The lead generation space has become more crowded than ever. While there isn’t a lot of differentiation between most sales prospecting tools, there seems to be at least a dozen new ones every week.
In this increasingly competitive and commoditized market, companies struggle to stand out in their cold emails. But bold font is not the solution to differentiation.
Our readers nominated Velocify’s cold email for the Hall of Shame because of their curious and excessive use of bold font, but there are actually several deeper issues worth solving first.
Let’s take a look at their email, below:
From the start, the intro is too self-focused and doesn’t relate to the recipient’s needs at all.
The rest of their email is just stuffed with every possible feature, combined with weird bold text and jargon (high velocity outbound prospecting of accounts?!). I can only guess that this is an attempt to show-off.
When I read this email as a recipient, I think:
“How is this any different from the dozens or even hundreds of “sales acceleration” software out there? I don’t feel like this is interesting enough to reply to, since none of the features are all that impressive or compelling. There isn’t any social proof. Plus, all this bolding is making my head spin. Can I hit the delete button NOW?”
Attempting to highlight all their features in their first email just overwhelms the recipient, and decreases the chance of ever getting a response. The better approach would be to share one savory benefit per email, planting intrigue into a prospect’s mind and giving them an incentive to respond.
How to Fix This Bad Cold Email:
Instead of tackling every use case the product provides, the sender should approach it from one specific pain point, and paint a story for the recipient.
For this example, if I was to rewrite this email to target a Director of Sales, and I was going to focus on the benefit of increased sales productivity, I might say something like:
Subject: sales productivity hack for {!Company}
Hi {!First},
Most sales reps spend only 39% of their time each week actively selling.
[Have a descriptive 1-2 sentences on what the other 61% of time is eaten up by.]
[Explain how you’ve helped one of your clients make their sales reps more productive and efficient through automating 80% of their daily manual tasks. It’s important here to quickly describe how you were able to do this; focus on what sets you apart from another sales acceleration solution.]
Would you like to see how this could work for {!Company}?
Thanks,
[Name]
In the rewrite framework, I’ve addressed these issues with Velocify’s cold email:
- Hooking the recipient with a statistical nugget that quantifies a pain point
- Describing a single pain point Velocify solves for the presumed decision maker, with a possible solution for that problem, in the form of a mini-case study that provides social proof
- Eliminating jargon and bold from the email that would overwhelm and turn-off prospects
Bragging about every single feature you have doesn’t work well for cold emails, especially when you’re in a commoditized and crowded space, like lead generation tools. Instead, just focus on telling a story around a specific pain point, and how you can solve this problem for the recipient.
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!”)
