Dos and Don’ts for Cold Emails

Sending an email to a complete stranger and asking them to cooperate in your idea can either be a disaster or a real win for you. There’s nothing in between. As much as you want to make your name known to a vast majority of people including ones that you don’t know at all, sometimes cold emails can bring you more headaches than triumphs.

They’re not called cold for no reason. They represent a relationship with a recipient that has no previous connection to the sender until the moment they receive the email. All of this leads us to the inevitable truth that writing cold emails is a job that has to be carefully observed.

I know that this might seem a bit overwhelming to you, but don’t worry. We’ll look in the dos and don’ts of cold emails together and you’ll be able to craft your own cold email in no time. So off you go!

DOs

Write a warm subject line

Wait what? Warm subject line in a cold email? I know it sounds crazy, but a huge ‘do’ in writing your cold email is constructing a subject line that will capture the recipients’ attention and make them feel connected even though they hear from you for the first time. If it doesn’t grab them from the start they’ll just scroll away and ignore it as spam so pay enough attention to making it awesome.

For example, some great subject lines would go something like this:

• Hey there! Check out my new blog!
• Visit my site and taste the real pizza
• The newest fashion trends at your fingertips
• Are robots real? Join us to find out!

You see how they’re all friendly and approachable creating a feeling that the email you send is not the first. Also they’re short and right to the point so definitely write them like that.

Show your real self

Let’s get this straight! No one wants to read a text written by robots or a text that stretches on and on until they get bored and abandon it. We’re talking about recipients you don’t even know here, so make sure you present yourself in the best light. And plus the cold email is something similar to a pitch making the pressure to get everything right higher. But not impossible. Just be yourself and write as personalized as possible and the recipients will value that. Also clearly state your intention from the beginning and precisely introduce yourself or your company.

For instance, if you’re a food blog, you surely won’t write about how much you love food or how you came up with the idea to open the blog. Instead you’ll shortly state what your posts are about and whether you want the recipients to subscribe or just visit and read your posts. I think you get the idea.

Send at an appropriate time

Don’t even think about sending out a cold email on Monday morning or late at night. Why? Because then people are the most tired and fed up of everything so they’ll probably just throw it in the trash. That’s why you have to choose an appropriate time like the weekend or during the day to do that.

Also keep an eye on the frequency and number. Try not to exaggerate and send more than a 100 cold emails because you’ll bore both yourself and your recipients. Keep them no more than 50 daily and you’re completely fine.

DON’Ts

Make mistakes

Typos, wrong usage of tenses or punctuation marks are your enemy when it comes to writing cold emails. What do you think the recipients will do when they see an email with grammatical mistakes? They’ll surely abandon it at once. They didn’t even bother to address me right and I should believe in their words, they’ll say and all you did was in vain.

That’s why head over to Grammarly or personally check your entire cold email before hitting the ‘send’ button.

Stuff all text together

Paragraphs, my friends! That’s what your recipients are looking forward to once they open the cold email. They’ll expect at least three paragraphs with all your ideas separated in them so that they can skip from one idea to another faster. That’s why consider organizing your words and even putting them in bullet points for easier understanding.

The person you’re cold emailing will have a hard time to get around the email if it doesn’t contain breaks between the text. No matter how short the email is they’ll always find the tiring search for your intention among the stuffed sentences as a huge set back, so don’t do it.

‘Whatcha say’ them

Whatcha say? Never address the recipients using a jargon like that. You’re meeting them for the first time, so you obviously don’t want them to see you as unserious and unprofessional. Any jargon in the cold emails can bring you more harm than good and may cost you the whole success of it, so abandon it completely. Especially if the jargon words are from your industry and field of expertise making them unfamiliar to the reader and boring.

For instance, in the food blog example, never use ‘veggie — vegetable’, ‘chix — chicken’, ‘GBD — golden, brown and delicious’, ‘jizz — sause’ or similar to them. That would simply nerve the readers and provoke them to lower their opinion of you. And you don’t want that in your wildest dreams, right?