Make investors subscribe to YOUR mailing list!š¬Part 3 - understanding laws around cold emailing.
Explaining the rules and regulations around cold emailing in the US.
In the last two posts I have covered 1)How to find contact information of the right investors and 2) How to automate that discovery process. If you havenāt read the first 2 parts of these series, I recommend doing so asap, otherwise you might be a tad lost. You can find the first part here and second part here.
As promised in Part 1, this system is geared towards generating 10k email addresses of useful points of contacts every month because automations are strongš¤š¦¾. And when you start working with such volumes of emails, you REALLY want to know the rules of cold emailing.
CAN-SPAM US federal law of 2003, what you need to know.
Before jumping into the legal section of this post, I want to mention that Iām not a certified legal expert and information below should not be viewed as legal advice. However this legal section is fully covered using information from the book āStartup Law and Fundraisingā by Paul A. Swegle who is indeed a registered attorney. Point is, source is reliable but Iām not a legal expert so donāt sue me please.
Below is the excerpt from Swegleās book. You can find more information about āStartup Law and Fundraisingā here, but itās over 500 pages long and as someone who read it, I can tell with confidence - itās really boring and a lot of information in that book will just make your fundraising life much more complicated than it needs to be.
Key points from this excerpt:
Do not mislead your targets. You canāt put āEARN BILLIONS WITH THIS INVESTMENTā in your subject line while trying to invite investors to your email list.
Make sure that investors know that this is a semi-cold email and not a personal one. In the beginning of the email, identify yourself and your role in the company and explain how you found their contact information. I will go into great depth on how to properly construct your email in Part 4 of this series.
All mass-mailing tools allow you to include āunsubscribeā button or link in your emails - USE IT. Most of the time, I include the unsubscribe button even more than once in the email just to be sure that Iām compliant with this regulation.
In the signature of the email, include the mailing address that is actually capable of receiving physical mail. If you include the address of your registered agent, you might not be able to receive mail there (depending on the type of registered agent), so I recommend including your personal address since it goes on public record as soon as you incorporate your company anyways.
It is rare, but A LOT of investors have legal background so if you piss someone off on a wrong day, you just might get hit with a CAN-SPAM law violation and lose up to $42,530 for every single email violating this law. Staying compliant when it comes to mass mailing isnāt hard so just donāt spam people and ask someone to peer-review your emails before sending them to thousands of well-educated investors.
This is pretty much all you need to know about the legal side of IML growth process. I personally have sent well over a million emails over the past year (including the ones I send at my day job) and received 0 reports of spam. This means that if you construct your emails properly and allow users to unsubscribe easily and you donāt send any follow-up emails to those who unsubscribed, you will have no problems whatsoever.
I wanted to include the description of the system that helps you achieve a tiny bounce rate and that protects you from getting your email burnt - a situation where nearly ALL of your emails would go to spam folders of my recipients. But unfortunately Iām just a few hundred words away from exceeding the maximum number of characters that can fit into an email (the one that you receive through Substack) so I will include this system into the 4th part.
The next part will explain how to keep your mailbox healthyš· and keep your deliverability rates sky-high. The system that I will introduce in that part will force you to delete anywhere between 20% to 45% of the 10,000 emails that youāve exported from Apollo, but itās well worth it.
But for now this concludes Part 3 of these mini-series. As always, hope youāve enjoyed it and if you have any questions - donāt hesitate to reach out by responding directly to this email or in the comments of Substack. Speaking of which - I get a lot of responses like āgreat contentā but they go directly to my mailbox and even though I really appreciate it, I would appreciate the likes on the posts quite a bit too:) So far my most consistent like-giver is my brother (shoutout to Kirill) so if you enjoy reading this, please leave a comment using the button belowš
And going back to the fact that āStartup Law and Fundraisingā by Paul A. Swegle is a big (and boring) book, here is the photo of it if you didnāt believe meš
But if you feel brave (or just donāt trust my judgement), you buy it for $44 here.
Have a good Sunday and Iāll see you in Part 4!