Scalable email templates that feel like personalized one-on-one messages

3 Cold Email Mistakes That Ruin Sales Conversations

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Reaching out to leads via cold email can be intimidating at first. Your ego is on the line – will your message resonate with the people you want to start a sales conversation with, or will you be rejected or ignored?

If you’re selling to a broad range of titles and industries, it can be tempting to aim for the most generic message possible that could appeal to anyone on your list. Instead of narrowing down your audience and your value propositions, you pick the broadest reasons why someone would choose to buy your product or work with your company.

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5 Ways Self-Indulgent Sales Emails Turns Off Clients

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Most of us know shameless self-promotion in a cold email makes the sender look like an egomaniac who isn’t interested in getting to know their prospects. But sometimes, self-focused copy isn’t offending potential customers. It’s just making the emails utterly boring and incredibly forgettable. Watching paint dry is more exciting than reading a cold email where the sender keeps the focus completely on themselves.

Case in point, our latest Hall of Shame candidate:

Let’s start from the top to see how this email not only fails to capture our attention, but focuses so much on the sender’s perspective it’s impossible to relate to the email and feel compelled to respond.

  1. Poor targeting
    First, it’s clear the sender bought a poorly targeted list, since the recipient of this email doesn’t work in healthcare and never has. The priority here seems to be emailing as many people as possible instead of stopping to think which companies and individuals are a good match for the business. Prospects will take this to mean you don’t really care about their needs.  
    The fix: Researching your ideal targets and investing in a quality list is the first step to ensure your words won’t fall on disinterested eyeballs.
  2. Vague, selfish subject line
    “Quality IT Partners,” is so vague it would be easy to skip over in the inbox. It tells us nothing about the sender’s business or how it might help the recipient. In fact, it looks as if the sender tacked a subject line on last minute, without much thought. That level of laziness becomes self indulgent in the sense that it assumes the reader will open the email no matter what.
    The fix: A subject line like “{!Company}’s path to URAC accreditation” or “{!First}, is URAC accreditation on your mind?” is much more specific, and therefore does a better job of taking the recipient’s needs into account.
  3. Self centered from the start
    The first word of this email, “I,” tells you everything you need to know about the sender’s passion for focusing on who they are instead of what their prospect needs. The remaining lines follow suite: “We have,” “Would this service,” and “I would like.” The email is a story about the sender, not the recipient, and cold emails that are about anyone other than the recipient usually fall flat.
    The fix: Change “I” to “you” and adjust sentences to fit the second-person point of view.
  4. Bloated, meaningless credentials
    Words like “leader” and “expert” are undescriptive and meaningless without supporting evidence. Most often, a prospect will take those words to be bragging and move on without a response.
    The fix: Instead of a bland label like “leader,” the sender could opt for a descriptor that says, “recently featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for X” or “named the top IT accreditation company in 2017.”
  5. No social proof or mention of success
    Finally, the email falls short in the one place that it’s okay to be a little self-indulgent: the social proof. The body of the email tells you what the sender offers (accreditation experts), but gives no reason why the recipient should chose them over another company. In this case, a little bit of social proof or a statistic can go a long way.
    The fix: Dropping in the number of accreditations they’ve successfully obtained and the companies they’ve obtained them for plus a few other metrics of industry success (possibly mean time to accreditation?) adds significant value.

Have bad cold emails in your inbox? Send them to us!
Help us fight the thoughtless spammers, one crappy cold email at a time by sending us the worst cold emails you’ve ever received. We’ll put them up anonymously on the “Hall of Shame,” and shoot you an email when they go live.

Please send all submissions to “[email protected].” (And feel free to suggest what you want to nominate the bad cold email for!)

How to write unforgettable cold emails

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cold email storytelling

What was the first story you ever heard? For me, it was Sleepy Dog. As the title suggests, the book is about an exhausted puppy that doesn’t want to go to sleep and gets out of bed several times, probably making his parents wish they had never decided to have children.

“Sleepy sleepy up to bed. Sleepy sleepy sleepyhead.”

Two decades later, I still remember that book. The plot, the characters, the pictures, everything, down to the last word.

Studies show that today, people consume around 100,500 words per day, from text messages to emails, billboards to restaurant menus. That’s the equivalent of reading Wuthering Heights every single day.

Somewhere in that noise is your cold email.

Like Sleepy Dog, the best stories are like little brainworms– sticking around in our brains, occasionally coming to the front of our minds when something triggers it. Most cold emails are a soulless march through benefit after benefit, ending in a desperate plea for your prospect’s business.

Without an intriguing narrative, there’s no reason why your pitch will rise to the top. Want to turn your turn your cold emails into magical, brainworm-worthy narratives that won’t be quickly forgotten? Here’s three questions that will help you stick inside peoples’ minds.

Question #1) Why should the reader care?

Your prospects are reading a great American novel’s worth of words every day. As a result, the best way to get someone reading your cold email with interest (besides crafting a great subject line) is being able to relate to them.

The best way to accomplish this is by talking to people who fit your buyer persona. If that isn’t possible, a great second option is to search by job title on LinkedIn and read through a few profiles. See what skills they value and how they demonstrate their talent. The metrics they cite– number of deals closed, percentage of churn reduced– are good indicators of the things your prospect values.

Just telling a nice story about your product isn’t enough if it doesn’t address your buyer’s needs. A VP of sales doesn’t care about employee satisfaction metrics. But what he or she does care about is having an effective, insanely productive team. That’s the need your story should address.

Question #2) What’s your compelling story?

Every product’s features and benefits can be outlined in a way that resonates with your prospect’s biggest pains. By crafting them into a story, you can inject an element of reality that aren’t as visible in other types of emails. The most compelling stories draw the reader in and make them feel like they are the heroes, sent to save the day.

Here’s a few tips to help you get started:

  • Get your brainstorm on
Grab the closest dry erase board or blank piece of paper. Draw a circle for each benefit, spaced a few inches apart. Next, think about how each benefit might have a positive impact on a user’s life. For example, if the benefit is “reduce the amount of time it takes to screen applicants”, the impact might be “spend less time at the office and more time at the beach.” That’s a fantasy any HR manager can get behind.
  • Ask your customers
If you’re truly stumped, reach out to your best customers and ask them if you can interview them for a customer testimonial page or other marketing asset. Before the call, prepare a few good questions. Keep in mind that you’re trying to get your customer to talk about an experience they had with your product– this is your story! Good questions that will lead to great stories usually start with phrases like “Tell me about a time..” or “Give me an example of…”
  • Map out your cast of characters, setting and conflict
Once you have an idea of the story you’d like to tell, it’s time to lay out the basics. After you have this down, writing will be a breeze. CAST: Who is involved? Typically: you, your prospect, and a few examples of current clients. SETTING: When, where and why does your prospect need your product? CONFLICT: What’s the customer problem that your product can solve?

To help you along even more, here’s an example of an email that tells a great story about a fantasy football team:

SUBJECT: join {!Company}’s Fantasy Football sales team
Hi {!First},

Would you like to leverage the competitive spirit of fantasy football to give {!Company}’s sales team a new competitive edge? Applying the same mechanics of fantasy football, we helped [Client] 3x the average number of deals their sales reps closed over 6 months. When can we have a quick call to see if this same model could work for {!Company} or not?

Question #3. Why am I telling this story?

Just like knowing what your customer wants, it’s also important to keep in mind what YOU want. What are you trying to entice them into doing? How does your story lead them to the conclusion that they should get in touch with you?

The last line of your cold email story should entice them into turning the page by reaching out to you. If you’ve ever had someone spoil the conclusion to a book or movie before, you know how awful it feels. Once you know how the story ends, the magic is gone. It’s like skipping to the last page of the book and then having no motivation to go back and see how the characters got there.

The best types of stories reach conclusions that excite your prospects, not bore them. Just like not giving away the ending prematurely, you should keep your goal in mind as you write. Sometimes a story seems like a great idea until you realize that it’s missing a good call to action. When that happens, you don’t need to start over– just reread what you already have, revisit your notes and think about how you can naturally flow into a conclusion that fits with your company’s brand, product and marketing objectives.

Kathie Irwin is an L.A.-based copywriter and avid reader. 

For more tips on crafting killer cold-emails, register for Inside Sales’ online Web Conference on May 7 and watch Heather’s presentation on the “5 Secrets to Cold Email.”

Be a goat, not a sheep!

We always strive to create captivating copy that is unique, actionable and adds value to prospects’ lives.

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