24 Best Personalized Cold Email Templates (With Tips)

Sales email tips and strategies

Have an ultra-refined prospect list

Make sure that your email list is ultra-defined before even considering sending a personalized email.

Build a super-refined list first. Know who your ideal customer is, and your prospect’s pain points.

If your product/service solves their bleeding neck problem, the chances of them responding will be so much higher.

Honestly, if you want to double your response rate, imagine a prospect who woke up one morning with a huge problem that your company happens to solve.

For example, an MSP. You sell an IT service, manage hosting, and offer support to your clients.

You have long sales cycles, big contracts, and usually people don’t switch their MSP often. But let’s imagine that you know the CEO’s server crashed just last night.

Their team will be working from home with no data, it’s just a disaster.

A waste of an entire workweek.

If you reach out during this time and offer a remedy to their pain point, are you going to have an easier time getting replies?

Well, the answer is pretty obvious.

You most probably will be getting more replies.

The sharper the pain point, the more desperate your prospects will be to find a solution.

Perry Marshall calls this a “bleeding neck problem.”

If you know who has a problem and this issue is keeping them awake at night, and your service solves this issue, you’re going to get more replies.

Here’s what to do…

• Firstly, list all the problems your product/service solves.
• Then, order them by most likely to be experienced often to least.
• Next, structure your cold email outreach campaign in such a way that your first email hits the most frequent pain point. Then your second email will mention the second-biggest pain point, and so on.

If you aren’t sure what your target audience’s biggest pain point is, ask your current clients what the biggest problem they are facing in their industry at the moment. 

Here’s an example

“On a scale of 1-5, what’s the biggest problem in your industry right now? What would be a 5?”

This can give you some insights on what to write in a cold sales email.

The Takeaway…

When building a cold email campaign always ask about the pain points listed and which one is most likely happening right now.

Structure your campaign around that.

But you can only reach out to the right buyer persona if you have done your research.

Use personalization

You should use personalization for 2 main reasons.

1. Personalized emails get more replies – It’s that simple

At Salesbread we analyzed data from 75 million emails sent with QuickMail.io. And time and time again, we saw that personalized emails received more replies. 

And it’s not just us who have seen this.

Forbes mentions how 80% of companies report seeing an uplift since implementing personalization, and how companies using advanced personalization report a $20 return for every $1 spent.

Here’s an example:

Which email do you think you would reply to?

A generic email that has probably been sent to thousands of other people…

Or…

You would most probably reply to the second email. 

Why?

Because it’s personalized.

Notice the immediate compliment? They also have a value proposition in the email. Basically, they want to offer “free advertising” by mentioning us on their podcast.

Plus, the email wasn’t generic, it was specifically for us at SalesBread.

The sender wasn’t trying to push a sale or their services on us. Instead, they were offering us something of value.

For us to be featured on their podcast, which in turn would give us exposure.

This shows the power of personalization. 

2. Personalization increases email deliverability

If you write the perfect email and send it to hundreds of people at the same time, it’s going to end up in spam. Your perfect cold email isn’t going to be seen by your prospects.

ESP’s hate spammers.

Once spam filters pick up on what you’re doing, they will block your emails from landing in a prospect’s inbox.

Welcome to cold email purgatory, thanks to mass email. DON’T DO IT.

If you develop a bad sender reputation, it’s really hard to fix that.

Personalization ensures that you develop a good sender reputation. 

This means fewer of your emails will end up in the spam folder; This in turn ensures that your prospects will see your emails, leading to better response rates.  

Research each prospect on your list

What most sales reps get wrong is that they use basic personalization and hit send via some automation tool.

If you want results, you’re going to have to dig deeper.

Personalization is more than just mentioning someone’s first name.

In fact, to get results, you’re going to have to research your prospects.

Here are some ideas:

• Google their name and the prospect’s company and see if they were featured in recent articles, or in the news.
• Take a look at their LinkedIn profiles – Is there any interesting information on their “about page” that you can use in your email?
• What commonalities do you share with the prospect? Do you perhaps have mutual connections on LinkedIn? Or do you both have a love of hiking?
• Have you read one of their blog posts and enjoyed something in particular?

Then… Think CCQ.

CCQ stands for:

• Compliment
• Commonalities
• Questions

When looking at your prospect’s info, think about what you could use to compliment them on, what you could mention as a commonality, or even what question to ask them.

Here are some examples of how you could use the CCQ method in your sales emails.

Compliment

Subject line: Featured on podcast?

Michaela, I really enjoyed your Ted Talk on {{topic}}. The part about {{specific point}} resonated with me. I’m reaching out to you because I’d love to interview you on my podcast.

Let me know if this might be something on your radar.

P.S. Congrats on your company winning {{award.}}

Commonalities

Subject Line: Jack Reamer

John, our mutual connection, Jack Reamer, mentioned that you’re the person to talk to about {{subject}}. He said that {{ company names}} does {{topic}}…

I’m curious to hear about how you deal with {{specific pain point}}?

Questions

Subject Line: Quick Question

Jack, I noticed that your company specializes in LinkedIn outreach. Curious to hear if {{company name}} makes use of any automation tools in the process.

We have heard that many b2b salespeople are struggling with things like {{pain points }} when using automation.

Do you find this to also be a problem?

When you show the prospect that you have done your research, it sets you apart from all the other “fake” or superficial emails. Personalization isn’t just adding a prospect’s name. 

This might make them more inclined to reach out to you.

This type of “sales psychology” is known as a pattern interrupt.

You’re doing something different from all the other b2b salespeople out there. This makes the prospect stop and change their usual pattern.

Write a custom intro for each prospect on your list

A custom intro consists of 1-2 short personalized sentences.

This opening line needs to be written in such a way that it captures a prospect’s attention. And you do this by personalizing the sentences with the information that you found.

You don’t have to personalize the entire email, but make sure that your first 2 intro sentences have been written specifically for the prospect. 

(The rest of the email body can contain a specific pain point and a value ad.)

Remember to be specific in your intro.

Compliment them on a specific article, or if their company received an award, mention that.

The more specific, the better. 

Use a “P. S” at the end of the email

Using a P.S. is another way to stand out.

For example, you could use the P.S. to compliment the prospect, or even drop a link to something that you would like them to see.

Your P.S. shouldn’t be a sales pitch, but rather something that can add more value to your email.

You could even mention something like:

“P.S.: If there are any connections in my network that you would like an intro to, I’d be happy to help.”

Don’t send long emails – Keep them brief

People don’t have time to spend ages reading long emails. If you’re writing essay-type cold sales emails, you’re going to lose your readers.

Keep the email to the point and brief. Have a max of 3 – 5 sentences.

You don’t have to mention everything about your product/service in your email. In fact, you shouldn’t.

What we suggest is adding only ONE value proposition in each email.

This gives you a reason to add a different value prop in your follow-up.

Here’s an example:

Short and to the point.

Make use of case studies and testimonials

In your email copy, you could also mention a testimonial or share a link to a case study. This creates social proof, which might make the prospect more inclined to trust your services.

You could even name-drop some companies that you have worked with, especially if they are well known, like NIKE or HubSpot.

Use a/b testing

A micro campaign has 2 segments. There will only be 1 email and 1 follow-up.

In total, you are going to write 4 different emails and then see which email and follow-up performed the best.

This will also give you an indication of which prospect list had the best response.

This will help you optimize your sales process, ensuring greater conversion rates because you are targeting the right people, and are sending out messages that prospects enjoy reading.

Write a follow-up email

You can make use of bump emails but try to not make it obvious that it is a bump email. For example, don’t say: Just checking if you saw my email.

Rather, say something like: “Should have probably added the link to my podcast.”

Use the Fibonacci sequence and write a follow-up email if the prospect hasn’t yet responded. 

Use a low-commitment CTA

We always use a call to action in our emails or LinkedIn messages.

A clear CTA lets the prospect know exactly what you want from them.

The trick is though, to make it as easy as possible for them to respond.

So instead of asking for a 45-minute phone call, ask for a quick 15-minute call.

A good CTA will motivate someone to either book a call with you, check out your demo, or sign up for an offer that you might have.

Do cold email subject lines matter?

This article explains that subject lines don’t make a huge difference to your open rates. The key is to write a killer email and keep your subject lines short.

So keep the above points in mind when writing hyper-personalized emails. If you do this, you will increase your reply rates.

Interested in learning more?

Check out some of our other articles, as we go in-depth into all things lead gen.

Or if you lack the time to run outreach campaigns yourself, or would just like some advice on how your sales team can hit better targets, reach out to us below for a free 15-minute strategy session.

We would love to help you find more qualified sales leads AND make more money.