Bad Cold Emails.

The internet has now been around for over 40 years.

Throughout that time it’s evolved exponentially, toward an evermore connected, fast, reliable, and diverse world-wide web.

Yet even with all that has changed about the internet over these last 4 decades, the primary way we communicate with eachother has remained the same: email.

It’s a beautiful thing really. How seemingly each year a handful of new, ‘revolutionary’ social apps will emerge with claims of completely changing how we will communicate with each other. And each year we all keep waking up and opening Gmail first (or Outlook, or maybe even… Hotmail).

And ultimately for me this has just illustrated that the best place you can be if you are trying to sell things on the internet is in someone’s inbox. And that 10+ years from now, that will probably remain true.

There are many different ways to show up in someone’s inbox, some are good and some are bad. Here’s how I’d rank them:

1) Single-Send Warm Email: the best email you can send is a good ‘ol fashioned hand-written email to someone who already knows you. Seriously. It’s not rocket science, it’s called being a human, and the way things have become so overpowered this one has become more and more rare. These are the most sincere, and an extremely efficient way to catch up with a prospect or contact after awhile.

2) Personalized Alerts: this was a major feature we built with Uptrends, and honestly I think the biggest differentiator. A person opts-in to not only receiving emails from you, but also decides exactly what content they want that email to contain and how often they want to receive it. For an automated email this is really the best route, and acheives the best open-rates and engagement. Downside compared to the next one is that it’s harder to add as much ‘color’ to these.

3) Newsletters / Blogs: these are a good way to reach a large number of people who have opted-in to hearing from you. You can broadcast a one-size-fits-all message to millions of poeple this way. You shouldn’t expect more than a third of them to ever open your emails, and most of them will forget about you after a while unless you’re REALLY good. But that’s okay because it’s a numbers game.

4) Automated Cold Email: compared to the top 3, the main difference with cold-emails is exactly that: they’re cold. Meaning the receiver has not opted-in to hearing from you, and most of the time they don’t want to hear from you. Unless you have great messaging or an infinite email list to send to (and great spam-prevention), you should probably not send automated cold emails ever.

5) Single-Send Cold Email: the only thing maybe worse then an automated cold email is honestly a single-send cold email. And this is because at least with automated emails you can still reach thousands of people’s inboxes and play the numbers game. With manually-sent cold emails you are essentially guaranteed to get spam-filtered and blacklisted after sending about 20emails per day. You should not do this.

Actually, there is one thing worse than a cold email. And that’s a bad cold email. Here’s one I got today:

This guy — who I have literally never heard from before, and is trying to sell me offshore DevOps — claims that his barista asked about me??? as if this is some sort of compliment that is sooo extremely flattering that I’d have no choice to respond? The problem here is a few things:

• Disingenuous

• Insincere

• Tacky

• Rude

Frankly, it’s rude to goad someone into feeling like they HAVE to respond to your cold email, that your cold email is more important than the other 100+ emails in their inbox right now. The best thing you can do is be sincere, provide real value, and understand that you are not the most important thing this person will read today.

Remember that next time you send an email.

peace,

Ramsey