Come and say hi over on telegram!
[ Ссылка ]

In order to get replies, a cold email has to be short yet powerful, and intriguing. For this reason, each part of this short message has to deliver value and play a crucial communicative role.

At Woodpecker, we get an inside look what determines whether a message will have a high response rate or not. Using what we’ve learned, we’ve put together these 6 tremendously important steps to write effective cold emails for sales.

To begin with, let’s take a closer look at what a cold email is today and how the approach to writing cold emails has changed over the years.

Cold emails are a way to start and maintain business relationships.

To get a better understanding of what they are, let’s think of how business relationships develop in the offline world. Usually, everything starts with a conversation…

Here’s one of the possible scenarios: a salesperson goes to an industry conference or trade to meet new customers. During the event, they look for opportunities to start a conversation. But their goal is not to pitch their offer or brag about their company. They want to break the ice and start a dialogue. They aim at learning more about their prospect’s business and building a rapport with them.

Outbound sales effort follow the same principles. Cold email are a way to start a conversation in the online world. It’s a great way to reach out to a person who most likely knows nothing or very little about your company. Since it’s the first time they hear about you, we say they are “cold” leads.

The goal of a cold email is not an instant conversion, but building the relationship from strangers to business partners. In other words, to warm those leads up little by little.
Cold emailing has come a long way since it was first used in sales. It used to be that the sole purpose of sending cold emails was to pitch the offer. Usually one, generic message was sent to a large group of prospects without any personalization or segmentation whatsoever.

Since the method was new and not many people did business via email yet, such a mass-sales-oriented approach actually worked great as a lead generation method. But the more copy-paste type of messages flooded the prospects’ inboxes, the less effective this approach became. People grew sensitive to the salesy tone and the generic character of cold emails.

The approach to sending cold emails has evolved significantly since then. Messages with an aggressive sales pitch are now bound to fail. Also, impersonal, one-size-fits-all type of emails are no longer effective.

Nowadays it’s all about building a relationship with a prospect. Cold email copy should be focused on the recipient, not your product or service. Put yourself in their shoes. From the very first email, a prospect should feel that you understand their business and the challenges it entails. Don’t jump to making the deal straightaway. Instead, let your prospects tell you more about what they struggle with in their daily work. Then show them how these processes can be improved or done in a more efficient way.

Personalization is key to winning prospects interest these days. Therefore, prospecting also plays an important role in the overall success of your cold email campaign.

Furthermore, personalization can now address the exact reply of your prospects through different versions of a follow-up and defining a trigger action that pings it.

The more you learn about your prospects, the easier it will be for you to craft a message perfectly tailored to the particular prospect segment.


A cold email is an unsolicited e-mail that is sent to a receiver without prior contact. It could also be defined as the email equivalent of cold calling. Cold emailing is a subset of email marketing and differs from transactional and warm emailing.

Cold email is a personalized, one-to-one message targeted at a specific individual. Its aim is to get into a business conversation with that individual, rather than to promote a product or a service to the masses. Cold email, according to its proponents, is not spam. However, if certain steps are not followed, it may be treated as spam by spam filters or reported by the recipients.
Email deliverability is the percentage of emails that got successfully delivered to the inbox, instead of getting blocked or classified as spam.

Email deliverability is not the same as email delivery. Email delivery is the percentage of emails that got successfully delivered to the recipient's email address, regardless of whether it is the main inbox or any other folder, including spam.

Email deliverability is especially important for cold email senders because their goal is to have their email delivered to the recipients' main inbox.

свернуть