COLD EMAIL TEMPLATES
What is a cold email?
A cold email is an email you send to prospects you have no prior relationship with. This means they didn't opt in to receive it, nor you've been in communication with them before.
Everything you see below...
- You scraped somebody's email from LinkedIn and you're trying to convert them into customers
- You're asking various website owners to give you a backlink
- You're pitching an Instagram influencer for sponsored posts
- You’re contacting people to increase your network
... is a cold email.
Cold emails have played a pivotal role in helping us reach first $250K in the first phase of lemlist growth.
Guillaume Moubeche, CEO @lemlist
How to write a cold email?
Here are things you should consider if you want to create an effective cold email and improve your cold outreach:
Write a compelling subject line
The subject line is one of the key factors based on which people decide whether or not to open your email. So your subject line should be catchy and personalized to drive attention and motivate your receiver to open it.
Keep your cold email brief and simple
People don’t tend to spend too much time reading your “email poems”. So always try to be brief with your sales pitch and talk about them and the value they will receive. Not you or features of your product/service.
Be straightforward and use clear CTA
Even if your offer sounds interesting, people can just skip it because your call-to-action is not clear. Want to meet for a coffee? Or maybe have a demo call? Then make sure your receivers understand what they should do next by offering them an easy option to book a day and time.
Personalize your email to the recipient
Personalization is your superpower if you’ve made a deep research and already know your sales prospect on a deeper level. If done right, you may receive a reply straight away. Depending on your cold email template you can personalize text, images, or even blow their mind with personalized dynamic landing pages.
Personalization in your cold email templates
Here are three ways in which you will take your cold email game to the next level.
What is a cold email template?
Cold email templates are templates that were created by other professionals and are proven to work after lots of sent emails and A/B tests.
They are a great starting point for your email outreach process. By using templates and adapting them to fit your audience and style, you will most likely increase your cold email open, click, and reply rates.
Depending on the needs there are different email templates for cold outreach that can be used.
Sales cold email templates
Cold email templates for sales professionals will help you receive a better open rate and close more deals.
Click to open sales cold email templates
Networking cold email templates
Below examples are the templates you can use for networking if your goal is to reach out to a blogger, get a backlink, invite someone to be on a podcast, etc.
Click to open networking email templates
Cold email template for jobs
Looking for a job or in search of top talent? These job application and job offer email templates will help you.
Click to open recruiting email templates
Best cold email templates
Every email campaign is different and has its goals. But the below email examples are the best cold email templates we saw in terms of open, click and reply rate.
Cold email to grow your community
Are cold emails spam?
Cold emails are DEFINITELY not spam.
There is such a thing called the CAN-SPAM act.
It states that you can send emails to business people that you do not know. However, you have to play by the rules that are outlined in the Federal Trade Commission's guide.
So the rule is simple. Don't send spam.
A proper cold email accomplishes three things...
- targets relevant people who might be interested in something
- it's personalized
- has a specific request
Unlike spam that completely misses out on all those points.
- it's generic, no personalization
- has high commercial intent and promises unreal things
- can have a fake name and fishy contact info
How to avoid spam filters?
We strongly suggest to follow these rules in order to make sure your cold emails never go to spam.
Pay attention to your complaint rate
If you send spam, people will mark you as a spammer. The more people mark you as a spammer, the more your "complaint rate" increases.
Needless to say, this is very bad for business.
Authenticate your domain
Domain authentication is the same process as when you’re checking in for your flight. In the outreach world, your email provider performs an “ID check”.
They want to verify that the email is really coming from you. In short, you'll have to set up two parameters: DKIM and SPF. After you authenticate your domain, you'll see an instant boost in email deliverability.
Analyze your results
Cold email results and metrics matter. Keeping your reply, click and open rates high not only brings value to you, but it also sends signals to email providers that you're one of the "good guys".
If you see a problem in your metrics, address it immediately.
- Low open rates? Check email deliverability!
- Low click and reply rates? You're not personalizing enough.
Verify emails before sending anything
Before you press send, we can't stress high enough how important it is to verify email list. The objective is to keep your bounce rate as low as you can, but at least below the 5% level. As you can probably guess, the more unverified emails you have, the more you risk to be hit with a higher bounce rate.
High bounce rate equals more of your cold emails heading to spam.
Before sending a single email, spend time assessing whether an email is valid or not. There are tools that help you clean lists in seconds.
Never send email blasts
Never send blasts. Never use email marketing tools for cold email outreach campaigns.
Spread out your cold emails. Between 200-500 emails per day is optimal.
Warm-up your email address
Similar to the way athletes warm up before a game, email addresses also need to prepare too.
Email warm-up is a process that involves gradual increase of your sending volume. A warmed-up email address is one that has been sending and receiving messages as a real person would, when creating his/her email.
Best part, lemwarm does this automatically for you.
Personalize your message
Cold email personalization is so much more than using just first and company names in your pitch. You should aim to make your cold email feel like a tailor-made suit or dress.
Nobody likes to receive copy/paste-ed generic emails, so there's no point in sending them. You will just waste both yours and your prospect's time for no apparent reason.
How to send cold emails?
One of the main reasons why cold emails are so loved is because it's not super hard to build a list and start sending them.
All you need is an email finder, a proper cold email tool and you're golden.
In reality, this is where some of us hit a roadblock.
The point here isn't to send thousands of emails. Your objective is to close as many as you can.
It's super important to identify your target audience early on and divide your list into segments for one simple reason.
No client is the same. Their pain points, budgets, company sizes, tool stacks, and needs are all different. As a result, your approach ought to be different.
It's also key to draw a line between cold email and email marketing tools. This will save you from another typical email outreach mistake. Using a tool like MailChimp to send cold emails.
Although we're talking about the best-in-class newsletter tool (that we also use for it btw), using it for cold emailing will dramatically lower your deliverability.
By using lemlist, your messages are sent one after the other, thus imitating human behavior, which providers prefer to see. By doing so, you won't risk hurting your email deliverability and your emails won't go to promotions or spam.
Is there the best time to send emails?
When you research what is the best time to send an email on Google, you'll see many different studies.
We've tested some of the tactics on our campaigns. And the biggest advice we can give you is to never follow other people's data blindly.
Here are a few things that work for us though.
1) Afternoons perform better than mornings across all metrics, especially open rates. We found out that between 12pm - 16pm works best for us.
As we using lemlist, all we need to do is set the right schedule for each of our campaigns.
2) I never saw a big difference between reply and click rates across different days. All working days are rolling pretty good for us.
3) Our typical follow-up schedule looks like this:
- 2-day delay between email 1 and 2
- 2-day delay between email 2 and 3
- 3-day delay between email 3 and 4
4) The key thing is to not let too much time pass between follow-ups, but don't overwhelm people either. Day delays play a bigger role.
To set up delays, we just tell lemlist how long to wait before every email in the sequence. Easy peasy!
5) Avoid weekends. Not because Saturdays and Sundays can't perform. Avoid them because it isn't cool.
When you start sending cold emails, analyze if there is a particular time when your emails get opened and replied to. Assess whether your prospects are busy at certain hours. That will tell you if you need to take this into account or not.
Cold email mistakes to avoid
By using lemwarm, a feature that's connected to your account, you'll warm up your email account automatically.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ reviewed
cold email tool
300+ reviews on Capterra
"We had massive success using lemlist to grow our sales pipeline. When you work with a good company and they help you become more successful, I can just highly recommend them.“
Every salesperson needs lemlist. It’s so simple to use, easy to connect with your CRM and their automation features will save you a lot of time. We booked more meetings using lemlist compared to other tools we used in the past.
"My emails simply stand out amongst all that noise of emails we receive every day. Building relationships with top talents is much easier thanks to highly personalized emails."
lemlist cold emails vs. regular cold emails
