How Chief Used Cold Email to Start Their Network

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Happy Sunday Operators ⚙️

People think the world is driven by greed.

I believe the world is driven by the desire to connect with others.

This strong desire to connect with like-minded individuals drives the largest businesses in the world.

That’s why I decided to dive into one of the largest professional networks I could find.

Chief is a billion-dollar professional network focused on helping women executives achieve success. The group has over 15,000 members (!).

But how did they start?

^{Together With Cornerstone}
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That’s why we are starting Cornerstone, a professional network for COOs and senior operators.

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P.S We have fantastic operators on the list, including COOs from Beehiiv, Support Shepherd, and Late Checkout. It’s free to join the waitlist!

^{Setting the Stage}

How Chief Used Cold Email to Start Their Network

Becoming a top executive for anyone is a big accomplishment.

But it gets lonely at the top. For women, it gets lonely a lot earlier.

Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan, executives at high-growth startups, understood this struggle. Their personal experiences with:

• Terrible networking events

• Poorly planned leadership development courses

• And unequal spaces for woman

led them to co-found Chief in 2019.

Chief aims to create an exclusive community for women executives to grow as leaders.

(Just like what I'm doing for COO and senior operators at Cornerstone!)

By helping their members level up, Chief help more women achieve true positions of influence and leadership.

So what exactly does Chief offer?

Chief’s most popular offering is “Core groups,” which are peer groups of 10 other Chief members and a dedicated executive coach that meet monthly.

The curated groups ensure you're with a group of people who 'get it.'

The company also offers workshops, a digital platform to connect with other members and clubhouses in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. Guest speakers – like Michelle Obama and tech journalist Kara Swisher – also give talks for Chief’s community.

Since its initial launch in 2019 with 200 members, Chief has grown to over 15,000 women in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, with over 60,000 on the waitlist.

With membership costing about $8,000, you can estimate that they make around $100M in annual revenue.

(No wonder they have a billion-dollar valuation!)

But how did Chief get their first members?

Childer told the My First Million podcast about their launch strategy:

By using cold email to attract the highest quality members, Chief was able to jumpstart their business.

Cold email is one of the oldest ways to scale a business. However, getting in front of the right people is another beast altogether.

Cold email can be a great channel to launch a network, but it can also be dicey when done wrong.

The era of "spray and pray" is dead. You're more likely to end up in the Spam folder than get a response.

Ops Tactic: Don’t spray and pray with cold email. Use cold email strategically to kickstart your network.

^{Why this Matters}
Why Should You Even Want to Send Cold Emails?

Cold emails give you the power of targeted outreach. It's like playing darts—you don't throw them and hope for the best. You aim for the bullseye.

With cold emailing, you're in control. You get to segment and target the most likely interested in your offering.

Take Chief, for example. They didn't send a mass email to every female executive in business. They targeted senior executive women in VP positions in Fortune 500 companies based in NYC.

That's super specific! By focusing on this group, they ensured that their message hit home.

Now, let's talk about cost. We all know that marketing can be a real budget-buster. But with cold emailing, you can make a big impact without breaking the bank.

The main costs are getting your hands on those email lists and the time you spend crafting those compelling messages.

Cold emailing can make your product or service feel like the hottest ticket in town. People start to sit up and notice when you position your offer as exclusive. They want in on the action.

Chief nailed this by positioning their network as a premium, exclusive community for senior executive women.

And by selectively reaching out via cold email, they made their recipients feel like VIPs. It's like getting a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory – you feel special and valued.

So, let's say you are trying to jumpstart your business with cold email. How should you start?

The Blueprint

10 years ago, you could send a few cold emails to folks to break through the noise. But nowadays, there are too many ways to get someone’s email. It can take over 4 “touches” to get in touch with someone.

Let’s get your cold email infrastructure in place:

I. Setting Up for Maximum Deliverability

When I started my own business, I knew that email outreach would be a crucial part of my strategy.

But I quickly realized that sending emails wasn't as simple as I thought. Spam filters were a pain, and I needed to find a way to ensure my messages reached my target audience.

As I delved deeper into email sending, I learned the importance of setting up my email sender to achieve high deliverability.

The first lesson I learned was integrating my email sender (Apollo) with a reputable domain server like SendGrid. This setup, I was told, would help manage my email sending and improve deliverability.

It was like having a reliable navigator guiding me through the choppy waters of email marketing.

Next, I discovered the secret of using aged domains. Instead of using my main business domain, I purchased aged domains through services like GoDaddy Auctions.

With their established history and credibility, these domains would help me build trust with my recipients and the spam filters.

But my journey didn't stop there. I soon learned about warming services. Tools like Mailreach, Lemwarm, and Mailwarm became power tools, sending emails to known inboxes and improving my email address's reputation and deliverability.

I began by sending 25 emails daily and increased by 25 per day until I reached my target volume. During this ramp-up period, I monitored my deliverability rates, adjusting as needed to ensure my messages hit their mark.

Email verification became another crucial step in my process. I relied on services like MillionVerifier to ensure the email addresses in my list were valid, helping me reduce bounce rates and maintain a good sender reputation.

It was like having a keen eye for detail, weeding out any potential roadblocks to my success.

I made it a habit to run verifications every time I added new contacts to my sequence, accounting for job changes and outdated information.

II. Crafting Effective Cold Emails

Besides being able to deliver your emails, you need to be able to convince people to open them (Who would've thought?)

By segmenting my audience based on job titles, company size, industry, and other relevant criteria, I could tailor my messaging to specific groups. This targeted approach allowed me to speak to their unique pain points and challenges.

You need to personalize your emails instead of sending generic, one-size-fits-all ones. No one wants to read a bland email that doesn't get across to the other person.

But getting recipients to open my emails was a whole other challenge. That's when I started experimenting with different subject lines.

A/B testing became my secret weapon, allowing me to test different variations and see which ones generated the highest open rates.

I learned that the most effective subject lines were actionable, clear about the email's content, and avoided spammy words like "free" or "discount."

Once I had my recipients' attention, I crafted compelling email content. In the first email, I highlighted my product or service's key benefits, addressed common pain points, and explained how my solution could assist them.

But I didn't stop there. I always included a clear and concise call to action in my emails. But, instead of immediately asking for a meeting, I found that offering valuable resources like case studies or industry insights was a more effective way to engage my recipients and build relationships.

Of course, not everyone responded to my first email. That's when you need an automated follow-up sequence. I set up a series of follow-up emails built on the previous messages and nudged the recipient to respond.

In these follow-ups, I kept a conversational tone as if I were continuing a dialogue. Referencing the previous email made the conversation feel ongoing and more natural.

III. Tracking and Optimizing Your Campaign

When I first started out, I thought my job was done once I hit the "send" button. But I realized that the real work begins after the emails are sent.

One of my most important steps was integrating your email sender with my CRM to track who replied to my emails.

This helped me manage my sales pipeline more. I could see which leads were engaged and required timely follow-ups, ensuring no opportunity slipped through the cracks.

To measure the effectiveness of my campaigns, I started tagging leads with the source "Cold Email." This simple step helped me attribute any successes to my outreach efforts and gave me a clear picture of their ROI.

But tracking didn't stop there. I became obsessed with monitoring my open and click-through rates.

I set a goal to achieve an open rate higher than 25% and a bounce rate lower than 10%. These benchmarks helped me gauge my campaigns' health and identify areas for improvement.

Response rates were another key metric I tracked. I paid attention to positive and negative responses, using this feedback to adjust my email content and targeting.

I knew I needed to make changes if a particular message or audience wasn't resonating.

The data I gathered became my secret weapon for refining my email sequences. I dropped underperforming subject lines and calls to action, replacing them with those that generated better engagement.

It was a continuous process of testing, measuring, and optimizing.

But the most important lesson I learned was keeping my contact lists current. I prioritized removing contacts who had asked to be unsubscribed or were no longer relevant to my business.

This helped me maintain a clean and engaged list, improving my deliverability and reputation.

Through consistent tracking and optimization, I turned my cold email campaigns into a well-oiled machine. By leveraging the data at my fingertips, I could make informed decisions and continuously improve my outreach efforts.

I turned my cold email campaigns into a well-oiled machine through consistent tracking and optimization

By following these three steps—setting up for deliverability, crafting effective emails, and tracking performance—you can maximize the success of your cold email campaigns.

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