Cold email templates can make or break your outreach. Here are the ones that actually convert.

"The best cold email templates", the title may sound rather catchy and in reality it's because it truly is.

There is no "best template" for cold email, since every industry is different, every business is different, every prospect list is different, and every copywriter is different.

For example, you can't apply a cold email template from the car industry to the jewelry industry, it goes without saying.

Depending on your prospect, whether they are an individual or a professional, a salesperson or a manager, a decision-maker or an individual contributor, you shouldn't write your email the same way.

Logically, when you're doing cold emailing, your prospect list shares more or less the same characteristics. For example, your list might contain all the salespeople from tourism offices in the United States. Their characteristics are similar, they're all salespeople, they all work in a tourism office, and they're all American. This list would be coherent for cold email.

If on the contrary you want to target as many people as possible without any common characteristics, that's more like mass mailing. If that's what you'd like to do, unfortunately this article will only cover the best cold email templates. But it can still be useful to you, the two have some things in common.

So you'll have understood that a cold email template cannot be applied everywhere and at all times. You can, however, "draw inspiration" from one to craft your own personalized emails. The structure of an email will generally remain the same.

The key to success is to test as many of your ideas as possible and only keep the ones that work.

That's why we'll start this article with a guide to the "essentials" to have in a cold emailing campaign via Emelia, followed by some of the best templates you can draw inspiration from.

1. You need to start with a powerful hook. This hook is the most important element of your entire email, it must grab attention and spark your prospect's curiosity. It's what determines whether they want to keep reading. Without a full read of your email, there is no chance of conversion or of a click on a link. Before even thinking about converting, think about a persuasive and effective hook. You can perfectly start with a problem your prospect is facing, a relevant and intriguing question (intriguing doesn't mean mysterious but attention-grabbing), an upcoming event, or a connection you have with the prospect.

2. Your message must feel authentic. Personalization is the key in your cold email campaigns. Each of your emails must look unique in your prospect's eyes, they must feel that you took the time to write to them personally. That's why at Emelia we offer you the ability to create Variables (link) and Spintext (link). With these features, every email will be personalized and you'll be able to automatically choose to mention your prospect's name, their role, their company or any other (professional) piece of information you have about them.

3. Don't drag things out. Your message must be effective and quick to read. Don't paraphrase just to hit a minimum word count, and don't use overly complicated or pretentious terms. Your email should include a brief introduction of who you are, what you have to offer the prospect, and the action you want from them. That's it.

4. Emphasize the benefits you'll bring them. Many sellers make the mistake of talking about their products and services by listing their technical features. That's something you absolutely must not do, you need to focus on the value of your offer, you must emphasize the benefits your prospects will gain if they agree to move forward with you.

5. You absolutely need to include a Call-To-Action. Without one, the prospect won't think to contact you on their own or click on a link. The CTA must give a direct "order" to your reader's brain. It can be a word or a short sentence, like for example "Book your free slot" or "Click here". It's simply about giving your reader something to do, guiding them.

The subject line is to your reader's inbox what the hook is to the content of your email.

It's essential to write it well if you want any chance of your prospect clicking on your email rather than sending it straight to the trash or to SPAM.

There are 5 key points to writing it well:

1. Use variables. At Emelia, just like for your content, you can also use variables in your subject line. Putting information about your reader, like for example their first name, in the subject will immediately grab their attention. Your conversion rate will be directly correlated to your open rate, so think about personalizing the subject.

2. A subject line must be simple and easy to read. Don't forget there's a character limit on email clients and that many people today use their smartphone to read their emails. If you want to avoid your subject being truncated, keep it short.

3. The words in your subject must be punchy. There are words that have a direct effect on our brains, words like "best", "simple", "free", "official", "secret", "results", "proven", etc., will tempt your readers more and will boost your open rate.

4. A question can be a good way to interest the prospect. If it's well written, they'll likely click on it to get the answer to their question.

5. Don't lie. One of the temptations when you start in email marketing is to "lie" or exaggerate in the subject to boost your open rate. Reading the advice we've given you above, you've probably been tempted yourself, and that's a normal reaction. However, we advise against it, since when opening your email and reading its content, the prospect will realize they've been tricked and this is likely to frustrate them more than anything else. Don't lose sight of the fact that your primary goal is to get as many conversions as possible, not opens. There's no point in having a campaign where 100% of emails were opened but where none of the prospects took action.

Now that you have all the basic information and you know how to build your cold email campaign on Emelia, let's move on to some templates that are effective and that you can draw inspiration from.

The following template achieved a 100% open rate and a reply rate of over 62%, which is very high in the industry. This is the elite of cold email.

Subject line: {{companyName}} + e.ventures

Content:

Hi {{firstName}},

I'm an investor at e.ventures, an international venture capital firm with offices in San Francisco, Berlin, São Paulo, Beijing and Tokyo. We invest in early-stage and growth-stage companies, you may be familiar with some of our investments such as {{CompCompanies}}.

I came across {{companyName}} and I love what you're building. It would be great to connect with you to learn more about the team and your vision for the company, to see how e.ventures could contribute to your continued success. Below you'll find a snapshot from our internal tracking tool for your {{Sector}}, I thought it might interest you.

*Screenshot of the internal tracking tool*

Would you be open to jumping on a quick intro call in the coming days to see if there's a way for us to work together?

As you can see, the author used a lot of variables. We can spot firstName which is one of the essentials, the first name is very important for personalization. Then we have companyName in the subject, which is the name of the company the reader works at, this directly grabs the prospect's attention and increases the chances of an open. We have Sector which is the sector the target company belongs to. And finally there's CompCompanies which is a variable to display a company the investment fund holds a stake in. Generally it's in the same sector as the target company, which increases the chances the prospect is aware that the mentioned company exists, and therefore that they'll be naturally more engaged and attentive while reading.

Note that the Call To Action at the end of the email is very well done, it pushes the reader to reply to the email, even if the reply is negative. A negative reply is better than no reply at all, never forget that.

It's worth noting that in this example, the marketer chose to run a 3-step sequence. If the prospect replied to the 1st email, the next 2 steps were not triggered. If on the other hand the prospect didn't reply to the email, after a predefined time interval, the software (at Emelia we offer this in the features) would send a new step, meaning a new email:

Hey {{firstName}},

I was just wondering if you had a chance to look at my previous email? We'd be thrilled to meet on an intro call in the coming days or weeks.

I'd be happy to walk you through our investment philosophy and how we aim to help companies beyond simply injecting capital.

If despite this follow-up email the reader still didn't reply, the last step of the sequence was triggered:

{{firstName}},

3rd try but I don't give up that easily, because I'm really interested in what you're currently building, even if you can't say so right now!

Could you give me a call in the next two days?

That's how this cold email managed to reach a high reply rate, thanks to its deeply personalized content and regular follow-ups that remind the prospect they forgot to reply to you. Draw as much inspiration as you can from it to replicate a winning pattern, if this format fits your business.

The following email template is very different from the previous one since there's only one step in the sequence, but it achieved a reply rate of nearly 60%. Which is huge for an email with only one step, so once again this is the elite of what you can find on the internet.

Subject line: Invitation-only meeting for {{jobPosition}}.

Content:

Hi {{firstName}},

We're hosting a special, invitation-only meeting for the {{jobPosition}} role.

We'd love it if you could join us. Here's why...

{{reason1}}

{{reason2}}

There's only one thing you need to do at this point. Just confirm your attendance.

Oh, and in case you need more details about the event, you'll find everything here.

Looking forward to seeing you there,

{{signature}}

As you can see, this email is short and gets straight to the point. It isn't pretentious and provides clear goals. This is one of the reasons why this campaign was successful.

But that's not all, as you can see in the subject line, the writer used a jobPosition variable, meaning the person's job title within the company. By doing so, the marketer plays the exclusivity card, which sparks the prospect's curiosity, who will immediately open it since this email concerns them directly. While reading the email, your reader will feel special and part of an elite, since the email is exclusive to people of their rank.

However, exclusivity isn't everything, since if it concerns a kiddie duck-pond game, no one will be interested. That's why one of the other reasons for this campaign's success is that the copywriter added "reason" variables, which makes it possible to build a whole argument to convince the prospect to come to the event. Of course, the reasons are different depending on the profile and the information you have about your prospect. That's exactly what the Variable feature and the Spintext feature are for.

In short, draw heavily on the 2 templates we've offered, since in our opinion they are among the best on the market. We chose to offer you 2 and not 10 because that would risk misleading you and confusing the information in your brain. We took 2 very different cases, with different ways of working, so that you can gauge what's best for your business and adapt these examples to your own needs.

We hope this guide will have been useful to you. If you have any questions, feel free to browse the blog, and if you have more specific questions, to contact us.

We recommend the article "Launch my first cold email campaign with Emelia.io" (link) to learn more about how the software works. It's very simple to use and you can start using it for free today to run your first tests.