Sending Cold Email? Here's some tips to get them opened...

I've likely sent well over a million emails over the years, and here are some to-dos I've discovered myself, as well as learned from my email mentors.

The difference between emails that get ignored and emails that work isn’t always the body copy… it’s what happens before the email is ever opened. Most people worry too much about the message itself, while ignoring what the reader sees first:

Your sender NAME, SUBJECT LINE, and PREVIEW TEXT. (the first sentence)

If your subject line fails, the rest of the email never even gets a chance.

Here’s help with subject lines that consistently get opened:

-Keep it under 40 characters

-Use lower case letters - especially now, so it doesn't look like AI

-Don’t make it obvious you’re selling... if they sense a pitch, it's dead

-Use curiosity, ambiguity, or something surprising

-Make them think "whoa!", "huh?", "WTF!", "why?"

-Write the subject line and preview text as a pair, since people read them together

And while I can write paragraphs on it, here are a few simple to-dos for the body text:

-Keep it as short as possible

-Write like you're talking to a 10-year-old