Looking for some suggestion and guides If anyone available to have a chat?
Hey everyone,
I’m a Shopify developer. Most of my client acquisition was through Upwork, and honestly, it was going pretty well for me. But recently I’ve started thinking that I shouldn’t depend on one platform for getting clients, so I’m trying to build my own outreach system.
I decided to give cold email a serious try.
So far, I’ve:
- Built a website for my Shopify development/CRO services
- Bought a domain and set up professional business emails through Zoho
- Started building a prospecting process
- My initial goal is just 5 good, personalized emails a day, rather than blasting hundreds of emails
- The idea is to reach Shopify/eCommerce store owners, do a quick audit of their website, point out actual issues/opportunities, and use that as a way to start a conversation
The problem is... I’m now getting stuck in the “which tools do I actually need?” stage 😂
I’ve been exploring Zoho Campaigns because it’s relatively cheap and gives me useful metrics like opens and engagement. But the troublesome thing is that it sends 1 email to as many as people you want in a go. Meanwhile I want to send 100 people 100 different emails.
I’ve also been looking at Apollo + Instantly, but I’m not sure whether I actually need that setup yet.
For example, Should I go with Zoho campaign and apollo? (but on Zoho I will have to make 5 different campaigns for 5 different contacts just in order to keep account of those emails)
Should I go with apollo and instantly? But they are bit expensive for me right now as I'm not trying to send 1000 emails a day
I also haven't properly explored the automation side of Zoho yet, so maybe I’m missing something there.
Basically, I’m trying to figure out a simple roadmap:
Find the right prospects → research their store → create a useful audit → send a personalized email → follow up → track replies → improve the process.
So, if anyone here has gone through something similar, especially developers/freelancers who moved from Upwork to their own outbound system, I’d really like to connect.
Would be great to have a few people who are also figuring this stuff out so we can share what’s working, what isn't, tools we’re testing, mistakes we're making, and hopefully help each other along the way.
And if you’ve already done this successfully, I’d especially appreciate hearing what you would do differently if you were starting from zero today.