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The Cold Email Guide
Episode 37
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Today at a Glance:
One cold email can literally change your life. But a cold email success is never an accident. You need a framework for writing and executing highly-effective cold outreach.
The principles of a great cold email: Short & Sweet, Personalized, Credentials or Social Proof, Create Value, and a Clear Call-to-Action.
Importantly, these principles apply to any form of cold outreach (Twitter DM, etc.), so can be leveraged broadly for a variety of use cases and needs.
The Cold Email Guide
One cold email can change your life. It can open doors to a new job, secure a new mentor, or unlock new opportunities.
A cold email—as an investment—has the ultimate asymmetric return profile: Huge upside, limited downside.
In this piece, I will attempt to deconstruct a framework for optimizing your cold outreach in order to further accentuate that beautiful return profile…
Background
I’ve sent (and received) a lot of cold emails—some great, some not.
What I've learned: a cold email success is never an accident. There are very specific principles of great cold emails that you can apply to enhance your cold outreach efforts today.
The best part? The results are instantaneous.
So let’s just dive right in…the core principles of a great cold email:
Short & Sweet
Personalized
Credentials or Social Proof
Create Value
Clear Call-to-Action
I’ll cover each principle and then workshop a few examples:
Short & Sweet
If you're sending a cold email to someone, remember that the person receiving it probably gets a lot of these. They don't have time—or energy—to read through long and winding notes.
Keep it short and sweet!
Space out the text to make it optically inviting. To bring this point to life, here are two emails—identical content, different spacing.
Option A:
Option B:
Same exact email—one a block of text, one spaced out. Option B (the spaced out version) is so much more digestible and optically inviting for a reader. As such, Option B is much more likely to elicit a response.
Personalized
No one likes a generic email—it's going to get auto-deleted 99% of the time.
Personal touches can make all the difference in the effectiveness of a cold email. They require a bit more upfront time investment—for background research, diligence, and execution—but have
Published on 4 years, 1 month ago