What Makes a Good Cold Email?
In the right hands, cold email is one of history’s greatest sales channels. When has a channel existed that lets you both target any potential customer in the world and sell to them for free?
Cold email harnesses the zero marginal cost of software to create a massive asymmetric upside. An email costs nothing to send but can result in billions of dollars of pipeline.
Unfortunately for most, their cold email not only isn’t generating them deals, but going unanswered, or worse, ending up in spam. Changing this requires you to rework how you think of cold email.
The paradox of cold email
With cold email, you can send anything to anyone at any time. Adding another recipient to an email you’ve already written costs nothing—which might encourage you to blast the same email to as many people as possible.
The paradox of cold email is that this idea is exactly the opposite of the one you need to succeed. Although cold email can be a one-to-many channel, you must treat it like it’s a one-to-one (no matter how many people you email).
Why? Because cold email that stands out and gets replies makes its recipients feel like they are the single focus of that email. Not like they were sent a template that 1,000 other people got.
Why do cold emails go unanswered?
Treating cold email as a one-to-many channel leads to three key problems with your emails:
They aren’t targeted well. This could mean they aren’t relevant to the receiver, timed wrong, or are selling something the receiver doesn’t need.
They don’t land in the inbox. This is a symptom of bad targeting, which lowers your sender reputation, and gets you classified as non-primary or spam.
They aren’t well written. Unsuccessful cold emails focus on the sender rather than the receiver. It doesn’t deliver value fast enough to warrant immediate action and ends up ignored.
Each of these builds on each other and makes it more likely your cold email goes unanswered. Behind each of them is the fact that your recipients can tell when you’re treating them like one of many.
Think of it from their perspective. Outside of cold emails, email is most often a one-to-one channel. Breaking this pattern is a massive red flag. Sending them an unpersonalized, low-effort email makes it easy for them to ignore you.
A framework for fixing your cold emailing
The key to getting your emails answered is to realize there is no such thing as a universal cold email. Your emails must feel uniquely tailored to your recipient. To help you do that, I’ve put together the following is a framework.
1. Move from persona-based to pain-based targeting
Good cold emails target the right people. They are more relevant to the receiver and land in the primary inbox more often.
To find the right targets, search for people with a pain you can solve, rather than a persona. For example, instead of targeting enterprise retail CTOs, target CTOs spending too much on inventory management infrastructure. Sources for these targets from industry news, your personal network, or company content about spend management.
Using pain-based targeting helps you make your value clear and ensures your timing is right. It enables you to personalize your email to what the recipient is thinking about rather than their surface identity.
2. Use smart personalization
The best personalization brings value to the recipient. For example, it provides industry-specific information or helps them prioritize their problems. This could include relevant research, survey results, benchmarks, or even feedback.
It may tempt you to use personalization automation, such as sending a college slogan like “Go Gators.” Those seeing a lot of cold emails will recognize this as an attention hack and send your email to the garbage.
3. Give your recipient superpowers
The ideal cold email is a bit like a miracle. The recipient has a problem, and out of nowhere, you provide a specific solution to solve it.
To make this clear, you should treat your solution like a superpower. Helping your recipient visualize their powers both gets their attention and inspires them to action. When both of these happen, you are more likely to get a response.
4. Proactively handle objections
Recipients are armed with objections they use to write off your email. You need to both know what the most common and relevant objectives are, and how what you offer can support it.
For example, if you find recipients fail to convert because of cost, make the value calculations clear to them or subtly compare your pricing to your competitors. You can discover these by surveying customers about their objections, listing them by severity, and then addressing the top one or two.
5. Keep your structure simple
Email is a unique medium, and you treat it like other written mediums. Most importantly, you need to keep your content simple. People scan emails and when they don’t catch their attention, they trash them.
All the previous parts need to fit into some combination of these four sections:
Hook: Ask a question, address a pain point, or demonstrate clear value.
Why: Show your recipient you value what they value.
Objection handle: Answer the 1-2 most important objections.
CTA: Pick one like scheduling a phone call or booking a demo. Make it yes or no.
Each section should get your point across in 1-2 sentences. Going beyond this makes it increasingly likely your recipient ignores everything you’re trying to say.
Put into practice. To try this out, take the framework, apply it to your business, and then write emails for 50 of your prospects. Once done, go back and evaluate. Ask yourself “Is this an amazing cold email for this person?” If not, what part of the framework does it fail at? Knowing the specific areas that you are failing at helps you target them for improvement.
Cold email is more than copying and pasting
Many who write about cold emails make you think all you must do is copy and paste their template to succeed. The reality of successful cold email is the opposite of this.
Doing the work to understand your recipient and personalize your email enables you to tap into its massive potential. The framework helps with this, but it is entirely up to you to implement.
Want more help with how this would look for you? Connect with our team and let’s start the conversation.
