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Welcome to Episode 296 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• These emails help prospects love MSPs: It’s critical to have a series of good emails to send to prospects who are looking at your MSP for the first time. Early engagement is key for email deliverability and not being labelled as unsolicited spam.


• A simple way to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn: Here’s a tried and tested LinkedIn hack to connect with the right people on LinkedIn. Remember, both decision makers and influencers are important contacts.


• Smart ideas to sell more to your MSP’s existing clients: Selling more to existing clients is the big opportunity and my guest tells you how to do it and how it can generate more delicious profit for your MSP.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you upload PDFs to your LinkedIn personal profile? You should, the algorithm loves it. Here’s how…

These emails help prospects love MSPs

It’s a huge struggle. A lot of MSPs looking to grow, struggle to do effective data capture from their website, and this is an important way to build up your database of prospects. But it’s not just about getting them to fill in the form in the first place, that’s just the start of the process, the real question to ask yourself is: What do I then send them?

Let me tell you some of the perfect emails to send to new prospects looking at your MSP for the first time.

So tell me, do you have some form of data capture on your website? You really should. The most basic data capture is asking people to sign up for your email newsletter, which actually very few people will. A better form is to offer them something known as a lead magnet, also known as an ethical bribe, which is where you give them something in return for their email address. And this might be a guide, like a cyber security guide. Although the 2025 version of data capture that’s working really well right now is to do an interactive quiz and you allow them to build a scorecard for something. Again, something like their cyber security score would be a great way of doing that. But the data capture itself is only the start of the process.

What’s critical is to have a series of good emails to send new prospects, because you can make an assumption that they may be looking for a new MSP in the future.

And you need to send them content that’s going to influence them to pick you and not another MSP. So let me give you some examples, starting with the very first email you send to them. And the goal with this first email is to get them engaged with your content and either get them to click something on the email or hit reply. Why? For email deliverability. Because that sends a very clear message to their email agent that they are interested in your content and they don’t just see you as unsolicited spam.

I do this with the first email in my sequence. I introduced myself and then I ask the MSP who’s reading that email to hit reply and tell me which marketing problem they’re suffering with right now. And we do get a pretty good reply rate to that. Of course, I make sure I answer every single person who replies. I do that personally, which in itself is good for engagement. It’s good for showing there’s a real human at the other end who’s listening. And of course it’s good for email deliverability. So I would definitely do that with your first email.

Here’s what you could do in some of the other emails that you send out to people when they first join your list. You could send them some social proof, testimonials, reviews, case studies. People love seeing other people like them and what they’re doing. That’s what makes social proof so powerful. Now, this could be as simple as sending them to a page on your website where your latest reviews are, or if you don’t have that page on your site, just send them off to your live Google Reviews page.

Another email you send out could be educational. It could tell them about the biggest cyber security mistakes that businesses make these days. In fact, wouldn’t it be amazing if you put together a two minute video which you presented yourself? It doesn’t have to be slick and Hollywood. It could just be you talking into your phone telling them the biggest problems that you and your team see that cause the most pain for the businesses you look after. The kind of prospect that would actually watch a video like that is someone who’s going to be likely switching MSPs in the future. So that’s a very powerful piece of marketing to do.

Some other emails you can do is to ask them what technology questions they have. Perhaps even ask them what technology they’re running right now, what are they running their computers on? And anyone that replies with Windows 10 or XP, yep, there’s going to be a follow-up phone call there. But whatever you do with this, make it super simple for them. Let them just hit reply and ask you any question and you’ll answer. And do expect to only get a tiny number of people emailing back, but those that do are your highest engaged prospects.

You can also tell them about your service. Never be afraid to mention what you do or at the very least send them to a page that explains it. And of course, at some point, don’t forget to invite them to join other audiences that you have, such as connecting to you on LinkedIn, YouTube, or other places where you post content.

Now I’ve got one final piece of advice for you on this, and that’s to obsessively join other people’s newsletters. And no, I don’t mean other MSPs. You can be more original than that. Look outside of the tech world for inspiration. If you come across someone’s website and you think it’s great, regardless of what industry they’re in, but assuming it’s B2B, then enter your email address and join their list. And it’s always a smart idea to do research on what other businesses whose marketing you admire are doing. I do this all the time. I’m subscribed to hundreds of newsletters and at least once a week I’ll get an email from something completely unrelated to what you and I do, but it gives me an idea to improve my own emails.

Improving your marketing is an activity that never ends, right? Hey, do you want to join my email list because I spend a lot of time making sure my marketing is as good as it can be. And if that inspires you with your marketing, that would be great. All you have to do is go to my website, mspmarketingedge.com, and my lead magnet I’m giving away is a free magazine. So go into the navigation, look for magazine, and that’s how you can join my email list.

A simple way to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn

There are two ways to grow your MSP. Of course, you need to get more new clients, but you should also be selling more to your existing clients. In fact, it’s that second task that generates increased profit because when you have an existing relationship with a client, there’s very little marketing cost and very little cost of sale. All of the gross profit margin drops down to the bottom line. My special guest today is an expert at helping MSPs sell more to existing clients and he’s going to be here in the next few minutes. What about this? To find new clients for your MSP, you head to LinkedIn and you find someone who could make a good client down the line. You make a connection request and then you wait and wait and wait for them to accept, but they ignore you. So you send them an InMail and they ignore you again. Nothing nada.

Thankfully, there is a tried and tested technique to get connected to the senior decision makers that ignore you like this, and to get a conversation going. Let’s find out why it’s such an issue in the first place, what the fix is and how to help you fall in love with LinkedIn all over again. You’ll love this idea. It’s smart, but simple and easy to implement. And I’m not claiming it as my own idea either. It was suggested to me on a call by an MSP called Jason Johnson, so thank you so much, Jason. And it is as simple as this.

If you want to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn, then first connect to people lower down in their organisation.

Think about it from the point of view of the CEO or the big decision maker that you’re trying to reach. Let’s imagine they’re running a big business, they’ve got hundreds of employees, which is lots of seats for you, great. And they get LinkedIn connection requests all the time from strangers that they don’t know because those strangers all want a piece of their business.

So they tend to ignore most of their connection requests. And then they get a connection request from you, and they can see that you are already connected to 10 other people who work for them in their business. So they’re much more likely to click that blue accept button without thinking about it. Smart, right?

This is a good time for me to remind you that in any buying decision made by bigger businesses, there are two sets of people involved. There are the decision makers and there are the influencers. So the CEO or whoever might give the actual yes or no, but before they do, they’ll ask their team what they think. And that team can include other senior staff, team leaders, rising superstars, and especially their executive assistant or their virtual assistant. Most MSPs focus all of their attention on the deci