85 million cold emails taught us these 15 lessons

85 million cold emails taught us these 15 lessons

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3 of these lessons are wildly counterintuitive.

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Thanks to Gong and 30 Minutes to President's Club for help with this one.

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The data supported these 12 common best practices:

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✅ Email Length:

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1) 50-100 words

2) 3-4 sentences

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This will only continue trending downward. Keep emails short and concise.

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✅ Personalization:

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3) Personalized emails have 5x the reply rate of non-personalized emails

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No-brainer here. Gotta personalize your emails.

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✅ Messaging:

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4) Buzzwords, AI, platform, ROI decrease reply rates by up to 57%

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Not convinced you should stop talking product?

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✅ Call To Actions:

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5) Asking for time reduces reply rates by 44%.

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Ironically, time is the worst thing to ask for in a cold email.

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✅ Subject lines:

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6) 1-4 words has the highest open rate

7) AI, buzzwords, numbers, and questions reduce open rates by up to 18%

8) All lowercase subject lines have 11% higher open rates

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Subject lines should emulate internal communication style. Make sure you look like a peer instead of a vendor.

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✅ Multi-Channel:

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10) Add voicemails + cold calls to increase reply rates by 3.24x

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Point voicemails to your emails. Use the phone to drive attention to email.

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✅ Bump Emails:

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11) Break-up emails increase reply rates by 89%

12) Case studies reduce reply rates by 47%

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Yes, bump emails work. And they work very well.

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🚨 The Three Surprises

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These three lessons surprised us.

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1) Reply rates are 41% lower without social proof

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You miss out on a ton of replies when you don't strategically name drop.

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2) Offers outperform Interest-Based CTAs by 4x and increase reply rates by 28%

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You need to offer the prospect something in return for their time. An audit, an insight, talk up the SE, etc.

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3) Use company personalization vs. individual personalization for Director+ roles. Reply rates are 50% higher (9% vs. 6%).

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Leaders do not care that you know where they went to school or know a personal interest of theirs. Everything should connect to the business's goals.

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~~~

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Data shows that in 2025, top reps book 8X more meetings than average reps.

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Want the full playbook on how they're doing that?

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Get our cold email course.

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To celebrate launch week, we're offering a discount (don't follow our negotiation advice 😂).

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Grab the course here: https://www.30mpc.com/course/cold-email-course

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