The knack to getting responses from the people you’re targeting with cold outreach is quite straightforward. Even though its virtually guaranteed that you won’t know your prospects, your approach to them has to seem like its anything but cold.
Achieved through Personalization, this is where, after completing some research on the prospects and their needs, you include material that is specific to each recipient.
Various online “goo-roos” will say go the whole hog on a prospect and find everything you can on them - but that’s too much information for our freelancing efforts; we don't need to know what they did yesterday. Only the information that will help you land the job or work that’s offered.
What we can do is tailor our cold outreach so that it bypasses the prospect's BS filter, which will be finely tuned to disregard any standard email or communication asking for work.
Going one step further than your prospect, the very existence of the spam filter is to detect mass, generic emails and send them to the death trap that is the spam/junk folder. But because you’re personalizing your email (or communication via respective medium) and making it unique, you won't get shot down by said filters (human or otherwise).
The guides, databases, and resources listed below make finding and saving the information needed for personalization simple:
What Personalization info can be used and where to find it
Personalization Research Tools
It goes without saying that finding work should be at the top of your priority list as a freelancer (well, who else is going to do it for you?). And 'Hire Me, Pay Me' is, without a doubt, the primary motivation driving any freelancers cold outreach.
Incorporate the info acquired via personalization correctly in your own outreach, and just as you learned how to hack lead generation with Fuelance, you can hack interaction with prospects.