Cold Email Strategy: Everything You Need to Know

Mark Lindquist

April 20, 2020

Contents

There is a lot out there on how to send cold emails that convert.

But through all the templates, examples, best practices, and anecdotes, there are really only about 10 things you have to get right:

Set a goal to move the prospect to the next phase, whatever that is for your business; not to make the whole sale in a single email
Have a well-researched list of relevant prospects
Maximize deliverability by setting up the “technical stuff” with your email service provider
Don’t send too many emails at once
Personalize (but not too much)
AB test your subject lines, because what works for one industry won’t for another
Keep your emails concise and benefits-focused
Always have a single, clear CTA
Always follow up multiple times
Leverage multiple channels, including social media and phone

Knowing what to do is the easy part. Knowing how to do it is where things get tougher.

We’ve helped thousands of customers send millions (and millions, and millions) of cold emails. Below is everything we’ve learned

Cold email strategy

The Cold Email Masterclass

An 8-chapter eBook with everything we know about cold email, including:

Building your outreach list
Copywriting subject lines and body copy
Personalization
AB testing
Following up
Interviews with sales experts

If you want to learn about the strategy of cold email, start here.

The Cold Email Academy

This series gets into the technical “nuts and bolts” of:

Building and cleaning outreach lists
Setting up your email system
Structuring your emails in ways to make them easy to open and read
Personalizing, following up, and testing

Once you’ve finished the Masterclass, the academy will take you to the top 1% of cold emailers

How to Use the AIDA Model in Sales Emails

Our favorite copywriting formula: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. This article walks through (with examples) how to leverage the AIDA formula for your outreach.

Cold Email Tips: 5 Ways to Take Emails from Boring to High-Converting

A list of practical tips to live by in your cold emails, along with examples of good and bad emails.

How to Personalize Any Cold Email Using The “CCQ Method”

Personalization is key to an effective cold email campaign. This article/interview cold email expert Jack Reamer dives into his CCQ Method for personalization; that is, personalizing an email via a commonality, compliment, or question.

Cold email templates

Cold Email Subject Lines: 12 Best Practices + 38 examples

You won’t get anywhere if people aren’t opening your emails. Follow these 12 best practices, and draw inspiration from 38 subject line examples, to make sure you’re maximizing your open rates.

15 Cold Email Templates To Generate More Leads

Everything you need to start writing your cold emails. Best practices for subject lines, body copy, CTAs, personalization, with 15 templates and an overview of how to get the most out of templates you find online (because copypasta never works).

Meeting Request Email Templates + Subject Lines

Cold email is all about moving prospects to the next step of the sales process. Often, that’s requesting a meeting. This article dives into meeting-request email best practices and templates.

7 Effective Sales Email Templates

This article simplifies writing sales email copy down to 4 main elements: opening, offer, closing, and signature, then shares 7 structures to try for your next email, and examples of each in action.

16 Email Outreach Templates for Every Situation

Getting beyond sales, this article shares cold email examples for marketers, community-builders, and anyone else doing cold email for reasons that aren’t the typical prospector.

How to Get Past the Gatekeeper (With Templates)

Your first connection into a company will often be a gatekeeper, tasked with preventing an overload of requests to a higher-up. Follow these best practices and templates to turn a gatekeeper into an ally.

Maximizing cold email deliverability

Deliverability help docs

We’ve organized everything we know about maximizing deliverability in our help doc series. Included are videos walking through specifically how to set up your email, warming up a new email address, and testing deliverability.

Step-by-Step Guide to Optimizing Your Cold Email Deliverability

Beyond the technical elements of deliverability, this article dives into more strategy related tools to use and best practices to follow to maximize deliverability.

The Practical Guide to Staying GDPR Compliant With Your Cold Emails

Cold email is still allowed by GDPR, but there are steps you have to be taking to make sure you’re in compliance. This article dives into those steps.

How to Warm Up an Email for Cold Outreach

If you create a new email address for cold outreach, you have to make sure it’s set up properly and ramps up it’s sending schedule over a period of weeks; otherwise, you’re risking getting blacklisted and banned. This article gives you everything you need to know to warm up an email address for outreach.

Cold email use cases

An Agency and Consultant’s Guide to Cold Email Acquisition

Laura Lopuch is a cold email consultant who has helped dozens of agencies leverage cold email as an acquisition channel. Laura shares her process and best practices in this article.

How to Perform Cold Email Outreach for PR

Cold email is the most effective way to connect with journalists and members of the media. This article shares best practices for using cold email to generate PR.

Cold email case studies

8 Lessons from Firing Squad on Optimizing Cold Email Performance

Firing Squad is an agency that specializes in cold email outreach. Here, they share 8 lessons they’ve learned from sending over 140,000 cold emails via Mailshake.

How Michael Brennan Use Mailshake to Save a Ton of Time on Link Building Campaigns

Michael walks through, step-by-step, how he uses Mailshake cold email to generate hundreds of links for himself and his clients.

How Ashley Ryan Builds Authenticity at Scale With Mailshake

Ashley Ryan has closed over $100,000 in sales using Mailshake for cold email. She walks through her process in this article.

How inBeat Uses Cold Email + LinkedIn to Connect Brands with Influencers

InBeat uses Mailshake cold email and social selling to prospect for their own business, and to connect their clients with influencers in their space.