Grow your digital agency through one logical process of getting a client’s attention.

Content

1. Who are the companies with money that can afford you?
2. A simple email that begins the process to convert them into buyers.
3. How you find them and their emails to begin the process.

1. Who are the companies with money that can afford you?

If I was to buy a new domain name right now, I would get about 20 emails in the next month with agencies offering services.

I don’t know if that works for others but we ignore them because they’re generic.

A better way?

A better way is to find companies who have money is by looking at whether they use a technology that is relatively expensive.

Focus on companies using a certain technology

Where do you find 100,000+ companies with money?

We also send our marketing emails and it's a struggle to know who has the budget for our products.

Then we had a thought.

We use Intercom live chat across 2 companies. We pay $1,000 / month for it. Any company paying $1,000 / month for live chat systems must have sufficient budget for other services.

There, at the time of writing, 20,000 Intercom paying customers. There are also 70,000 total installs meaning 50,000 more trialled it out or are still trialling it.

Intercom is not even the biggest live chat company. Some others have 100,000s of installs but we’ll focus on Intercom for now.

If a company uses intercom live chat, it means they have some sort of software or at least a website and therefore have design and / or development needs.

If you’re reading this you’re probably an Anymail finder user so you already know how to convert that data into emails.

That’s not a problem.

It’s the content of the email you first send to them which is the biggest problem.

2. A simple email process that would convert them into buyers

This is the process which, as an Intercom user, would convince us to buy agency services because:

1. It starts with small steps.
2. It’s relevant.
3. It builds trust and that’s the number one factor before money.

The process if you were say, a design agency.

Intercom is a live chat system that automatically sends out emails to a company’s users. It has a default design for its emails.

Those email templates are completely plain and while we could make them look nice, we go with the default.

Here is the process to convince us to buy design agency services:

1. You send us an email saying you have free Intercom email design templates that would increase our sales.
2. We open it and the design looks good, so we sign up to download it and use it.
3. You have our email and over weeks you send us more information related to Intercom and design or whatever. You get the picture. Don’t sell, just educate us.
4. You tell us that you’re a design agency and your services cost X and you get things done in Y time. Maybe you pitch a small job at first.
5. At this point we know you’re good so we or X out of 1,000 of the other Intercom customers you’ve contacted, take up your services.
6. You do a great job.
7. We fall in love with you.
8. We contact you when we have other design jobs or you pitch to us. I don’t know how it works but at this point we love you so who cares!

As I said, there are 20,000 paying intercom customers and it’s growing. There are probably a million other live chat customers using other live chat services out there and they are growing. Not all do auto emails but some do or they have integrations and then that’s another market.

What if you’re a web dev company?

Do the same thing but maybe build an extension that helps live chat people. A simple dumbass one like turning off the pinging noise (I saw that the other day).

Email people and tell them about that extension or that service.

We install that free extension and give you our email.

Over months, you tell us about the cool updates you’re doing to it or other things you’re building.

You then tell us that you do dev work for other companies and have built X apps in X time. We trust you because we’ve used your extension.

3. How do you find them and their emails to begin the process?

How do you find all the companies that use live chat? How do you find all the companies that use just Intercom?

Websites like Builtwith.com, Nerdydata.com, Publicwww.com and more, all can tell you which domains have Intercom and other live chat tools installed.

Builtwith is the oldest and is expensive but you can start with publicwww.com. It’s free to sign up and do searches and download 100s of rows of data.

As you already know, you can upload that file to Anymail finder to get emails.

Begin the process. If you don’t have any Intercom email designs at present, just email companies and ask them if they might be interested before you even make them. I don’t know what response you’d get but it’s a good conversation to test out. I’d certainly be interested in signing up to get free email template designs for Intercom.

We’re also going through this.

We’ve used tools like Builtwith and sent tech based emails for our cobrowsing service Upscope.

It works even when the emails are simple, although that’s because Upscope is a screen sharing add-on for live chat tools like Intercom. I guess with agencies it requires a different approach and is a longer process.

We might not be an agency but we can offer a recipients perspective, I hope you liked it.

Related: Another way to get people’s attention is either via social signals or a crazy hack involving who they follow on twitter. See more by reading about the best email subject lines.