🥶8 Rules For Doing Cold Email Right

I don’t mean to brag, but I’m really good at cold email.

Like so good if you give me a valid email address and promise the person has a pulse, 10-1 odds I can get them to respond.   

But how?

By following these 8 Rules For Doing Cold Email Right. Use them to write better emails, get your messages read, and most importantly, responded to more often.

Rule 1: Decode The Decision Maker

When most people think about cold email, they wanna know, “WhAt ShOuLd ThE eMaIL sAy?”  

But this is a big mistake. Because the perfect message to the wrong person will always fall on deaf ears.

When I work with freelancers, emailing the wrong person is actually the #1 mistake I see people making.

They email people too high or too low on the totem pole.

For example, one of my students was trying to land deals with her favorite e-commerce brand. She wanted desperately to rewrite their email series and work with them on retainer.

When she showed me her outreach, it looked good.   Then I asked, “Who are you sending this to?”

And it was the social media coordinator!

This person’s job was to post on Instagram! So when she was emailing them, they had no idea what “email funnels” even meant.

If you want to get good at cold emailing, it’s critical that you learn how to spot the right person in an organization for your offer/cold email. Just go on LinkedIn and spend 3 minutes to find the actual decision maker.

Remember, the perfect message to the wrong person will always fall on deaf ears.

Rule 2: Your Email Must Pass The Zero-Friction Test

When it comes to cold email, friction equals death.

Remember, these are probably important and definitely busy people who don’t have time to answer 15 questions and weed their way through huge chunks of text.

Ideally, they should be able to read your email in 60 seconds (or less) and be able to respond with a simple yes/no.  

Don’t say, “Will you hire me to do email?”   That’s so complicated! For how much … when do you start … what are your references… who are you again?

Instead, say something frictionless that’s easy to reply to. Something like, “Do you have 15 minutes next Tuesday afternoon to discuss this?”

You can reply with one word and keep things moving.

It’s frictionless. It works.

Rule 3: Make a deposit before you withdraw

Gun to my head, I would never choose to cold email someone with a one-off message.

It’s so transactional and honestly feels too sleazy for my brand.

  Instead, I prefer to get on people’s radar ideally months but definitely weeks in advance of when I ask them for something.

How?

  I’ll send them a genuine compliment about something I noticed or liked about their site. I’ll retweet them or respond to their tweets a couple of times.

Basically, I just try to make a deposit in our relationship bank account before I make a withdrawal.

It helps not just because of the principle of reciprocity, but it also helps your name stand out in their inbox when you do reply.

Warning though: Don’t be cheesy. It needs to be a genuine compliment for this to work.

Rule 4: Perfect your 2-sentence pitch

 So many cold emails have all this blabbering backstory about who the person is and what they do and why they’re emailing me.

Breaking news: Nobody wants to hear your life story (I mean, I do, but not when you’re cold emailing) and it immediately gets your email trashed.

Especially if you write it in huge blocky paragraphs.

 You need to be quick and to the point about who you are and the value you add.   Whenever I was cold emailing I would say something like,

“Hi NAME, Was checking out your site and noticed a cool opportunity with your welcome series.

Didn’t want to overload you with a long email so I put together a short video to show you exactly what I found that could possibly double your email revenue.”

Then I’d link out to a quick 2-5 minute screen recording that showed them how I could help their brand.

That’s it. 2 sentences and I was done.

Rule 5: Find one weirdly specific thing to mention in your email

I’ve found if you can throw in 1-2 crazy specific details that show you’ve actually done your research about the person, you’re almost guaranteed to get noticed.   And getting noticed is an important way to tip the scales in your favor for getting a response.

Where do you get these things?

Sometimes they’ll mention them on their site.   Sometimes, you can just look the person up on Twitter or Facebook and see if there’s a topic they’re regularly talking about.

For example, for one brand I really wanted to work with, the founder was constantly tweeting about bitcoin.

So I threw in this mention of a new high in one email.

 And he mentioned it in his response. It’s the little details that make the biggest differences.

Rule 6: No carpet blasting your message

The point of cold emailing is to get in touch with a very specific person at a company that you’re interested in working with.   NOT to send it to hundreds of people per day.

And it works when you’re customizing your message to the person you’re emailing.

If you’re going to copy and paste the same message to 500 people per day, you’d be FAR better off to run ads to your services than cold emailing people.

Because even if you try to customize certain variables like the name, people can see straight through a blanket message.

 So just don’t do that.

Rule 7: No hard selling… but DO occasionally try hard smiling

Nobody likes to be hard sold. And yet this is the approach so many people take with their follow up messages.

  “If you do not reply, I will assume you are not interested and delete you from our database. Please reply by 4 pm today!”  

It’s like, “Okay buddy back off the ledge!”

Don’t try to do that. Be gentle. Be friendly and be humorous when you can.   I’ve used this gif with a message like, “I really hope my follow up isn’t causing you to do this…”