Master the art of sending Twitter cold DMs at scale

Twitter DMs can be exceptionally powerful when done right. We’ve seen DMs be an excellent growth/acquisition channel for multiple early stage companies.

Alright, so how do we start sending 100s of twitter DMs at scale?

Pause - this is not where you actually should start.

This is in fact the biggest mistake folks make with cold outreach - not just on twitter but across social platforms. They focus too much on “how do I send X DMs per day” and too little on “what do I actually send” and on “whom do I need to be sending to”.

Sending 100s of DMs per day isn’t hard. Fortunately, you don’t have to solve that because there are awesome sending and automation tools. The hardest part of all of this is figuring out who the target audience is, where they are, and what message they will respond to.

Let’s go master the art of sending Twitter DMs at scale!

Goal setting

Define your goals.

What do you want to achieve from this effort - schedule user interviews/get product signups/book meetings? What is your product or service? How can you simplify the core value prop in a single sentence or three crisp bullet points?

Ideal customer profile

Understand who you need to reach out to. Be specific. Create a spreadsheet or write your ICPs on the nearest whiteboard available. Write every single detail you possess at the moment about 3-5 prospects you know. Just write it down manually. This exercise will help you develop a mind map that will keep you in check at every interaction with your prospect.

Who is it? Why are they on twitter? How many followers do they have? What kind of content do they like to consume? What are some of the probable interests? Are there any patterns? Any keywords in bio to take note of - “founder”, “indiehacker”, “product manager”, “SDR”, etc.?

And again - you don’t need to have all the answers right now. If you have, you’re ahead of a lot of people. If not, don’t worry and start with what you have. You’d still be ahead of those who never make the first move.

Let me tell you where you stand at the moment.

Finding contacts at scale

Won’t talk about this at length here as we wrote an entire doc on this. Do give it a read.

TLDR;

Find where your prospects can be found: bulk of them can be found following a twitter account or engaging with a tweet (likes or replies). I like to call these

If you use

You can find followers of a twitter account or people who engaged with a tweet (liked/replied) and use them as leads in a few clicks.

Crafting the offer

Only two things matter:

You

Who are you? What credibility do you bring? Are you elonmusk99?

I won’t accept $1000 upfront from a guy named elonmusk99.

I might consider responding to someone whose twitter bio reads ‘2x Dad | Working on a revolutionary saas to help indiehackers reach their first 100 customers’. Anything that proves you’re a real human behind the message is good. Anything that establishes you a subject matter expert is dope.

Right twitter bio - good.

Right twitter bio with recent posts on insights about the industry - excellent.

Unlike cold emails - the prospect can get info about you in one click (bio is available right above the message)

Your offer

Your offer needs to be for my benefit. Hard selling/asking for a meeting/offering discounts can work but only for select niches at a low conversion. There are ways to improve conversion by using segmentation, i.e. tailoring the message as per pain points of the specific set of audience. Striking relationships/providing value is something that can be blindly trusted to outperform everything in the long run - no matter who the prospect is.

Crafting the DM

The best DMs are the ones written solely for the target. The likelihood of receiving a response increases by many folds if it's a warm prospect (i.e. you engaged with it recently over twitter or irl).

Appreciate in public. Engage with their content. Show some interest in their day to day and you suddenly have a new blossoming relationship.

Personalization

Dead simple. You personalize - you win. It does not end at including {{first_name}} in the greeting. Ideally, you research well about the prospects’ role/company/problem and send a message solely written for it. Sure this is time-consuming. You need to strike the right balance for your use case.

Segmentation

Personalization to the roots is expensive. Segmentation is the solution here. While you run campaigns manually for a few prospects - you realize a certain subset ends up receiving a very similar message - same problem set, same solution for instance. Actionables? Prepare different set of messages for different clusters of prospects. For instance, coffee shops in Florida, with a similar revenue bracket are likely to be facing similar set of problems - so identify that you can reach out to all the prospects in the segment with the same message and yet sound well-researched.

Referral/common grounds

Goes without saying - If you have a mutual connection to share or went to the same school - mention it.

{{firstName}} - {{mutualConnectionName}} suggested we should talk. I’m working on a service [your service or offer] - can i share more details?

No ask/low friction ask

Always possess a give-first attitude. In a world where everyone’s looking to profit off you - a giving attitude sets you apart. Asking for a 45-minute meeting straight off the first message from a stranger will not work. Instead, make it super low friction for the prospect to respond to you. If you’re just starting up, consider offering a small fraction of the service on a pro-bono basis in exchange for a testimonial.

Talk numbers

Numbers can dramatically increase the weight of any piece of writing. They not only add credibility but also make your claims more tangible and believable. There's a night and day difference in conveying what impact you could bring to a business with and without numbers.

But be careful and honest.

Social Proof

You helped my competitor 2x month on month for 4 months straight? Take my money!

That’s how powerful social proofs can be!

If you’re just starting out and you don’t have case studies or testimonials that you can talk about, go ahead and sell yourself (yes!). Tie your credibility to the business. Share your credentials, purpose and track record.

“Previously, I led a product team at X that impacted 50 million MAUs.” If that’s not possible either, you can talk about how the prospect’s competitors are successfully deploying what you’re proposing to race to success.

You can also mention how an industry has evolved over the last few months to make it for it to be the best thing to happen right now.

Clear Call to action

Love this one. Very easily forgotten. You explain everything about your product or service nicely but leave the prospect guessing on what to do next. Understand everyone’s too lazy to take action until asked.

Two well-thought offers - CTA can be the difference between being ghosted versus receiving a reply (positive/negative). This is usually the first thing you’d want to look at if you’re having a terrible run with reply rates.

Using Spintax

If the target account does not follow you - you’ll land up in its ‘Message Requests’ section. If twitter identifies you as a spammer (maybe with good intentions), you’d find yourself landing in ‘other’ messages section. That’s two clicks away and attached to a red flag - good luck with the reply rates!

Solution? While we don’t have the right answer here since its ultimately Twitter algo’s call - what we’ve observed processing hundreds of thousands of messages is - varying the message can save you here. We believe twitter is the most fanatic with messages that violate twitter rules -

If you’re using cold dm - use {optionA| optionB| optionC}

Overall structure

We built a crowdsourced library of twitter DMs

Not saying it has the greatest DMs - it’s all put by the community - it’s as good as the community likes it to be - you can contribute and make it a more valuable asset.

Automation

Once you’ve run a couple of tests manually - it might be time to see how this thing will perform at scale.

ColdDM

Step 1

Creating a Message template

Go to

Step 2

Create a contact list. We have a doc that talks about creative ways of creating some really effective ones

Ton of filters to create a really targetted list suited to your business!

Go to

Step 3

Create a campaign. Select what message you’d like to send to what set of people. You can also specify how many contacts you’d like to send in a day.

Step 4

Track results. You also get a little CRM to mark leads as interested/not interested. Replies are synced at regular intervals.

You can also engage with the leads (multiple at once) without leaving colddm using

Hope you found this useful. Happy ColdDMing!

P.s. Send us a Cold DM at @joincolddm for a little discount code ;)