Good Cold Email Examples And 4 Keys That Made Them Work 

In today’s post, I’m going to be talking about cold emails, cold email examples and four tips that make them work.

And when I refer to cold email, this might be people who are cold prospects completely. 

It might be a decision maker, people you haven't engaged within a long while, or people you're in touch with on LinkedIn.

Or maybe you met at a conference, event, or social function. 

Just any group of prospects that you don't have much of a relationship with at this point.

People dislike cold email because most people are terrible at it. 

This is because they take one of two misinformed paths when it comes to cold emails and cold email templates. 

The Lazy Email Path

They get blinded by the idea of cold email automation and they forget completely about the recipient on the other end of the email. This can result in ineffective cold emails with little to no response rate. Many people will use the same cold email template for different prospects, which doesn't work very well. 

The “Silver Bullet” Cold Email Path 

They are looking for one magic cold email template that jam packs tons of info into it that's going to sell a cold prospect immediately. 

All that does is leave a bad taste in their prospect's mouth. These emails rarely get responded to and tend to have a very low open rate and response rate.

And that is what we are going to talk about today…

1. How to stand out from the crowd with cold email marketing campaigns
2. How to capture the attention of your ideal customer without annoying the email recipient
3. How to immediately transition from solicitor to valuable resource 
4. And, most importantly, how to actually get results from your cold email template and campaign (hooray!)

How Do We Turn Cold Prospects Into Leads and Clients?

I had the Connect 365 Director of Products, Pat Henseler, make a short video to go through everything in this post in more detail. I highly recommend giving it a watch.

Automate your cold email outreach and get dozens of templates inside of Connect 365. Request an invite to try it free here.

Today I’m going to go through the most important factors that you need to consider when creating a cold email campaign.

1. How to make the right introduction
2. How to structure your email to gain your prospect’s attention
3. What to say to build trust almost immediately
4. And how you can amplify your results at scale. 

And to be clear when I say “results,” I’m not talking about just opens and responses, but ultimately sales opportunities, getting the right people booked into sales appointments, strategy sessions, etc. 

So let's take a look at the four keys to getting your prospects to pay attention to. 

Tip #1: Make Your Cold Email Valuable, Not Commissioned.



The first tip is to make your cold email message valuable, not commissioned. 

One of the big mistakes I see whenever we have a new client come on board, and they have an idea for an email template or campaign, they quickly want to push their prospects into a sales call or a sales opportunity.

Try and engage your prospects in the email subject line and email copy, try and ask them questions, try and focus on a pain point or benefit, try and give them something of value. 

This is something we've learned from working with thousands of clients, analyzing millions of emails and the best cold email templates.

If you're too forward in your emails, or you have too thinly veiled a email message that makes it clear that you are trying to sell them something your prospects are going to tune you out every time.

If you treat people transactionally they are going to view your business as a pest instead of a peer. Especially when we're talking about cold prospects and new sales. 

Now, if you’re emailing people who have been engaged with your material and your content for a while now you can treat them a bit differently and be more aggressive in your approach, but for cold prospects, if you're too transactional, it's an issue. 

So the question remains, how can you make your cold emails effective? 

The Quality Content Approach to Cold Emails

To stand out from the crowd you have to start with quality cold email content that your prospect is actually interested in. 

And this cold email content should not be gated. Meaning they should not have to opt-in or buy anything to get the content. 

It should be something that they can access easily, a link to some valuable content that's going to help your prospect solve a pain point of theirs or, at the very least, gets them thinking about an issue or need that they are dealing with that you can solve. 

And if it's something on your blog or your own website, please, please, please do not send them to something like this.



Don't send them to some sort of like feature comparison or stuffy white paper from your cold email template. 

For most products and services you don’t need to make them work so hard to see how you can help. They may not even know that your competitors exist. Up until recently, they didn't even know you existed until you sent them an email. 

Start with email actionable content that gets them thinking about you as an asset. Include a call to action that makes it easy for the prospect to reach you or your company. You can get into the deeper content down the road when they tip their hand and show interest.

Keep reading to see what I mean. You'll also find examples of effective cold email templates we've seen.

The Interview Request Approach to Cold Emails

Another common cold email approach we use is getting our clients' foot in the door with their prospects by offering that prospect or decision maker a chance to get interviewed.

This could be for your blog, your podcast, to share into a LinkedIn group, etc. Whatever platform you can offer that the prospect may know.

The focus here is to disarm your prospects in the cold email by offering them something of value. Publicity, notoriety, backlinks to their website, or whatever benefit you can think of. And you don’t have to have a following or huge amounts of site traffic for your prospects to value this. Most will just be excited that someone wants to interview them about their company.  

And in that interview, make sure to use questions designed to get them talking about the types of pain points that you can solve. Which makes sense right? You are essentially asking if you can interview them on their experiences in an area that you are an expert in. This is a good way to get in front of the right person, whether it be a co founder, sales manager or someone else in charge.

Let’s say you are a local SEO agency and you want to build relationships with small to medium sized businesses in your market. You could offer to interview them about their business and their web presence in your cold email. There you can ask them questions like, “So how many monthly visitors do you get to your website every month?” or “What are you doing online to attract potential customers to your website?”

Chances are they are not going to be doing everything right. As soon as they mention that you can jump in and offer to take a deeper look to help them out. You are an expert in this area and can help them solve a problem or pain point that, before your call, they didn't even know they had. 

Again, the goal here is to get your foot in the door with your prospects. To get the right person to know and trust you will help seal the deal every time.  

The Group Invite Approach to Cold Email

Another cold email approach we use often is sending a prospect a friendly invitation to a relevant group on LinkedIn or Facebook. This could be a group that you run or manage… or just a 3rd party group that has a community created specifically for people just like your prospect. 

Feel free to invite them to any group your prospects may find interesting. And again, it comes back to the principle that cold email templates should be about starting a relationship, not closing it.

The Small Group Mastermind Approach to Cold Email

Finally, another ice breaker approach to consider is inviting your prospects to a mastermind. This is just a small group roundtable of you and your prospects where you'd be able to start relationships with a handful of ideal clients at once by facilitating conversation. Notice the catchy subject line that prompts prospects to open it.



This approach is one that I used for my agency, LinkedSelling, to close our highest value retainer client we’ve ever had. All I had to do was email some businesses who fit the mold of our clients. 5-6 agreed to meet for the mastermind. We each chatted about our businesses and what we need help with. 

I followed up with someone who needed sales and marketing help and BOOM… a prospect was turned into a new client, all because of a simple cold email template.

Tip #2: Your Cold Email Message Should Ooze Relevance 

By this, I mean that you should be as specific as possible to your recipients as you can, this includes the email subject line. The copy you use in your cold email campaign should feel like you wrote it specifically for your prospect, rather than just listing our your value prop. We've seen this done in some of the best cold email campaigns.

But that does not mean you are going to write a custom cold email to every single one of them. That would take forever. Instead, think about what common denominators your prospects have. 

Are they all marketing executives or is a specific decision maker in charge? Are they recruiters on the west coast? Are they facility managers who are in an area that was recently damaged by a hurricane or forest fire?

Be sure to call that out in your cold email. 

For instance, here’s an example of a cold email example that was part of an “Interview Request” campaign...



This email from a client of mine’s campaign was sent through Connect 365 and, as you can see, it looks exactly like it was typed out manually. But it wasn’t. It was actually sent to hundreds of sales prospects at once. 

But they would never know because they…

1. Called out the industry directly in the cold email to let them know that this is relevant to them and their line of business immediately
2. Included their company name to stand out from the hundreds of other cold emails they’ve gotten that day
3. Stroked their ego by comparing them to other “Top Marketing Leaders” in the area and therefore making this email feel like an honor

They made it clear why this email is relevant for THEM in THEIR world. 

Find that connective tissue between your prospects and make mention of it.

Here’s another cold email example that uses the group invite approach…



First off, if you go this route, you want to make sure that you make it very clear why your prospects should be interested.

It needs to be easy for them to understand that the group is a community of people that are just like them, both in the email subject line and in the copy. 

As you can see in the cold email example above, if you’re trying to get clients in the Commercial Construction space, inviting them to a group called “Commercial Construction Professionals” makes a ton of sense. 

And you get to break the ice without your company coming off as salesly or sleazy in your email.

Tip #3: Be Personal in Cold Email Templates, Not Robotic

This is IMPORTANT. You are a person. The person receiving your cold email is a person. So it makes sense to be as personal and relatable as possible in your emails, right? 

And it’s not just the words you use in your emails or the subject line but also in your email design and how you're delivering them. 

I’ve talked a lot about making your message or your offer feel unique to your prospect to avoid being overlooked. You need to stand out for this to work.

So we don't want a cold email to prospects looking like a newsletter like this…



This screams, “HEY, YOU AND EVERYONE ELSE I KNOW ARE GETTING THIS EXACT SAME MESSAGE”. 

Now there can be a place for that kind of email marketing. But again, we're talking about emailing people who you don’t have a relationship with. Keep in mind, they don’t want a sea of information and stock photos about what you do. 

This type of cold email example is going to go straight to the promotions folder. It's going to be ignored. You might even make some people upset by using this cold email template. 

This kind of stuff is why people see email (both cold email and warm email) engagement rates plummet. In 2019 alone, email rates fell by 8%. 

The inbox is a competitive place. You need to be able to stand out and by zigging where others are zagging. From the email subject line to the first line of copy, your email templates need to be different than the competition.

Your Cold Email Template Should Be Personable

You need to have a more personal look to your cold emails. By sending out cold emails that looks personal and not like they were from an email template. That's delivered just like if you sat down and sent that message to someone individually, you are going to get a better response and open rate as a result. 

Here’s an exercise: the next time you are going to write a cold email, even if you are sending it to hundreds of people, write with one person in mind. Write like you are sending it to a specific person. Notice the differences in how you would speak to one individual as opposed to a group of people. 

It's going to be a little more informal, a little more off the cuff, and feel less like a sales email. Shorter sentences. Smaller paragraphs. That type of approach with your copy helps you sound more personal and less robotic. 

It feels organic and works.

Again, see how I did that here in this cold email example using the Mastermind Approach



And lastly, for your initial cold emails be sure to end it by asking them to respond to a specific question. This is really important when you’re asking an ideal customer or decision maker to agree to a meeting. 

Don’t make the mistake of just dropping a calendar link in the cold email and expecting them to click it and book a call. Instead of a normal call to action, ask them if a specific time works for them. Make it super easy on them to turn this into a 2-way conversation. Make it uncomfortable for them to ignore the question. Like you are waiting on their response before you can move on. 

Once you get that first response your chances of success are very good.

Tip #4: Cold Email is Sequential, Not One-And-Done  



As with any kind of marketing, it takes multiple touchpoints at times to breakthrough. That’s why you need to think of your outreach as a deliberate sequence instead of an individual message. 

Likewise, you don’t want to load up a single cold email with everything someone needs to know about you and your products and services. 

It won't work. 

It's going to fail. 

Then you’ll get frustrated. 

And give up. 

If you are looking for a quick-fix silver bullet insta-close email, I recommend to stop looking now. It's a waste of your time. And that type of thing is not a long term stress. That's going to get resolved consistently. That's going to bring in new opportunities. 

Long term success with cold email is only possible through sequential and consistent messaging and touchpoints. The graphic above is from a Microsoft Study that interviewed 13,000 sales professionals. They found that, on average, it takes 7 touch points before a prospect will agree to a meeting. This means you could be cold emailing for weeks before getting a response, but it works!

But the staggering part is that FIFTY F$%&ING PERCENT of sales professionals gave up after a single unanswered email. 

89% gave up after the 4th attempt even though they KNEW that it takes an average of 7 attempts before you will be successful. 

Absolutely insane. 

So just by sending a single follow-up email, you are 50% more likely to get your prospect’s attention than your competitors. 

That means that you want to have a series of cold emails ready to roll and queued up before you even plug in your prospects into the campaign. 

And if you follow the four cold email tips that I laid out in this post…

1. Make Your Cold Email Valuable, Not Commissioned
2. Ooze Relevancy
3. Be Personal, Not Robotic
4. Cold Email is Sequential, Not One-And-Done

They're foundational best practices for cold email templates and campaigns. They are tried and true. But you might be thinking that they sound too simple. They are simple by design. It’s not complex to send your friend a personal email. That’s essentially what you’re doing here by creating effective cold email templates. 

The truth is most people don't do the simple things. 

“Business schools reward complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.” Warren Buffet

Entrepreneurs have been sold on the myth that they need some complex funnel with all the bells and whistles to be successful. 

But that’s just not the case. Simple, calculated, consistent email outreach and follow up is all 90% of businesses need to generate consistent growth. 

That’s what Connect 365 does for our clients by…

• Sending personal outreach or follow up emails to dozens or hundreds of potential clients in a way that gets an average of 2x-3x better engagement rate
• Scheduling out sequences of emails all at once so that you can have weeks or months of cold emails queued up at once
• Providing dozens of proven cold email examples and templates preloaded in every account that can be tweaked and launched in a matter of minutes with a click of a button
• Attracting and building sincere relationships with your perfect prospects and ideal customer in as little as 60 minutes a month

So if you'd be interested in learning more about how our customers are using these four keys to generate better results from their cold email and follow up you can request an invitation to try it out free for 14-days.