6 Cold Email Rules Based on 10,615,314 Emails Sent

Forster Perelsztejn Nov 8, 2019 — 10 min read

That’s what we do here at Overloop: we help customers set up and launch cold email campaigns. Lots of campaigns. In fact, 10,615,314 emails have been sent from our platform since we launched it, by customers ranging from Cloudera to AdRoll to 87seconds.

This a lot of data from which we’re able to extract patterns; see what works… and what doesn’t.

When we realized that our own customers had trouble writing great emails and mostly yielded poor results, we figured it was time to work on some cold email templates

Most of the templates you’ll see below are based on the exact emails our sales team uses to reach out to prospects and eventually convert them. The rest is emails we ourselves received that we found were pretty solid or stuff we grabbed from people we know to be authorities.

I compiled them into a list that will hopefully fit every situation you might find yourself in when it comes to getting in touch with potential customers.

Shall we get to it?

A few general rules

Even though they’re all meant to be used in different circumstances, the cold email templates below do obey the 6 Commandments of cold-emailing:

• Nail that subject line. That’s the difference between an opened and an unopened email. According to Convince and Convert, 35% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone.
• Keep it short. They don’t know you, and they’re probably busy. Be smart, don’t waste their time with a foot-long page of information, you’ll have all the time to discuss that further down the road.
• Make it personalized. Don’t just make it “personal” with merge tags, show you actually did some research. Mention their industry, competitors from the same niche, events they have attended, etc.
• Bring social proof. If you can flash a few relevant names and data, knock yourself out. Bonus point if you’re already in touch with businesses or people they personally know.
• Customize your from field. According – again – to Convince and Convert 43% of email recipients click the Spam button based on the email “from” name or email address. Would you rather open an email from Google or Larry at Google?
• Avoid SPAM filters. According to a research by Cisco Systems, no less than 86% of the world’s email traffic is spam, which is why the war against spam is tougher than ever. Which is also why you’d do best not to use any spam trigger words, not attach files, or use URL shorteners!