Every investor’s inbox is full of founders asking for twenty minutes. Most of those emails look the same: a paragraph about the company, a line about the round, a deck attached and a polite request for a call. Most of them go unanswered.
That’s not because the companies are bad. It’s because the email gives the investor no reason to reply today rather than never.
This is the story of how we helped Sierra Medical secure three new investors from a list of 70 US organisations, with a 19% reply rate, by changing one thing about how the emails were written. And it’s a practical guide to doing the same, whether you’re raising money or trying to open doors with partners.
The problem: a new market and no one to run it
Sierra Medical is a UK healthtech company working to change how medical diagnostics are done. It’s building a generalised model, using spectroscopy, that streamlines laboratories and delivers fast, affordable and accurate screening tests.
It was ready to expand into the US, and that meant three things at once: finding investors there, keeping existing stakeholders informed, and looking credible on social media, where its previous provider simply wasn’t cutting it.
What it didn’t have was the means to do any of that. There was no outreach infrastructure, no marketing resource, and no in-house know-how for breaking into a new market. Understandably, the team felt overwhelmed by the complexity of it all.
That’s a common position for an early-stage company. The founders are deep in the product, the science and the fundraising itself. Building a proper outreach programme on top of that is one job too many.
What we found
When we looked at the task, the hardest part wasn’t finding investors. Lists of healthtech funds aren’t a secret. The hard part was getting the right people at those funds to reply.
Cold outreach has a well-known problem. The industry average reply rate for cold outreach sits at around 3–5%. That means for every hundred people you email, ninety-five or more say nothing at all.
With a focused list of 70 organisations, that maths doesn’t work. A 3% reply rate would mean two conversations, and possibly none with the people who matter. We needed something that gave each investor a genuine reason to respond.
What we did
1. Kept the list short and specific
We targeted 70 high-value healthtech investor organisations across the US. Not hundreds, not every fund that has ever backed a health company, but organisations where Sierra Medical’s work was a real fit.
A short list sounds like a limitation. It’s actually an advantage. When every name on the list matters, you write more carefully, and the people reading can tell.
2. Tied every sequence to a real event
This was the change that made the difference. Rather than sending cold, generic emails, we tied every sequence to a key industry event happening in the US.
Events give an email something most cold outreach lacks: a reason to reply now. “We’ll be at this event, would you like to meet?” is a far easier question to say yes to than “can we have a call sometime?” It has a date, a place and a natural end point. The investor is often going anyway, so meeting costs them very little.
It also changes the tone. An email about a shared event reads like a note from someone in the same industry, not a request from a stranger.
3. Automated the sending, not the thinking
We built and launched the campaign in lemlist, an outreach platform that sends personal-looking sequences and follow-ups automatically. That gave a team with no marketing resource a proper outreach programme without someone having to send and chase every email by hand.
The automation handled the timing and the follow-ups. The thinking, who to contact, why and around which moment, was done up front.
4. Made sure there was something credible to find
Investors who get an interesting email do one thing before they reply: they look you up. So alongside the outreach, we restructured Sierra Medical’s stakeholder communications and took over its social media.
We designed a consistent, recognisable content style, built around data-led posts on the scale of the problem, thought leadership from the team, and announcements such as new advisory panel members. Social engagement rose by 64%. When investors went looking, they found a credible, active company.
What happened
The results spoke for themselves:
- 3 new investors secured through the outreach
- A 40% open rate, from a highly engaged investor audience
- A 19% reply rate, against an industry cold outreach average of 3–5%
- Social engagement up 64% once we took over social media and content
As Sierra Medical’s CEO, Liberty Foreman, put it: “I trusted my gut engaging with the Darwin team, and it paid off.”
Why it works
An event turns a cold email into a timely one. It answers the question every busy reader silently asks: why should I deal with this now? Without an answer, the email goes on the “later” pile, and later rarely comes.
It also lowers the cost of saying yes. A meeting at an event the investor is already attending is a coffee, not a commitment. Once you’re talking face to face, the conversation can go wherever it needs to.
And the supporting work matters more than people expect. A strong email that leads to a quiet LinkedIn page and an out-of-date website undoes itself. Outreach and credibility work as a pair.
How to plan your own event-led outreach
Whether you’re raising a round, looking for distribution partners or trying to reach buyers in a new market, here’s where we’d start.
- Build a short, honest list. Choose the organisations where you’re a genuine fit, and stop there. Seventy good names will beat seven hundred loose ones.
- Map the events they attend. Look at the conferences, trade shows and industry gatherings in your target market over the next few months. Note which ones your list is likely to be at.
- Give every sequence a moment. Anchor each email to a specific event, with a specific ask: a short meeting while you’re both there. If there’s no event, find another timely hook, such as news in their portfolio or a change in the market.
- Keep the first email short. Who you are, why them, why now and one clear question. Leave the deck for later.
- Plan the follow-ups in advance. Plenty of replies come after a follow-up rather than the first email. Write two or three polite, useful follow-ups before you send anything, and let your outreach tool time them.
- Get your shop window in order. Before the first email goes out, check what someone finds when they search for you. Post regularly, share real progress and make your website explain what you do in plain words.
- Keep stakeholders in the loop. Existing investors, advisers and partners can open doors too. Regular updates keep them engaged, and our piece on why your newsletter shouldn’t be a PDF attachment covers how to make those updates easy to read.
- Measure replies and meetings, not opens. Opens tell you the subject line worked. Replies and meetings tell you the campaign did.
A few things to avoid
- Don’t send the same email to everyone. If the message would work for any company and any investor, it won’t work for yours.
- Don’t attach a deck to the first email. Earn the conversation first.
- Don’t automate before you’ve thought it through. A tool makes a good campaign efficient. It makes a bad one fail faster.
- Don’t ignore the replies that say “not now”. A polite no today can be a warm introduction next year.
A last word
Good outreach isn’t about volume. It’s about giving the right people a good reason to talk to you, at a moment when it’s easy for them to say yes.
If you’d like help planning outreach like this, it’s part of how we help businesses reach the buyers and investors they’re after. And if you work in health, you can see more of how we support healthcare and healthtech organisations.
