How NOT to Write a Cold Email: Real Life Example (Complete Breakdown)

This is a real life cold email example, fully broken down step by step, to show you exactly what NOT to do when engaging your prospects.

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Real Life Cold Email Example: Full Breakdown

This cold email was received as follows (desktop vs. phone)

Figure 1. Email in browser/desktop and mobile format

To help you better understand the pitfalls within this cold email, I went ahead and dissected it.

1. Open-rate is Impacted by Subject line + First 50 Characters

Data shows: 60+% of all email gets read on a mobile device.

Figure 2. Dissection of the email on a mobile device (iPhone 7+)

Areas of improvement

1. Send time: Most likely scheduled for a EST timezone as 7:22 but too early for PST. When we wake up around 7am we start de-spamming the inbox. By the time we get to emails sent at 4:22 we’ve “swiped left” 20+ times. Muscle memory momentum is to continue swiping left.

Recommendation: Send at 7:22am local time

2. Subject: Self-Centered

Recommendation: Subject: Can you talk this week?

3. Opening sentence: The opening sentence is very important, in particular the first 50 characters.

Figure 3. Opening Sentence (first 50 characters)

What you see is self-centered information and redundant use of the rep’s name.

Recommendation: Good morning <first name>

4. Compiler: Do not use capitals, bold, “!” without meaning. It dis-incentivizes your readers early on. You may need it later on with a call to action or stating a finding.

II. Storyline Must Tell a Story

Engagement is driven by the structure of the body of the message.

5. Self-centered: Too many “I” and “We” (5 in two sentences)- instead this should be about your customer.

Figure 4. Too many I’s and We’s in the email

6. Use of a voicemail story-line for email:

Figure 5. Storyline used in the email

III. Call to Action

The key role of the Call To Action (CTA) is to create engagement.

7. 2-Step CTA: Similar to web-traffic the more actions it takes the less likely it is a client responds. Research has shown 2-step CTA’s will reduce engagement in excess of 50%

Figure 6. Two-step call to action

Please feel free to click the link [step 1] below to schedule some time [step 2] on my calendar.

8. Customer Centric: Current CTA requires customer to take action as if the sales person is too busy.

9. Lack of personalization: No using first name. When asking people to perform an action, they are programmed to respond to first name.

Recommendations:

Figure 7. Revised call to action — making it customer centric

Figure 8. Revised call to action — making it conversation driven

IV. Close

The close indicates the time frame of a response. For example “Have a great holiday weekend” vs. “Looking to hear from you before the holiday weekend” drives two very different time frames of action.

10. No action Close: Use of “Thank you” indicates the conversation is over.

Recommendation: Looking forward to hearing from you.

However, in this case you get a better result by closing on the Call to action:

Recommendation: Mike, can you talk later this week to review your account?

11. Use of extended footer: An extended footer with HTML is prone to be caught by spam filters

Recommendation:

NAME OF REP | Direct line (XXX) XXX-XXXX | NAME@…..

12. PS: The most read part of the email — but don’t make it generic like “check out this 90 sec demo video”

Recommendation:

PS. If it helps open your calendar, I start my days at 7am.

Originally published at Sales Hacker.