Top 8 Cold Email Templates for Crushing Outbound in 2020

Everyone knows cold email is dead, right? Hell, Neil Patel says 75% of cold outreach emails “aren’t even seen by real people”. Ouch! But, it makes sense. I don’t know about you, but I get 150-200+ emails a day. Every. Single. Day. And, that’s after setting my spam filter to lock things down pretty darn tight.

Every morning I wake up to one of:

Really; which kind of businesses and where? Because if I say, ran a service company in New Mexico that would be an awfully different sell then if I was a corn farmer in Iowa. Just saying.

Really? Well considering I’m not a “Ms”, I’d say your targeting strategy needs more targeting.

How come my bank or the power company never says that? Nobody with anything important to say needs to shout “don’t delete”.

The list goes on and on; to the point you actually start to feel sad for the sender. At Text Blaze we work with sales teams at scale every day, so this is particularly noticeable to us because we are intimately aware that there is a better way out there. We put it in action every day.

Keys to a successful cold email strategy

The subject lines

What would you do if you got the following email:

“$$$#1 Best ever!!!$$$ Make Millions tomorrow!!$$!”

I sure wouldn’t open that. But what if you got this:

“Dan, it’s your mom. Your dad got hurt. We can’t reach you, call ASAP”

Assuming you are Dan, you would probably open that right away. Now, those are two extremes, but it illustrates a point. The more personal an email is to you, the more likely you are to open it. None of us would open the first one, and we all would open the second. It doesn’t get more personalized than an email from mom.

Hubspot has some great stats on what makes for a great subject line. Of particular interest:

• 35% of recipients open email based on the subject line alone

So, yeah...you might want to nail that one. Focus on things like:

• Keeping it to 60 characters or less
• Including the recipient's first name
• Having an emoji in your subject line can increase open rates

Make it personal, but keep the personalization appropriate

To some degree, this roughly breaks down as B2C vs B2B, but even in the B2B space it also has some gradient based on the level of the person you are reaching out to.

In the B2B space, personalization is critical, especially the higher up the chain you go. Senior executives get hundreds of emails each day, most of them promising to solve every problem under the sun, and the moon. Guaranteed. By tomorrow.

And, the higher up you go, the more personally connected to the brand/company the executive tends to be. If you are reaching out to the founder of the company, the chances are that's their baby. That’s what they obsess about. Personalizing your email to the company/brand is a lot like asking a proud parent how little Johnny is doing in t-ball, it’s a great entry to get them to talk about something they are passionate about. So when you reach out to a founder/senior exec, say something about them that shows you did your research, and definitely show you know something about their business, and them.

With lower level employees, it’s a little bit more iffy. They generally aren’t as used to receiving super personalized messages, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t personalize. In this case though, make sure to focus on their company and their job function, not as much them personally.

The B2C space is a little different. Just...don’t. Unless you have a specific pre-existing relationship, don’t send a super personalized email, you will just come across as a creeper. Think about how you, or maybe your sister would feel getting some random email from a source that knew a whole lot about you? Just, don’t.

Best practices on what to say

Best practice template lists are always a little tricky because while there are definitely “best practices” and standardization across teams is critical, there is also a risk of coming across as too “salesy” or not letting the reps personality shine though. Different messages resonate with different people, and relying too much on templates can stifle that.

One way our most successful users address this, which we use internally at Text Blaze as well, is to take a multi-pronged approach. We have our standardized templates (we call them "snippets") that we use and those makeup maybe half to three quarters of our outreach. For the rest we encourage our reps to create their own snippets and try out different combinations. And, since we all have our snippets shareable across the team, we can try different combinations of everyone's best idea. A template is great, but the collective creativity of the team, combined with rigorous data analytics is really special.

8 email templates that work

Let's look first at three examples we use successfully internally at Text Blaze, and then we will look at some best practices from other organizations.

#1: Short and Sweet

This email is one of the first templates we came up with. It’s persona based, and focuses on the recipient and what we can do for them, not on us.

#2: Short and Sweet – dynamic

This template is similar, but we can dynamically use it for either Sales or Customer Experience as appropriate. A key value driver for Text Blaze in using this approach is that we can test wording into different verticals and test how the same wording works in different environments, giving us insights into how our different personas respond to different messages.

Note that in the following example we are using Text Blaze dynamic replacement commands to include form fields and make the snippet dynamic.

#3: Time bound sense of urgency

Most organizations run specials, limited time offers, or the like to create a sense of urgency. We do too, and below is an example. A particularly effective way of doing this is combining it with a monthly newsletter that talks about your product/service’s awesome new features.

One of the cool things we use here is that we can set the date for say, a week from today, and the date field will always display correctly when we pull this up, no changes needed.

#4: Relate it to recent events

Replyify has a great email related to something that happened recently. With the tools we have available to us (Looking at you LinkedIn Sales Nav!), it’s easier than ever to get updated when a trigger event happens for our prospects. People love talking about themselves, and they especially love talking about the cool new thing that just happened in their life. This can be a perfect intro to a great conversation.

#5: Getting the introduction

Life Long Learner has an interesting take on how to get an intro to that person you really want to talk to. What we see with this approach is that it is kind of a long shot in that the success rate for responses isn’t as high as some of our more direct approaches, but the payoff when it does work is huge. A warm introduction works wonders.

#6: When you don’t know if you have the right person

Over at Ubiq they used to have a really interesting template on how to reach out if you aren’t totally sure you have the right person. This can happen for instance if you are selling into the sales or customer success space but aren’t sure exactly which leader you need to connect with.

#7: When you see someone visited your website

When your marketing team is on point, you often know when someone has visited your website. The folks over at Contact Monkey have an interesting template for reaching out to folks who take an action on your website. One thing to note here, sped of response is critical. The difference between this email going out a few minutes or an hour after the action and three weeks after the action is huge. With the latter, might as well save your time, it’s a wasted opportunity.

#8: Provide awesome information

With cold email prospecting it’s not just about the initial email. According to Hubspot, eight touches is a good benchmark for the number of touches required for “prospecting success”. With that in mind, the folks at Mailshake have a great template for reaching out and continuing an outreach sequence and actually providing value instead of just “wanted to check in…”

Ultimately, cold outreach takes time and practice. It needs to be tailored to your industry, your company culture, and your reps personalities. You have to text, experiment, and see what works for your team!

Want to turbo charge your work with templates and snippets? Text Blaze is the fastest way to do that.

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