How To Create An Evergreen Cold Email Campaign

Most people launch static one-time cold email campaigns.

The problem with static one-time campaigns is that you need to constantly find new leads.

Fortunately, there is a better way: introducing "evergreen campaigns".

An evergreen campaign has fresh leads added each week automatically, meaning that you only need to launch the campaign once, and it will add new leads on autopilot, on a recurring basis.

In this article, I show you how to create an evergreen campaign:

1. Identify your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
2. Find a recurring event that your ICP performs
3. Extract lead each time the event occurs
4. Add lead to a Google spreadsheet
5. Connect your Google spreadsheet to a campaign
6. Launch campaign

1. Identify your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

The first step is to identify who your ideal customer is.

Most people make the mistake of thinking that just because a lead is in a particular industry or location, that it qualifies as their ICP.

This is not correct.

For example, if I am launching a cold email campaign for Emailchaser, with the goal of getting new customers for Emailchaser, then a generic business owner is NOT my ICP.

My ICP is someone that already uses cold email software.

If I send emails to generic business owners, then I will have a very low response rate since most business owners don’t even know what cold email is. This will then result in my email accounts getting blacklisted by ESPs like Gmail and Outlook, and all of my emails will go to spam.

The only way to have a high positive response rate, and avoid getting your email accounts blacklisted, is by targeting your ideal customer type.

2. Find a recurring event that your ICP performs

Now that you know what your ICP is, you need to find a recurring event/action that people in your ICP perform each week.

In order for your cold email campaign to be "evergreen", it needs new leads added each week.

It’s important to understand that just because an event is recurring, doesn’t mean that the lead is relevant. The recurring event needs to imply that the lead needs your product or service. The recurring event can be an action that the lead performs, or an event that occurs that impacts the lead which causes them to need your product or service.

Below are some examples of relevant recurring events:

- People using your competitors’ products
I have an evergreen campaign that involves extracting leads from our competitors’ warm up pools. Every time someone signs up for one of our competitors’ products and adds their email accounts to their warm up pools, our scraper extracts these email accounts, and then we are able to identify the owner of each company, find their email address, and then add them to our evergreen campaign, all on autopilot. You can also use a tool like BuiltWith to find companies that use your competitors' products.

- Liking/commenting on LinkedIn posts
There are tools like Phantombuster which allow you to extract people that like or comment on LinkedIn posts. Each time someone likes or comments on one of your competitors’ LinkedIn posts, you can automatically extract them, find their email, and add them to your evergreen campaign.

- New projects
If your ideal customer type launches new projects on a recurring basis, then you can build a custom scraper to automatically extract details of each new project, and then contact them in an evergreen campaign. For example, if you are a company that sells services or products to construction companies, then you can find somewhere online that lists every time a construction company starts building a new development, and you can then contact them. This YouTube video shows a real campaign built around this idea.

- Job postings
If you are a recruitment agency, and you help companies find talent, then you can build a custom scraper that extracts details from all new job posts made on LinkedIn Jobs, and then add the hiring manager or company owner to your evergreen campaign. This YouTube video shows a campaign built using this strategy.

- Podcast/interview/speaking appearances
If your ICP is a founder that appears on podcasts or speaks at events, then you can build a scraper that extracts all guests each week from the top 300 podcasts, and then add them to your evergreen campaign. This YouTube video shows this strategy being used.

- Newly formed companies / raised capital
There are tools that notify you each time someone leaves their job to start a new company. These tools can also notify you when someone raises capital for their startup. This website notifies you of these events.

3. Extract lead each time the event occurs

Once the recurring event occurs, you need to automatically extract the lead.

There are different ways to do this, and the right answer depends on your specific situation.

There are some pre-built tools that you can use to do this.

However, in most situations, you’ll need to hire a developer from Fiverr or Upwork to build a custom web scraper.

I've used this company to build custom scrapers for my cold email campaigns (highly recommened).

You can hire a low cost developer to do this for less than a couple hundred dollars. It doesn’t need to be expensive.

4. Add lead to a Google spreadsheet

Once you have extracted the data from the recurring event, you can add it to a Google spreadsheet.

For example, in the above-mentioned Emailchaser campaign, I hired a developer to build a custom scraper that automatically extracts all new email accounts that are added to our competitors’ warm up pools each week. This allows us to find all companies (websites) that are using our competitors’ warm up products.

These companies (websites) are added automatically to our Google spreadsheet.

We then hire a low cost virtual assistant from OnlineJobs.ph to find the email address and LinkedIn profile of the owner of each business; all of this information is added to our Google spreadsheet.

You can also use various online tools to enrich this data, but I usually prefer hiring a real person as it’s more accurate and you can add more flexibility to your execution method.

5. Connect your Google spreadsheet to a campaign

Now you need to connect your Google spreadsheet to your campaign in Emailchaser.

Each time a new lead is added to your Google spreadsheet, it will automatically be added to your campaign.

Since you are extracting leads from recurring events, and these leads are being added to your Google spreadsheet automatically each week, your campaign is "evergreen".

6. Launch campaign

The final step is to launch your campaign.

Once launched, it will remain active forever, since new leads will be added on an ongoing basis.

You can control how often new leads are added.

Final thoughts

An evergreen campaign is the best type of cold email campaign.

It provides new leads for your business, on autopilot, forever.

Stop sending static campaigns, and instead, put in the work to set up the systems that allow you to launch an evergreen campaign.

If you want to learn more about cold email, then check out my article How To Write A Cold Email.