Writing cold email that gets replies

Every email needs a reason it arrived today. A hire, a funding round, a product launch, a job posting that reveals a gap. If you can't name the trigger in one sentence, the prospect shouldn't be in the sequence yet.

Line one: the observation about them. Line two: the problem that observation implies. Line three: one sentence of proof that you've solved it. Line four: a low-friction ask. Anything that doesn't fit one of those four jobs comes out.

Two to four lowercase words that read like an internal note — a topic, not a pitch. No questions, no personalisation tokens, no curiosity gaps. The subject line's only job is to survive the preview pane.

Personalise the first line at the segment level, not the individual level, unless the deal size justifies manual research. Ten well-defined segments of fifty accounts beats five hundred lightly-researched one-offs, and it's testable.

Never send "just bumping this." Each follow-up introduces a new angle: a different pain, a relevant result, a specific resource. Three to four touches, then stop and recycle the contact into a later quarter.

Opens tell you almost nothing now. Judge on positive reply rate and meetings booked. High negative replies means the targeting is off; silence across the board usually means the offer isn't legible in the first two lines.