getting someone to open the message is barely the opening stanza of the battle - the real work comes when they open it.

So let’s go to part 2…

2/ How do we write a message people read?

Again, it’s easy here to start googling for templates and best practices, but that’s how you end up in a guru slop rabbit hole with loads of terrible writing.

Instead, I’d go back to first principles again and think about the messages that I read.

There are probably 3 core themes of messages that I’ll read:

1. They’ll have some sort of promise or payoff - I feel like I’m going to get something out of it.

2. It has to be relevant to me - Involving something that I’m genuinely interested in or concerned about.

3. It’s clear and to the point - I don’t want to see long text that I don’t have time to read.

In the subject line, we leaned on their competitor to pique curiosity, so here we need to deliver on that curiosity and set up a clear payoff.

Let’s see what I can do…

Notice here that I'm delivering on the subject line promise, showing I understand their world, and dangling something valuable in front of them - whilst also being extremely concise.

This is a message I’d definitely read, but then there’s the last step…

3/ How do we get them to take action?

If they get to the end of your message, chances are we’ve done the hard part. They’ve bitten on the hook, we’ve reeled them in, and all we need to do is get them off the hook without the fish flapping its way out of our hands.

Well, maybe that’s a bad analogy because it’s still extremely hard to get anyone to take action, even if they’ve read the entire message.

At this point though, it’s tough to really work from first principles. So instead, I’d just be looking here at making the best offer possible.

Which for me means: the most value possible, with the least effort needed from the reader.

So on one hand, we need an offer of something they want. Then we need the CTA to be the least friction possible. I think in the body of the message we wrote before we’ve cheated slightly and already created a great offer (to show them what a competitor has done), so now it’s just writing a frictionless CTA.

That means: minimum commitment and minimum effort needed.

The least effort thing I can think of is a yes or no question. It takes minimal thinking and it’s super low friction. So let’s piece it together.

Our perfect outreach message:

The offer is clear value (specific strategy that worked), the commitment is literally 0, and the CTA is dead simple - yes or no.

Will it work? Maybe.

The sad reality for us marketers is that every message doesn’t work on every person - even if it is “Perfect”.

This message may convert like wildfire when targeting tech firms and maybe it flops heavily if you target engineering firms with it. Because the reality it, there is no such thing as a perfect outreach message…

There is just an outreach message that works on a certain audience in a certain time period.

Did I waste your time here trying to create one with you? Maybe.

But I hope that working through this you realised that great outreach messages, just like great copywriting, arent’ created by:

• Trying to use tricks

• Stealing off online gurus

• Or Googling “Best practices”

They’re crafted by deeply understanding who you’re talking to and working from the same principles we talked about in this essay…

1. Get opened by being human and relevant

2. Get read by delivering clear and concise value

3. Get action by making the smallest possible ask

That’s what a perfect outreach message is for me.

Now, I have a feeling that most people will read this essay and fall in 1 of 2 camps.

1. They think it’s the most boring marketing essay of all time and hate me for it.

2. They find it useful and go ahead and apply it.

I just hope you’re in the latter :)

Either way, reply to this email and let me know what you thought and what you want to see more of going forward - it’s a massive help for me.

Until next Sunday,

— Niall

P.S. Please take a second to rate the essay below, it helps me know what to write going forward :)

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