Cold Emails; Short & Sweet
- Dan Greenberg
- Apr 16
- 5 min read
Cold Emails and messages waste your time; not because there is anything wrong with them, but because you give into laziness. I know this, because I do it too, all the time. We don’t focus our energy and write a truly thoughtful emails because it is easier to just copy and paste, or send by rote. That way we don’t have to engage our brains. But these copied and pasted messages lack relevance, and most of the time the client consciously or subconsciously will sniff out that it is copied and pasted, and disregard it. Just think about your inbox, how much time you devote to messages that are not crafted for you.
The goal of early cycle emails and messages is NOT to sell your product. The goal is to get your message noticed, build familiarity, and build association between yourself and what you solve. Your goal in subsequent messages is to inspire inbound signals, get a reply, or spark a thought process or conversation. Further down the road, your goal becomes to draw out more specific responses, and book meetings. Often this process will take some time to develop, but the key is to write emails that speak to these goals, NOT emails that try to sell your product.
Your subject line should be written in their terms. This is something that I talk about with my teams a lot and we have discussed it in this book and will continue to discuss. Communications with buyers have to be in their terms, not yours, if you want to have an impact. We tend to develop very niche languages, including descriptors and acronyms that help us define our brand, and product, and our differentiators. This is the job of good marketers because it is important to understand where you are truly the best, and truly relevant. The problem comes when we start to use those terms in our communications with clients. Clients don’t live and breathe our business, and they won’t even recognize many of the terms. Even if they can intellectually understand them, they just simply won’t put their brain through the mental exertion of defining them, and building them into the context of what they are trying to think about. Instead, they will just gloss over the term and ignore it.
Subject lines should be 3–5 words. They should be emotionally charged and they should describe the client’s problem in the client’s own terms. Your job is to describe their problem so well, that they would actually use your phrase to describe their issue internally. You will see some research that tells you that questions work well in subject lines, and they do compared to long or otherwise poorly written subject lines, but actually good research in well conducted A/B subject line testing studies suggests that statements outperform questions by a bit.
If your client is a consumer products brand and you are a packaging company you should understand your clients challenges with space limitations on grocery store shelves, and product freshness, and craft a subject line that that lets them know that you understand that there are tradeoffs and that solving one problem leads to the creation of larger issues in reference to the other problem. The subject should be written in the terms that they use to describe this tradeoff, your research should be able to give you a clue about that. Something along the lines of; “Great Packaging Preserves & Consolidates”, or “Preservation & Space Consolidation Combined!”. If I were actually a packaging seller, I am certain that the wording would be slightly different, but the idea is to use words that are used consistently by the client to define their problems. If they constantly think about consolidation of space for shelving, and they constantly worry about freshness preservation, then use those terms. Keep it short, keep it snappy, and keep it emotionally meaningful to their day to day.
Keep the email itself simple and short as well. Remember that you are not trying to sell your product. The goal of a cold email is to get noticed, and to improve recognition and association, and eventually to get a response. You should be making one point, and asking for one reaction, and you should be making it with simple language free of any terms of art or industry specific acronyms. As soon as you try to make more than one point or ask for more than one action, you will lose the reader.
There are many writers and even sales bloggers on LinkedIn and other sites who will talk about the F shaped email. This means that your first line is longer, and the subsequent lines get shorter. This is a good rule of thumb and the reason it works is because, as I have mentioned a few times in this blog, human beings are mentally lazy. This comes from our evolutionary need to limit exertion in order to save energy for the important things like hiding from lions. The way this plays itself out in this context is that people may start to read an email but they quickly decide that it is too long and start to skim. This means that they may start by reading horizontally, but then look for shortcuts and start skimming vertically. An F shaped email plays into this and allows you to get all of your major points across.
Your emails should be short. I mean, very short. They should be between 40 and 60 words. Remember that you are only making one point, and asking for one action, so if it is getting hard to keep it in that range, you should revisit the message you are trying to get across because you may be inadvertently trying to make too many points.
Let the client know that you have relevant information to share by referencing research or information that is relevant to the problem you are talking about.
Then comment on the business problem that you mentioned in your subject line, of course, using your client’s terms.
Then tie the problem to business impact. This helps illustrate to the client that you understand their business, while at the same time anchoring them to the impact of the issue.
Lastly, make sure there is a call to action that validates your message. The call to action can be an ask to respond by email, but it can also be something more simple like an invitation to view a website with more information about your insight, or an invitation to an event, or even an invitation to simply think about the problem in the context of your insight. The call to action does not have to be the perfect action to fit your cause because this is not the only message or call you will be making. You will always have other chances to ask for what you need, and if you don’t then they weren’t interested or were not the right client in the first place.
Lastly, add a P.S. Oftentimes in the rush to finish an email and move on, people skip to the P.S. and read that in lieu of other parts of the email. The P.S. is a way to stand out, and make a personal point without seeming pushy or awkward. They are easy to conceptualize and put into action, and they improve recognition and response rates.
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