Make investors subscribe to YOUR mailing list!📬Part 5 (LAST) - constructing the email.
You've made it and now it's time to start sending emails to your potential investors!
Remember how I promised to write these every 2 weeks? I failed. After a huge number of you clicked that “Book a Free call” button I took on too many gigs along with my day job and just couldn’t find time to finish this mini-series. But the final post in the series is here, so enjoy and good luck with your fundraising:)
By this time you should have your Investor Mailing List (IML) growth machine prepared and ready to go live. If you don’t, either go through the past posts that I have shared with you or book a quick call with me here.
Here are the previous posts:
How to find👀 the contact information of investors for your Investor Mailing List (IML). Read part 1 here.
How to find that information in large volumes at the lowest cost. Read part 2 here.
What do you need to know about the anti-spam laws in the US (CAN-SPAM regulations). Read part 3 here.
Keep your emails away from spam folders and maintain high deliverability rates. Read part 4 here.
Okie dokie, now that this is out of the way, let’s talk about the very last step that you need to make in order to start rapidly growing your IML - construction of the actual message that you’ll send to the investors. In this post I’ll provide a template for that along with the explanations of how to setup a proper email sequence instead of relying on just 1 email.
3 pillars of a good email.
1. BFB - Be Freaking Brief. You have a lot to tell this potential investor, you’re excited about your company and you really want to get the investor excited. You have to cool down and keep it really short.
2. Make a very clear call to action. You don’t want to make an investor scratch their head and ask “WTF does this founder need from me? Follow the BFB rule and then explain what exactly you want an investor to do right now.
3. Stand out from the crowd. Of course, just by creating the Investor Mailing List and preparing for your fundraising round so early on you will automatically stand out from the crowd, but this particular introductory email needs to be catchy too.
1 pillar of a bad email.
Just to make sure that everyone is on the same page, before going into details of how to write a good email, I will show you an example of a bad email, here it is:
Shruti is a great VC with an absolutely amazing story, rich experience in the field and most importantly in this case - there are tons of public information about her story of becoming a VC, about what Shruti’s fund invests in etc.
An example of public info that could have been used to turn this into a successful cold email would be an interview that Shruti made with Fundraising Radio: https://www.fundraisingradio.com/Shruti-Gandhi/
Here is an example of how this founder could write this email:
“Hello Shruti,
We haven’t met but I really enjoyed your episode on Fundraising Radio and think that you could make a great addition to our cap table when we open it up to new investors in 3 weeks! Would you be open to a brief 15 minute introductory call sometime next week?”
And here is the best part - you don’t even have to listen to the episode! If the investor agrees to a meeting, then it’s time to dive into the episode, otherwise - don’t even worry about it:)
Anywho, I got distracted from our main subject because I just saw this LinkedIn post so let’s get back to our email writing to grow your IML. Below you can find an example of the first email that you will send to a potential investor that you want to see on your IML and then we’ll dissect the 3 pillars of a good email one at a time.
Introductory email example.
In this example I’ll use myself as a founder and CEO of Fundraising Radio Holdings (aka FRH), our for-profit branch, separate from Fundraising Radio and pretend that we are preparing to raise (just fyi we aren’t planning to raise).
Subject: Largest podcast in the world about fundraising in the US!
Body:
Hello Investor’s Name,
My name is Konstantin and I’m the founder of Fundraising Radio Holdings, the largest podcast in the world about fundraising for early-stage startups in the US.
We are preparing to raise a pre-seed round of $500,000 in 7 months and I’ve decided to reach out to you to see if you are interested in receiving bi-monthly updates about our journey?
You can signup for our updates here.
This is the first email in the sequence of three. Let’s go over what I have covered in this email:
Who I am.
One-liner of the company I plan to raise for.
What they will receive if they subscribe.
Crystal clear CTA.
We can’t expect sky-high numbers from the introductory email and that’s why we are setting up the automated email sequence. Below you will find the second email’s example.
Follow up email example.
I recommend to keep the 2-3 days delay between first and second emails. If you make the delay longer, the investor might forget that they ever saw your name or the name of your company and the introductory email will be wasted.
Subject: Investor updates from Fundraising Radio!
Body:
Hi Investor’s Name,
I’m the founder of Fundraising Radio Holdings and I’ve reached out to you a few days ago but haven’t heard back from you yet so decided to ping you again, hope you don’t mind the persistency:)
Just as a refresher, FRH is the largest podcast in the world about fundraising for early-stage startups in the US and we are planning to raise our pre-seed round of $500,000 in 7 months. To save us some time on fundraising when the time comes I’ve decided to reach out to a handful of notable investors who focus on pre-seed rounds and invite them all to join our Investor Mailing list to receive bi-monthly updates about our progress, should I include you in that list?
Here is what you can expect from our updates:
Honesty. We are notorious for our “No-Bullshit policy” so there will be no BS in the updates, exclusively valuable information. We will share bad news as much as we share good news, after all we are a pre-seed startup and can’t have an easy, smooth ride, otherwise what’s the fun in building a business?
Requests for help. We strongly believe that an investor is not just money so we want to understand who on our investor list also believes in that and is willing to contribute their
Guaranteed exposure to some great content. Our team truly loves what they do and this absolutely guarantees a fun ride so how about you hop on the safe seat of a viewer so we can have a discussion about you joining the ride later on?
You can subscribe to our updates here.
As you can see, the second email is longer. Here you can put whatever you want - provide more details about what the updates will be about so the investors have a more reasonable expectation; share cool facts about your company such as milestones you have already achieved; reasons why you are building this company etc.
Point is - this email can be a bit bulkier since it’s not the first touch and you can share more information here and start building your relationship with this investor.
What if investors don’t subscribe?
Stuff happens, sometimes the tactics described in this mini-series don’t work as good as you would hope and give you 15 subscribed investors instead of 150. There are two solutions here:
Scale up your outreach. If you see that the subscription rate is pretty good, for example if 3% of investors that you send cold emails to, end up subscribing then just reach out to more investors. Plain and simple.
Leave the investors alone for a month or two. If you reached out to all or most investors that you wanted to, just take those who already subscribed and start sending them promised updates and as for investors who haven’t subscribed - don’t bother them for a month or so. Once enough time passes, send them two follow up emails suggesting to suggest to subscribe again.
Donezen.
This system takes some time to implement but it’s well worth it I personally have tested it countless times with the clients that we advise and it works.
In the next post I will talk about sending regular emails and more importantly - maintaining this fundraising machine so stay tuned and share this with fellow founders.
Remember how in the beginning of the post I complained about getting too many gigs helping founders raise money? Now my team of 3 is helping me out so if you have questions or need help setting up and running your fundraising campaign, just book a call below!