3 Things to Know Before You Email a Potential Client
If you’re a marketer, social media manager, designer, creative, freelancer, or agency owner, you’ve probably heard the same advice over and over: if you want more clients, start reaching out to businesses. Simple enough. Then you actually sit down to do it.
Which businesses should you contact? Are they even a good fit? Who at the company should you email? What are you supposed to say that doesn’t sound like the same generic pitch sitting in their inbox?
Learning how to email potential clients isn’t really about finding the perfect cold email template. The work starts before you write the email. Effective cold outreach begins with knowing three things: whether the business is actually worth pitching, who the right person is to contact, and why your services could be relevant to them specifically. Get those pieces right, and outreach becomes a lot less intimidating.
1. Is the business actually worth pitching?
One of the biggest mistakes people make when learning how to find clients is assuming that anyone who technically fits their target market belongs on their outreach list. If you’re a social media manager who works with restaurants, for example, you could search for restaurants in a particular city, collect hundreds of email addresses, and start sending pitches. Technically, you’ve built a lead list.
But do you know whether any of those restaurants actually need social media management? Probably not.
There’s a major difference between a business that meets a few demographic criteria and a business that gives you an actual reason to start a conversation. Before adding a company to your outreach list, take a closer look.
Look for real opportunities for your services
If you’re trying to figure out how to find businesses to pitch, start by looking at them through the lens of what you actually sell.
A social media manager might find an established business with great reviews and a strong customer base, but notice that its social accounts haven’t been updated consistently in months. A web designer might find a successful local company whose website is difficult to navigate on mobile or no longer reflects the quality of the business. An email marketer might discover an e-commerce brand with an active social following but no obvious email capture or welcome offer. A branding studio might find a growing company whose visual identity changes dramatically from its website to its social channels. A paid media specialist might discover a brand with a compelling product and strong organic presence but little evidence that it is using paid acquisition. These are significantly more useful signals than industry and employee count alone.
The goal isn’t to invent something wrong with every business you find. Some companies simply won’t have an obvious opportunity for what you sell, and that’s okay. Good prospect research helps you eliminate those businesses before you spend time pitching them.
Your outreach list should answer more than:
Could this company theoretically hire me?
It should help you answer:
Why might this particular company be worth contacting?
2. Who is the right person to contact?
You’ve found a business that looks promising. Now you need to figure out who should actually receive your email.
This is where another common outreach strategy falls apart.
A generic info@ email address might eventually reach the right person, but finding the actual decision-maker gives your message a much better destination.
Knowing how to find the right person to contact at a company depends on both the size of the business and what you’re selling.
For a small local business, the owner or founder may make most marketing decisions.
At a larger company, you may need someone more specific, such as a:
Marketing Director
Head of Marketing
Brand Manager
Creative Director
E-commerce Director
Social Media Manager
Communications Director
If you’re selling website design, for example, the right person might be different from the decision-maker for influencer marketing.
This is why collecting random email addresses isn’t the same thing as building a useful outreach list.
Match the person to the pitch
Think about who would understand the problem you’ve identified and who could realistically make a decision about your service.
If you find a growing skincare company with inconsistent social content, the founder might be the appropriate contact if it’s a tiny team. At a larger beauty brand, there may already be a marketing director or social lead responsible for that exact area.
This distinction becomes especially important when you’re trying to scale client outreach.
Sending 100 emails to 100 generic inboxes is not necessarily more valuable than sending 25 well-targeted emails to people who are actually relevant to what you’re offering.
Volume can increase your opportunities, but only when there’s quality underneath it.
3. Why are you reaching out to them specifically?
This is arguably the most important question of the three.
Imagine receiving this email:
Hi! I help businesses grow on social media and wanted to see if you need social media management.
There’s nothing inherently terrible about it. There’s also very little reason to respond.
Now imagine that the person reaching out already understands something about your business. They’ve seen that you have hundreds of strong customer reviews and a great reputation locally, but your social presence has become inconsistent.
Suddenly, there’s context.
That’s why learning what to say when emailing a potential client starts with research, not writing.
Your pitch should start before you write the email.
Give your email a reason to exist
Before contacting someone, you should ideally be able to answer:
Why this business?
Why this person?
Why this service?
Why does reaching out make sense?
That doesn’t mean your email needs to contain an unsolicited five-page marketing audit. In fact, it probably shouldn’t. It means you know enough about the business to make the conversation relevant. This is also where thoughtful cold outreach for freelancers can stand apart from mass email campaigns.
Personalization isn’t inserting someone’s first name into a template. Real personalization comes from understanding why the company made your list in the first place.
What does a researched potential client actually look like?
Here’s the difference.
Imagine you’re a marketer and someone hands you this:
Bright Smile Dental
Dental Practice
12 employees
Massachusetts
Owner: Jane Smith
jane@brightsmile.com
You have a business.
You have a name.
You have an email address.
But you still have to figure out why you should contact them.
Now imagine your research looks more like this:
Bright Smile Dental
Decision-maker: Jane Smith, Owner
Contact: jane@brightsmile.com
What we noticed: The practice has a strong local reputation and more than 200 positive reviews, but its website appears dated and its social presence is inconsistent.
Potential opportunity: Social media management and/or website refresh.
Now you don’t just know who to contact.
You know why they’re worth contacting.
Multiply that by 50, 100, or several hundred businesses, and the difference becomes even more obvious.
This is why curated prospect lists for marketers can be so different from purchasing a generic database. Contact information is only one part of useful prospecting.
Context is what makes that information actionable.
What if you’re completely new to cold outreach?
If you’re new to cold outreach, the process can sound much more complicated than it needs to be.
You don’t need a huge sales team or an elaborate tech stack to start finding clients proactively.
Start with a basic process:
Clearly define the service you want to sell.
Determine what types of businesses are most likely to benefit from it.
Research individual businesses that fit those parameters.
Look for a genuine opportunity related to your service.
Identify the appropriate decision-maker.
Find accurate contact information.
Write a concise message based on the context you uncovered.
Follow up when appropriate.
The biggest surprise for many people is how much time happens before the email.
Writing the message itself might take a few minutes.
Finding a genuinely relevant business, looking through its website and marketing presence, identifying an opportunity, finding the right person, and locating their contact information can take considerably longer.
That’s why “just start cold emailing” often feels easier in theory than in practice.
Should you personalize every cold email?
Yes, but personalization should actually mean something.
Mentioning that someone recently posted on Instagram or saying you “love their brand” doesn’t necessarily make an email relevant.
Before sending a cold email to a potential client, focus your personalization on the reason you chose that company.
Maybe you noticed an opportunity.
Maybe their business is growing.
Maybe they have strong demand but an underdeveloped digital presence.
Maybe they recently launched something that aligns directly with your expertise.
Your research should give you the angle.
You also don’t need to tell the potential client everything you discovered. Use the information to create a natural opening for a conversation rather than overwhelming them with criticism.
There’s a big difference between:
Your website is outdated and your social media is bad.
and:
I came across your company and noticed you’ve built a really strong local reputation. I also noticed there may be an opportunity to bring more of that presence into your social channels.
Same observation. Completely different experience on the receiving end.
Does cold outreach actually work?
Cold outreach can create opportunities, but it isn’t a vending machine where 100 emails automatically produce a predetermined number of clients.
Results can depend on your offer, portfolio, targeting, messaging, pricing, deliverability, timing, follow-up, market demand, and the quality of the businesses you contact.
That’s exactly why the research matters.
If you send a beautifully written email to a company that has no reason to need your service, the copy probably isn’t the problem.
Likewise, even an ideal potential client may not have the budget, timing, or internal need to hire you right now.
The goal of good prospecting is not to magically know who will say yes.
It’s to spend more of your outreach time talking to businesses where there is a logical reason for the conversation to happen.
How do you find businesses that need marketing services?
If you’re specifically trying to find companies that need marketing services, avoid assuming that every company with mediocre marketing automatically wants to hire someone.
Instead, look for combinations of signals.
A business with strong reviews, active customers, and a weak digital presence may be more interesting than a barely active company with weak marketing across the board.
A growing e-commerce brand with strong social engagement but no visible email strategy may represent a clearer opportunity for an email marketer.
An established professional service business with a dated website but clear market demand may be interesting to a web designer.
This is where prospecting services for marketing agencies and freelancers can be useful. The goal is to narrow an enormous universe of businesses into a researched group that makes sense for the services you actually provide.
Spend more time pitching, less time searching
The hardest part of outreach often isn’t sending the email.
It’s everything you need to know before you send it.
Cloud Nine Clients was built by marketers for marketers, agencies, social media managers, designers, freelancers, and creatives who want a more proactive way to find new clients.
Instead of handing you a generic database, Cloud Nine Clients researches businesses through a marketer’s lens to identify businesses worth pitching, the appropriate decision-makers, contact information, and relevant opportunities for your services.
If you want to handle outreach yourself, Cloud Nine Clients can build the researched list for you.
If you’d rather have the process taken further, personalized outreach and follow-up are available too.
Because knowing who to email is useful.
Knowing why you’re emailing them is a lot more useful.
Ready to stop starting from scratch every time you need a new client? Find businesses worth pitching with Cloud Nine Clients.