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7 ways to level up your cold email copywriting using data

lemlist team

July 25, 2024

7 min. read

lemlist team

LAST UPDATED

March 7, 2024

READING TIME

7 min.

Let’s open with some interesting facts…

71% of business and marketing executives who exceeded their revenue goals had documented buyer personas.
Of the companies that missed their goals, only 26% of them used buyer personas.
Open rates can drop 25% when adding +13 words to your subject line.
15% of booking rates came from emails that mentioned prospects 6-10 times.
+50% of booking rates came from emails that had 120 words.
Click rates for emails with images are 42% higher CTR than those without.
Including too many emojis can lower your open rates by 13%.
Personalization can increase your open rates by 50%.

What is cold email copywriting?

Cold email copywriting is basically crafting persuasive and engaging messages for potential leads or clients who have no prior relationship with you.

You have to capture attention, build trust, and compel recipients to take a specific action: replying, booking a call, purchasing, etc.

It’s harder than it sounds.

As opposed to writing a traditional email to a friend, coworker, or boss, cold email copywriting requires you to create a genuine connection with a stranger in only a few words.

Also, your cold email is among dozens of messages that your prospects will be receiving daily.

So you have to stand out from the crowd and convince your prospects to take action without coming off as gimmicky or sales-y.

It’s a fine line to walk.

That’s why we’ve analyzed the data from millions of lemlist cold email campaigns, to identify key statistics and insights that will help you fine-tune your cold email copywriting to get more replies and book more meetings.

Let’s get started.

7 cold email copywriting best practices based on data

Here are the 7 best practices for cold email copywriting that will help you write messages that convert.

1. Target the right people

Even the best-written cold email campaigns will fall flat if they’re not being sent to the right people.

In one survey, 137 business and marketing executives were asked if they create and document buyer personas as a part of their strategy.71% of those who exceeded their revenue goals had documented buyer personas.

Of the companies that missed their goals, only 26% of them used buyer personas.

A bar graph with the title "use buyer personas to hit your sales goals." The bars show "misses goals," "meets goals," and "exceeds goals." The companies that missed their goals less frequently define and use buyer personas. The companies that meet and exceed goals more frequently use buyer personas — Source: Cintell

Essentially, if you start your cold outreach with a specific buyer persona in mind, and find contacts that match this persona, you’re much more likely to meet or surpass your goals.

So before you even write your cold emails, you must stop and define the audience that you’ll be sending them to.

What steps should you follow to define your target audience?

→ Make a list of your best clients

→ If you don’t have clients, list potential clients and start networking with them

→ Research the attributes of the clients on your list

→ Identify the common attributes across multiple clients

→ Create a fictional profile of the person who would buy your product from each of the clients with common attributes

→ In the profile, include their position, age, goals, path to purchase, and obstacles

→ Separate your buyer personas into tiers, from most to least revenue

Once you have your buyer personas ready, prioritize the tier-one personas. This allows you to concentrate your efforts on the clients who are most likely to bring in revenue the fastest.

For a complete guide on identifying your target audience, use our guide on ICPs and buyer personas.

2. Start with a killer subject line

Once you have a list of targeted recipients for your cold emails, it’s time to begin the copywriting.

The first thing your prospects will see is the subject line.

In fact, it’s one of the most important factors in defining if your email gets opened and read, or ignored.

The first thing to know about subject lines: the shorter, the better.

When we analyzed millions of cold email campaigns, we saw that the emails’ success rates dropped with every extra word added to a subject line. 👇

A bar graph with the title "how many words should you put in your cold email subject line?". The bars decrease in size, showing that the email subject lines with the highest reply rates have the smallest wordcount

So when you’re writing your cold email subject lines, aim for 8 words or less.

It helps prospects understand your message as quickly as possible, and won’t get cut off on mobile.

Other best practices to keep in mind with your cold email subject lines are:

→ Personalize your subject lines by using text variables like {{painPoint}} or {{Objective}}, or by referencing a detail specific to the prospect.

→ Ask a question if it’s actually relevant to your prospects.

→ Add urgency and FOMO by referencing exclusive events or offers (if relevant).

→ A/B test your subject lines to find out what your audience responds to.

To learn more about cold email subject lines, plus examples of 10+ subjects with 80%+ open rates, read our data-based guide on B2B cold email subject lines.

3. Focus on your prospect

Too many cold emails start with “Hi, my name is…” or “To introduce myself…”

Prospects aren’t interested in who you are and what you do.They’re interested in how you can help them achieve their goals.

To measure this, we grouped emails by how frequently they talked about the prospect, as opposed to the sender.

To quantify “mentioning the prospect,” we measured the number of times the email included the word “you,” “your,” “yours,” etc.

And we found that, out of millions of cold emails, the ones that most mentioned the prospect got the highest average booking rates:

A bar graph with the title "focus on your prospects to book more meetings." It shows the highest booking rates for emails that "mention the prospect 6- times." and decreases in reply rate for emails that do not mention the prospect

So what does this mean for your cold email copywriting?

Make your prospect the focus of every cold email, not you.

Here’s an example:

A screenshot of a cold email. The text says "Hi Nadja, I’m Gina, a representative from [Company Name], and we specialize in automating sales processes for busy BDRs and sales reps. We’ve been helping sales teams for the last 3 years, and recently received $2M in our most recent funding round. I saw that lemlist focuses on personalization and multichannel sequences, but it can take a long time to add enrichment, reach out to inbound leads, browse on LinkedIn, do CRM clean-up, and so on. Do you want to hop on a call to discuss how [Company Name] can help you achieve your goals? Best, Gina"

Here, Gina starts her email with a long section talking only about herself and her company.

There is no hook to draw the reader in, nor is it immediately clear what her connection is to the prospect.

Here’s another version of the same outreach email, this time focusing on the prospect:

A screenshot of a cold email. The text says "Hi Nadja, Been following for a bit now, and while this is old news I still find it super impressive that you helped grow the business from $1M to $10M; aiming for $20M this year!  While lemlist focuses on personalization at scale and multichannel sequences, I know it typically takes me a few hours a day to do my work efficiently. Many of those manual tasks can be automated. If I can show you how [my company] can automate the enrichment of your TAM accounts, CRM clean-up and more, would it be interesting? Either way, congrats on the huge growth! Best, Gina"

This email only mentions the sender’s company one time and devotes the rest of the email to the prospect’s company and needs.

She shows that she knows the prospect by congratulating her on the company’s funding round, and she clearly states what the prospect can get out of this email: saved time by automating sales processes.

4. Aim for 120-word cold emails

It can be tricky to pinpoint the best length for your cold emails.

Should you write long messages that get all the details across, or write short ones that are easier to read?

We put that question to the test by analyzing the booking rate of thousands of cold emails.

On average, emails around 120 words had the highest levels of success.

A line graph with the title "how long should your cold emails be?" The line shows the highest average booking rate at emails of 120 words.

Granted, that doesn’t mean that you need to hit exactly 120 words every time you write a cold email.

Aim for the range of 75-125 words to give enough information for the prospect to understand your message, without rambling.

And don’t neglect the formatting of your email: the 120 words should be readable and easy to scan.

That means breaking up your text into shorter paragraphs of 1-2 sentences each, with line breaks between each paragraph.

Your prospects will only spend a few seconds looking at your cold email. So keep it short and as easy to read as possible.

For the full data analysis of cold email length and formatting, check this article on optimizing your cold email length for more replies.

5. Use images if appropriate

When your cold emails are limited to about 120 words each, a great way to get your message across without adding bulk is to include an image or two.

When we analyzed the reply rates of emails with and without images, we found that adding 1 or 2 images could boost your success:

A line graph with the title "adding an image to your cold emails can boost reply rates." The line graph shows the highest reply rates in emails with 0-2 images, then declines with every extra image.

However, adding more than 2 images puts you at risk of lower reply rates, or, if the file size is too large, getting flagged as spam.

To learn more about images and email deliverability, take a look at this data to know if images will land you in spam.

So when deciding whether to add images to your campaign, make sure they are:

→ no more than 2

→ tailored to your prospects

→ compressed

To learn more about the risks and benefits of including images in your cold email campaigns, read our full report on images in cold email campaigns.

6. Use the right tone for your target audience

B2B cold outreach doesn’t have to mean “boring to boring” - you can add a little personality by using casual language, emojis, and exclamation points.

You just have to make sure it’s the right match for your target audience.

First, let’s take a look at emojis in cold emails.Should you use them?

When we analyzed the average reply rates of emails with and without emojis, we found that emails with emojis got an average of 13% lower reply rates.

A bar graph with the title "should you use emojis in your cold emails?" There are 3 bars: emails without emojis, emails with emojis, and all emails. The bar for emails with emojis shows a 13% lower reply rate than emails without them.

However, this data set included emails with any number of emojis: from 1 to 20+.

If you only include 1-2 emojis in an email that’s targeted to an audience who uses them (influencers, freelancers, solopreneurs), you’re safe.

As for exclamation points, the results are similar:

A bar graph with the title "do exclamation marks hurt your cold email reply rates?" There are 3 bars: emails with exclamation points, emails without exclamation points, and all emails. The bar for emails with exclamation points is slightly lower than the other two bars

Emails without exclamation marks did get a slightly higher average reply rate than emails with exclamation marks.

If in your audience research, you found that your target audience prefers formal language, it’s best to stay away from casual details like emojis and exclamation points.

If you’re not sure, A/B test your campaigns to find out which tone of voice is the most successful with your audience.

For more information, use this step-by-step guide on A/B testing to fine-tune your cold outreach results.

7. Personalize at scale

Finally, one of the most important practices in cold email copywriting is to personalize your messages to your prospects.

In fact, studies show that personalization increases cold email open rates by up to 50%.

That means using their first name, using icebreakers that are specific to the prospect, identifying common pain points and objectives, referencing their competitors, and using any other detail that connects with them.

Of course, you could manually research and type out every individual cold email to be personal to your prospects. But this will take hours out of your day, limiting the time you actually get to meet with them and follow up on replies.

Instead, personalize your cold emails at scale by using text variables like {{firstName}} or {{companyName}}, and even image and video variables that are customized to your prospects’ landing pages.

One of the easiest and fastest ways you can do this is with a sales automation tool like lemlist.

It’s a tool that allows you to generate multi-step sequences like this:

A screenshot of a lemlist cold outreach campaign with a personalized email campaign and text variables

It includes personalized text, image, and video variables that are automatically personalized to all of your prospects.

And if you’re still stuck on your cold email copywriting, there are automatic templates that you can apply.

They’ve already been optimized with each of the best practices listed above, so all you have to do is fill in the blanks.

If you’d like to give lemlist a try, you can create your first campaigns without even entering your card information.

Key takeaways

To recap, here are the best practices to optimize your cold email copywriting:

Target the right people: Define your audience with buyer personas and prioritize high-revenue prospects.
Craft compelling subject lines: Keep them short and personalized, ask relevant questions, and A/B test.
Focus on your prospect: Make your emails about them, addressing their needs and goals.
Keep it concise and readable: Aim for 120-word emails with shorter paragraphs.
Consider using images: Include 1 or 2 relevant images, compressed and tailored to prospects.
Tailor your tone to your audience: Use casual language if appropriate, but stay formal if necessary.
Personalize at scale: Use automation tools and variables for personalized messaging.

Need more help with your cold email copywriting?

Use our database of proven successful cold email templates.

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	G2 Rating	Price	Best for	Standout feature	Con
SmartWinnr	4.9 star star star star star	$30/mo $75/mo $2,999/mo	Large, distributed sales teams	AI evaluation precision, gamified KPIs	Lack of tracking system
Performio	4.6 star star star star star-half	Not publicly available	Sales operations and finance teams	Powerful configurability	Limited training resources and complex to navigate
Varicent	4.4 star star star star star-half	Not publicly available	Mid-market and enterprise businesses	Comprehensive incentive management	Potentially high cost and steep learning curve
QuotaPath	4.7 star star star star star-half	$15/user/mo $40/user/mo Enterprise: custom price	Complex sales structures and businesses of all sizes	Complex sales structures and businesses of all sizes	Steep learning curve
Anaplan	4.6 star star star star star-half	Not publicly available	Collaborative teams	Connected planning	Complexity and steep learning curve
Xactly	4.6 star star star star star-half	Not publicly available	Companies with complex sales structures	Complex incentive compensation management (ICM) with high efficiency and accuracy	Complexity for smaller teams and potentially high costs
Qobra	4.7 star star star star star-half	Not publicly available	Companies who want to automate commission calculations and payouts	Simplicity and ease of use	Lack of features like redirection
ElevateHQ	4.7 star star star star star-half	$30/user/mo $35/user/mo Custom: upon request	Businesses that need a comprehensive and user-friendly sales compensation management software	Ease of use and adoption	Lack of ability to configure the product based on user needs
Everstage	4.8 star star star star star-half	Not publicly available	Companies with modern sales culture and businesses who want real-time insights	A built-in dispute management and real-time visibility	Users say it works slowly, customer support is slow
Sales Cookie	4.9 star star star star star	$30/user/mo $50/user/mo	Smaller sales teams	Powerful automation	Lesser user base and average user interface
Spiff	4.7 star star star star star-half	Not publicly available	Companies with scalable needs	Automated Commission Calculations	Lack of filtering by date, no mobile app

ERP vs. CRM

ERP

CRM

Summary

Backbone of a business's internal operations.

Backbone of customer-centric interactions and operations.

Goal

To centralize and streamline core business processes in a company.

To increase customer experience, satisfaction and loyalty, and boost sales.

Focus

Internal operations and processes across departments (finance, accounting, inventory, supply chain, HR, and sales).

All interactions with leads and customers.

Manages

Internal business data like financial data, inventory levels, production details, supply chain, HR info.

All customer data like contact info, purchase history, communication history, customer preferences and more.

Users

Finance, accounting, operations, supply chain, and HR departments.

Customer-facing teams like sales, marketing, and customer service.

Benefits

Streamlines operations, improves data accuracy, enhances decision-making, boosts collaboration, increases productivity.

Improves customer relationships, increases sales, strengthens customer service, personalizes marketing campaigns, provides insights.

Price

$150 per user per year on average.

$10 to $30 per user per month on average.

PRM Tool	Rating	Feature	Pro	Con	Mobile App	Integrations	Free Plan	Pricing
Airtable	4.65 star star star star star-half	Org-wide alignment	User-friendly layout and database	Suboptimal as a personal CRM	square-check	Lack of tracking system	square-check	Team: $20/month Business: $45/month
Dex	4.7 star star star star star-half	Social Media Integration	Easy contact data collection	No marketing/sales features	square-check	Lack of tracking system	square-xmark 7-day trial	$12/month
Notion	4.75 star star star star star-half	Block Functions	High customization capability	Not a dedicated CRM	square-check	Limited	square-check	Plus: €7.50/month Business: €14/month
Monica	N/A	Open-source	Open-source flexibility	Requires extensive manual input	square-xmark	Limited	square-check Self-hosted	$9/month or $90/year
Hippo App	3.1 star star star	Simple iOS app	Ideal for non-tech-savvy users	iPhone only	square-check iOS only	Limited	square-xmark 1-month trial	$1.49/month or $14.99/month
Contacts+	3.6 star star star star-half	Smart Contact Management	Feature-rich and flexible	Reported bugs	square-check	Rich	square-xmark 7-day trial	Premium: $13.99/month Teams: $17.99/month
Folk	4.4 star star star star star-half	Customizable Interface	Customizable for teamwork	Pricey for personal use	square-check	Rich	square-xmark	Standard: $24/member Premium: $39/member
Close	4.7 star star star star star-half	Integrated Calling	Integrated Calling	Too sales-oriented & pricey	square-check	Rich	square-xmark 14-day trial	Startup: $59/user/month Professional: $329/user/month
Covve App	4.8 star star star star star	Business Card Scanning	Business Card Scanning	Mobile only	square-check	Limited	square-check	$9.99/month
Nimble	4.45 star star star star star-half	160+ app integrations	Comprehensive integrations	No free app version	square-check	Rich	square-xmark 14-day trial	$29.90/month or $24.90/month (billed annually)

	Capterra Rating	Free Trial	Free Plan	Starting Price (excluding the free plan)	Maximum Price (for the most expensive plan)	Best for
HubSpot CRM	4.5 star star star star star-half	square-check 14-day	square-check	€15/month/seat billed annually	€792/month/3 seats billed annually + €45/month for each extra seat	Versatility and free plan
Salesforce CRM	4.2 star star star star	square-check 30-day	square-xmark But it offers reduced price to authorised nonprofit organisations	€25/user/month	€500/user/month billed annually (includes Einstein AI)	Best overall operational CRM
Zoho CRM	4.3 star star star star star-half	square-xmark	square-check Limited to 3 users	Comprehensive incentive management	€52/user/month billed annually	Small-medium businesses and automation
Pipedrive	4.5 star star star star star-half	square-check 14-day	square-xmark	€14/seat/month billed annually	€99/seat/month billed annually	Sales teams and ease of use
Agile CRM	4.1 star star star star	square-xmark	square-check Limited 10 users	$9.99/user/month billed annually	$64.99/user/month billed annually	Free plan for very small teams up to 10

CRM goal	Increase the sales conversion rate for qualified leads from marketing automation campaigns by 10% in the next 6 months.
SMART Breakdown	1. Specific: It targets a specific area (conversion rate) for a defined segment (qualified leads from marketing automation).	2. Measurable: The desired increase (10%) is a clear metric, and the timeframe (6 months) allows for progress tracking.	3. Achievable: A 10% increase is possible based on historical data and potential improvements.	4. Relevant: Boosting sales from marketing efforts aligns with overall business objectives.	5. Time-bound: The 6-month timeframe creates urgency and a clear target date.
Actions	Step 1: Refine lead qualification criteria to ensure high-quality leads are nurtured through marketing automation.	Step 2: Personalize marketing automation campaigns based on lead demographics, interests, and behavior.	Step 3: Develop targeted landing pages with clear calls to action for qualified leads.	Step 4: Implement lead scoring to prioritize high-potential leads for sales follow-up.	Step 5: Track and analyze campaign performance to identify areas for optimization.
Outcomes	Increased sales and revenue	Improved marketing automation ROI	Marketing and sales alignment	Data-driven marketing optimization

Table

CDP Software

CRM Software

Approach

Data-centric

Customer-centric

Focus

Interactions across various channels and touchpoints, both online and offline.

Sales, marketing, and customer service interactions.

Functionality

Automatically collects, organizes, tags, and makes data available in real-time.

Helps businesses track customer interactions, sales pipelines, prospects, and service requests.

Goals

Personalized customer experiences across all channels.

Better customer relationships, streamlined processes, and improved profitability.

Benefits

Data integration, management, and accessibility, allowing for detailed analysis and segmentation.

Better communication within teams and with customers by organizing information about customer interactions and history.

Data Handling

Handles both identified and anonymous data, stitches together various data points.

Deals primarily with identified customer data.

Use Cases

Personalized marketing campaigns, targeted advertising, content customization across multiple channels.

Managing campaigns and leads, enhancing customer service, providing better customer support, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Examples

Insider, Bloomreach, Salesforce Marketing Cloud CDP

HubSpot, Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional, and Zoho CRM

7 ways to level up your cold email copywriting using data

What is cold email copywriting?