Cold emailing is an art. Do it right, and you can establish career-changing relationships that will result in incredible opportunities. Do it wrong, and your emails land consistently in the spam box (and rightfully so).
Where do I most often see someone mess up their cold emails? When they get lazy and send out 10,000 cookie-cutter emails to a contact list they’ve built. Of course, all they’ve accomplished from that is being reported for spam 10,000 times.
On the contrary, I’ve also seen people obsessed with personalization spend hours doing background research on each individual contact. They then write essay-length emails to their contacts, hoping to wow them with attention to detail.
While they’re better off than spammers, this means they’ll only get one or two emails off each day (at best). So, while they may be running a higher-quality operation, they’re running an inefficient one, too. This inefficiency will cost them tons of time and effort in the long run and produce a less-than-optimal output—on top of burnout.
Where do we find balance when faced with two opposite ends of the spectrum? Where do brief, reusable cold outreach emails intersect with long, hand-crafted, personalized ones? Those are the exact questions I’ll be answering in this article.
Below, I’ll share the formula that’s allowed me to efficiently and effectively build invaluable relationships punching way above my weight. Let’s dig in.
The Cold Emailing Dialectic
I like to approach this cold emailing paradigm like Hegel approached history – with a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis. In our cold emailing model, low-effort over-reusability will be the thesis, ultra-effort hyper-personalization will be the antithesis, and our balance between the two will be the synthesis.
The Thesis: Over-Reusability
To be blunt, “over-reusability” is a nice word for spam. Allow me to cite an amazing example of a very un-amazing email sourced from a beautiful article on the subject of cold emailing:
The full extent of the author’s personalization was to cite a random article from the recipient’s content library. The recipient’s response was to ignore the email and take the time to mark it as spam (if you don’t know, getting consistently reported for spam can have severe consequences for your email deliverability).
Let’s be clear: Receiving this kind of email is insulting because you were just told you’re another contact in a long list of spam victims. To the author, you were only worth the few seconds it took to find that random piece of content to pass off the email as genuine. Any self-respecting person will give a hard pass to that kind of impression.
Let’s look at another example shared by Irina Maltseva, a foremost authority in cold outreach:
In both of these examples, the author is undoubtedly sending emails to thousands of people and, therefore, maximizing their outreach. However, the results they’ll get will be garbage since they treat their recipients like garbage. In both examples, they didn’t even bother to write the recipient’s name in the salutation.
As noted before, the primary strength of this sort of outreach is that you can get your emails out to thousands of people easily. In theory, this will maximize your chances of securing many important relationships.
Therefore, we must find a way to preserve that outreach efficiency while still writing great emails.
The Antithesis: Inefficient Over-Personalization
While they’re on the right track, there’s a class of people who insist on doing deep analysis on each and every contact they come across. Deep contact research is not always inappropriate, but it’s simply unnecessary in most cases.
These writers will perform much better than spammers, but they’ll also be grossly inefficient with their time. That inefficiency will slow their outreach to a crawl and lead to burnout.
These authors are also prone to sending long, overly detailed emails that take an excessive amount of time to read. As a result, while they may be achieving great opening rates, their emails will often not be wholly read and thus not responded to.
Here’s an example email I’ve created to illustrate:
While it’s not a bad email, many ideas can be heavily condensed or eliminated. Irrespective of how genuine the email is, most recipients will cringe at the sight of a cold email longer than 150 words.
Just for your sanity, it’s imperative to keep your pre-writing and writing processes as efficient as possible. Unfortunately, no matter how great or efficient your emails are, many of them will go without a response due to factors entirely out of your control.
So you need to minimize the time wasted instead of going crazy writing super in-depth emails to each person.
It’s not just about mental well-being, either—cold emails should always be as to the point as possible for recipient friendliness. In-depth research from Boomerang suggests that your cold emails should be between 50 and 125 words.
Back to research, just because you don’t know every detail of a contact’s interests does not mean you can’t write an incredibly effective cold email. You only need to do as much background research as you need to find something that will pique their interest and relate to your writing purpose—no more, no less.
The Synthesis: The Brief, Efficient, and Personal Cold Email Formula
The primary strength of an over-reusable outreach email is its brevity and conciseness. Conversely, the primary power of a long, over-personalized email is that it communicates genuine care to the recipient. We aim to synthesize these two strengths into one reliable and effective formula.
In my journey of cold emailing, trial, and error have allowed me to find a formula that’s very effective in optimizing my outreach and making incredible connections. The truth is that a good cold email is not a wordy love letter sucking up to a potential contact but a brief, concise message that intelligently piques their interest.
All you need to do is find something that interests your contact and relates to why you’re contacting them. The perfect cold email exists in a Goldilocks zone: Not too cut-and-dry and not too sappy and long-winded with an excessive pre-writing process.
To illustrate, I’ll provide an example from my professional outreach:
Notice the structure of this email:
- Salutation: “Hello/Hi/Hey [Target Name],”
- Introduction: Here, I introduce myself and add a hyperlink to my website for further context. If you have any shared contacts (coworkers, friends, etc.), include them here.
- Common point of interest: Here, I discuss something the recipient and I are both interested in (in this case, it was one of their articles). This provides the foundation for our relationship.
- Purpose of email: Unless you’re just emailing them to say hi, here’s where you will state your purpose for emailing them in a way that relates to your common point of interest. Remember: Your common point of interest must relate to your purpose for contacting them so that you can make a smooth transition.
- Closing: Write a friendly conclusion with an implicit call to action, such as “Talk soon” or “Looking forward to hearing from you.” More explicit ones, such as “Should I send ideas your way?” are good, too.
Following this formula, you can quickly produce succinct, potent cold emails that reach your contacts effectively. “How effectively,” you may ask. In the example above, I secured a guest post with a significant e-commerce merchant processing billions of transactions annually.
Cold outreach is not a complicated science. If you can effectively communicate your message, you will see great results as long as you’re providing value to your recipients. Ensure you have a great cold email subject line to maximize your open rates.
Brief is Beautiful
The greatest strength of the copy-and-paste outreach email is its brevity (you can only say so much when you know nothing about a contact). So, even though your recipient isn’t likely to respond, they won’t have to take much time to discern your intentions. In our synthesis, our goal is to maintain that strength while including personability.
You don’t need to include more details than you have to, and I’m not saying that just to be lazy. In my experience, brief, to-the-point messages have much better response rates than long-winded love letters.
As mentioned earlier, as long as your message includes sufficient personability, recipients will prefer messages that are easy to skim through. This anecdotal experience confirms the conclusions Boomerang reached in their study.
This principle also applies to follow-up emails. Keep them brief and to the point to direct the recipient’s attention back to your initial message.
It’s not hard to understand why brief messages are effective – your cold contact is a busy person. So, as they open your email, they’re going to be asking themselves a few questions:
- Who is this?
- Is this spam?
- What do they want?
- Why should I care?
Your cold email’s introduction will tell them who you are, your personability will express your authenticity, and your brevity will make it easy to discern your intentions. Finally, your typical point of interest will show them why they should care and take the time to respond.
If you're lucky, your contact will take a few seconds to skim your email at first. Your email needs to answer those four fundamental questions quickly and without difficulty. If you’re writing essays, you’re going to find a great many of your emails ignored. Your contact does not have the time to decode your intentions from a book-length email – it’s just that simple.
Concise messages save both your time and your response rates. So say it with me: “Succinct is sexy!”
Researching with Efficiency
When researching a cold contact, your goal is to find a common point of interest to convince the recipient why they should care—no more, no less. Of course, you already know why you’re contacting them, but they must understand why they should care.
This common point of interest will get you off on the right foot and allow you to transition to the purpose of contacting them. But again, that’s the purpose of your background research – you don’t need to write their autobiography.
In my above example, I knew my recipient was a published author and editor of her organization’s blog. Instantly, I understood that she valued her writing and would be amenable to a compliment on her work.
Even if she weren’t interested in my offer of a guest contribution, she likely would have responded to thank me for my praise. Discussing a recipient’s passion project is a reliable way to get them interested in what you say.
In addition to being relevant to her professional life, our common point of interest related to my purpose in contacting them: to contribute to her blog.
Your common interest point must relate to your purpose for contacting them, or else you will be forced to make a jarring transition to something unrelated. In that case, your email would come off as inorganic and self-promotional.
It’s up to you to find that relatable common point of interest, but it’s typically not hard. For instance, in my above example, I complimented the recipient on her article, indicating I had taken the time to read it.
Writing an article is hard work; therefore, you’ll always find an author happy to receive compliments! That sort of outreach will consistently provide positive results.
Strike the Perfect Balance in Cold Emailing for Better Results
Imagine the amount of time that’s been wasted sending out copy-and-paste cold outreach emails that only serve to fill the spam box. Conversely, consider how much more productive someone spending hours on each email could be if they optimized their writing process.
In this article, I aimed to find the goldilocks zone in the cold email process and give you the most significant return on your time investment. A balanced approach to outreach is not only more efficient but also massively more effective in skyrocketing your response rate.
Remember that cold outreach is hard work involving lots of trial and error, no matter how you cut it. Creating great emails requires serious time and dedication, even with the most optimized methodology.
That’s why we must be as efficient with our output as possible. We can only do so much work in one day, so we need to have a plan of attack when emailing any potential contact. With this article, I’ve provided a strategy for you to run into battle.
Hungry for more cold email tips? Check out our free resource, Cold Email Hacks: How to Get More Customers with Winning Sales Emails.
