Should We Use the ‘Most Effective’ Cold Email Templates?

How many ‘most effective’ cold email templates have you already seen on the web? How many of them do you know by heart? The ‘most effective’ phrase means that it worked great for a person who used it in the first place.

It’s a shame many cold email senders take it as the ‘most effective’ template ever that works always and for everyone. How to use the ‘most effective’ email templates in our cold email outreach? Should we use them at all?

How did the ‘most effective’ email templates work a few years ago?

We all know the famous approach by Aaron Ross from his bestseller Predictable Revenue, or Bryan Kreuzberger’s Breakthrough Email method. I see those as pioneers in the new approach to cold email. Without them, we probably wouldn’t do all the things we do with cold emails nowadays.

How do the ‘most effective’ email templates work today?

Those classic templates of the pioneers are awesome, and they definitely brought tons of new leads to people who used them. The problem is that because the templates worked so well, more and more people decided to make them a part of their own email outreach. And not in a creative way, but in the “copy-paste” way.

(…)

If you are the appropriate person to speak with, what does your calendar look like?

If not, who do you recoomend I talk to?

Thanks,

[SIGNATURE]

 

As a result, some addressees could get 5 cold emails a week which all were basically the same email template with different personalization data inside. And that’s a bummer…

So should we forget about the ‘most effective cold emails’ once and for all?

I wouldn’t go that far. Even if such templates are already worn out a bit, they still use some great techniques which we can include in our own cold email outreach. The key is to use them right.

Heck, at Woodpecker we even created a PDF report including the cold email templates that worked great for the people who wrote them. Additionally, we carried out an analysis on each of them and tried to pinpoint the mechanisms which actually made them work.

To download the report for free, sign up under this post.

Such an analytic approach to the ‘most effective’ cold emails allowed us to understand the reason why something works or doesn’t work in cold email. Having discovered that, we could work on our own cold email copy which wasn’t just a patchwork of sentences taken out of different templates, but copy that was original, well-personalized and thus effective.

What’s in it for you?

So how to use the templates that were extremely effective for other people?

Rule #1 Don’t be lazy

Copy & paste approach hardly ever brings positive effects, not only – but especially, when it comes to cold email outreach. Read as many templates as you can and learn from other people’s success and failures. But do not just copy & paste. Ever.

Rule #2 Be analytical

While reading the templates other people came up with, try to identify some cold email patterns. Divide each email into parts. Identify the role and purpose of each of those parts. The analysis will help you organize your own email copy later.

Rule #3 Keep your addressees in mind

Remember that you reach out to a specific group of addressees. A ‘most effective’ template which works for personal trainers will not necessarily work for SaaS marketing managers. Do some research on the people you are going to write to and only then start creating your cold email copy.

Rule #4 Practice, practice, practice

Trends in cold email change quite fast, so it’s good to keep up and improve your copy with time. What worked a couple years ago, probably won’t work so well nowadays. Take for instance the template with 3 options to choose from.

It’s a realy nice touch that worked awesome for us, but again, because it’s so great, many people use it and it kind of stops being funny for the addressees who’ve seen it in a twelfth cold email in a row.

Be careful with overusing the well-known touches. Find some creative ways to modify them for your own purposes. By making some changes from time to time you will also prevent your own email templates from wearing off.

For a good piece of analytical approach to some effective cold email templates worked out by successful start-up entrepreneurs, sign up for 15 Cold Email Templates that Will Get You Leads below this article.