The Anatomy Of A Perfect Cold Email

Love it or hate it, Cold Email can be effective.

But most of us are terrible at creating interesting looking emails that first get opened, then read, and then replied to.

So, let’s break down what I believe to be a great template for starting the conversation to sell almost anything over cold email.

The perfect cold email is just a recipe.

It has 5 ingredients:

• Subject line
• Compliment
• Case Study
• Call To Action
• Signature

Let’s see what an example email looks like, then we’ll dissect each part.

Subject: Quick Question

Body: Hi Joe,

I’ve been following what you’re doing at Acme Corp, and love the way you’re showcasing industry experts on Big Corp Podcast. Has to be doing wonders for your brand and inbound traffic.

I specialize in helping busy podcasters book more amazing guests for their shows. Recently I helped Emily from the Sales Insights podcast to book 20 guests from the NYT bestsellers list. This drove more than 50k downloads for her show.

Is this interesting to you? Let me know and I can send over a few times to chat.

Thanks,

Craig | Founder – Castos

123 Main Street, Metropolis, USA

craig@castos.com

Short and sweet, and instantly someone who’s reading this knows what you’re talking about, and if it’s for them.

I like this formula because there’s nothing sneaky or devious about it. It takes a bit of personalization, but not so much that you’d spend hours creating each email, and should get very good response rates.

I’m sending a campaign like this now and am getting 60% open rates, 10% response rates, and 3% bookings from it. Just as a benchmark.

Ok, let’s dive into the pieces of each part of the email.

Subject Line

This is easy. Just use “Quick Question” to start with.

From there you can split test something that has personalization to it, but Quick Question has been proven over and over to be a winner across almost all applications and categories.

If you’re going to start testing personalized subject lines, here are a few options:

• {{first_name}}, quick question
• Question about {{company_name}}
• {{verb}} at {{company_name}}
• {{first_name}}

Like a lot of things, the testing will prove out whether you will win with a personalized subject line, but start with Quick Question, and after you’ve sent 1000 emails then get fancy.

Compliment

Everyone loves hearing nice things, especially from a stranger.

This part by far takes the most time, and is NOT something you can templatize or farm out to AI. You have to do the work, be interested and curious about your prospective customer.

Do the research and find out what’s going on in their world lately.

Social media is perfect for this. See what someone’s been talking about, dive in and find the “Why” behind it, and there’s your Compliment.

Added bonus of a compliment is this is what shows up in the message preview in email clients like Gmail. If you see an email from someone that you don’t know and it looks like a nice message, you’re probably going to open it.

Case Study

This is where you both show social proof, and define the value prop.

In this example we said:

“I specialize in helping busy podcasters book more amazing guests for their shows. Recently I helped Emily from the Sales Insights podcast to book 20 guests from the NYT bestsellers list. This drove more than 50k downloads for her show.”

First I laid out what we do. Your prospective customer can immediately say “Nope, not for me”, or “ooh, interesting, I’ll give them another 10 seconds of my time”.

Then we gave some social proof of a real life example of our work from an actual case study, just consolidated down from a few pages to a few words. If you don’t have this yet, go get one first.

Then (and most importantly for me) is the So What. Nobody cares about booking guests for their podcast, in this example, they care about the outcome.

Here are a few other example Case Study scripts you could consider:

• “I help iOS app developers get more post A-series startup clients. Recently helped Dave from MacVentures land a Fortune 100 company with a $80k/mo retainer.”
• “I help businesses dominate their niche on YouTube. We recently launched a new channel for Bob’s Bagels in Roanoke and the first 5 videos got a combined 10M views, bringing in an extra 5000 customers over labor day weekend”
• “I help non-denominational churches increase their online presence. Recently helped Ascension Worldwide to launch a virtual meeting hall that added 5,000 new members to their congregation, resulting in $5M in pledges”

You get the idea.

The formula here is:

I {{your value prop}} with {{target audience}} to {{expected outcome}} resulting in {{what it means to them}}

The compliment has to be relevant, aligned with their industry, goals, geography (if applicable), show a meaningful outcome, and an impact on the top or bottom line.

Call To Action

Now that you’ve told them who you are and what you can do for their business, it’s time to see if they’re interested.

Remember, the entire goal of a cold email is to get a response. From there you can worry about booking a call.

So the message here is just: “Interested, let me know” essentially.

You don’t want to include a calendar link here, because that puts too much responsibility on their plate. Instead, it should be a Yes or No question.

Email Signature

Not terribly complicated here, but you need to have a nice looking signature to your email. It should include all the information that someone should need to know more about you.

I like to include the following fields:

• My name and title
• Mailing address
• Phone number – this can be a Google Voice number or your real cell phone if you’re hardcore
• Email address

I would NOT include my profile picture. Cold email, especially in the first message discourages links or pictures as they’re a sign of spam to the email gods. So leave it just plain text. No formatting at all.

Get Started

I’ve shunned cold email for a long time, but truth be told if you do it right there are really good results that can be had from very targeted, highly personalized cold outreach to your perfect fit customers.

Instead of only relying on Inbound, (and I emphasize the “only” part here cause I’m still a HUGE believer in content marketing), adding a bit of proactive outbound to your mix is a good idea.

Lots more to cover on the topic of outbound prospecting, and I’ll share what I’m learning as we’re growing our campaigns over time.