
A crazy insight from our study of 85M+ cold emails with Gong and 30 Minutes to President's Club.
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We wanted to know exactly what cold email call-to-actions (CTAs) performed best:
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- Poor cold email CTAs: -44% impact on reply rates
- Good cold email CTAs: +28% impact on reply rates
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π¨ The Big "Aha" moment π¨
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"Offers" outperform "interest-based CTAs" by 4x
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This is THE 2025 cold email data point everyone needs to pay attention to.
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An offer is NOT:
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- A free demo
- Gifts or gift cards
- A "meet and greet"
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Here are three offers you can add to your cold emails to increase reply rates by 28%:
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β Offer #1: Easy - Pitch The Blind Date
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Position who the buyer will be meeting with. Hype up the AE, sales engineer, or yourself.
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Example: A client of ours sells an automated welding solution
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Example email CTA:
"Our welding solutions engineer, Paul, is working with Hitch manufacturers like CURT to help overcome the welder shortage and produce consistent, high-quality welds.
Interested in a quick intro?"
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β Offer #2: Medium - 1:Many Offers
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High-quality, reusable insights that feel tailored. Competitive benchmarks, industry research, or best practice guides.
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Example: We have a client that sells to a clinical ops solution. They surveyed dozens of clients in key areas around clinical trials.
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Example email CTA:
"We ran a benchmarking analysis with a few of your peers like Ultromics and MEDRhythms find avg. study start times, drop-out rates, insights on how they shorten build times.
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Interested in seeing how you stack up?"
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β Offer #3: Hard - 1:1 Offers
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These are custom-tailored experiences or resources created specifically for the prospect. This works best at the enterprise & strategic levels.
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Examples:
- A cyber risk analysis
- A benchmarking analysis
- A workshop
- A personalized audit of a website checkout flow
- Visiting and experiencing the brand firsthand, then sharing insights
- Offering free data, licenses, or pilots
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Example: An EdTech rep would use language like this when reaching out to school districts
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"We compiled a report of how WCUS stacks up against the top schools in WA & OR.
Free next week to run through the report together?
Tom
P.S. If nothing else, youβll see how other PNW school districts are minimizing student inequity and achievement gaps to increase student readiness and graduation rates"
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~~~
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Grab the entire Cold Email Data Report with Gong here.
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Listen to the rest of my convo on the LevelUp Leads podcast here.
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