Cold Email and Follow Up Email Best Practices in 2023

how to write a cold email

Are you having a hard time coming up with a plan to cold email to possible clients? Are your email campaigns falling flat and not getting any responses?

You are not alone. Only about 18% of cold emails were opened in 2021.

In this blog, we will talk about the best practices for cold emailing. Are you ready to sharpen your skills and plan some cold emails? Read on to learn more.

What Is a Cold Email


First off, we need to learn what a cold email is. Cold emailing is when you email someone you do not know in hopes of having a working relationship with them.

It is not when you email a friend, or someone you know, about scheduling a lunch trip.

How Can It Benefit You

The benefits of implementing cold emails in your marketing outweigh the cons of not doing so. Implementing cold emails will help you get the word out about your business.

If one of them responds to your email that they don’t need your services, but they know someone who does. That email was still a success as it brought you closer to having another client.

How to Write a Cold Email


Try not to listen to the ones that will say cold emailing is spammy and not to do it.

It’s not if you do it the right way.

They will say this because it can be obvious when someone copies and pastes the same email continuously. That’s not something you would want to do.

You don’t want to leave another possible client’s name in the email that you are sending. That would paint you in a bad light. What you need to do is personalize the email.

Personalizing the Cold Email Is the Best

If you go with personalization, there is a chance of your email being opened and read, as the average open rate is 21.33%. Personalization could help in keeping your client’s attention once it is opened.

Don’t go into a long spill of the potential client’s story that you researched. Find something you have in common and a few things that you liked and talk about it in the email.

Keep it short.

Don’t make the email all about you. Make it about the client and make them feel special. Keep in mind what you can do to help them and express that in the email.

Before sending the email, you can find an email tracker that will track your emails like Mailtrack. There is a free plan where you can see if they opened up the email the first time you sent it.

Make Cold Email Less Time Consuming


You will want to gather a list of emails of the clients you want for the email campaign. This is where you will run into time constraints. Searching emails for clients can be daunting and tiresome.

You also want to make sure you don’t get the wrong email and end up emailing someone you aren’t supposed to. For example, a help email intended on helping someone that has an issue with a particular website.

You can use websites that gather the emails to make email lists a breeze. This will make it so much easier for you in the long run.

Buying Emails Is Time Productive

There is a possibility that you would spend hours trying to find one email. So finding a website that would allow you to buy emails to save time is a lifesaver.

Buying the emails will make it easy so you can focus on planning your cold email campaigns.

Writing Effective Cold Emails

Writing cold emails that work can be tricky. One thing that you don’t want to do is copy a template every time. This could count as a copy and paste too.

There is hardly any personalization in the templates, and you are just filling in names in the slots.

Could you personalize it? Sure, but it won’t mean that it will get a better response than the ones you write from scratch.

Subject Lines Are Important

You might not think the subject line is important when writing effective cold emails, but it is. One of the first things they will read in an email is the subject line.

This subject line needs to be intriguing enough to get someone to click on it. Click baiting is a no-no if the subject doesn’t match what is in the email. If you clickbait someone, they might get annoyed and click off and mark you as spam.

Draw the person in and use their pain points to your advantage in the subject lines. Let them know you can solve that pain point.

What to Do After Sending the Cold Email

Once you receive a response from your potential client and speak with them, you can do a cold call email. This is where you could email with additional information.

If you haven’t received a response, do a follow-up. You don’t want to not follow up and get lost in the weeds. Your first email could have got lost in the spam folder or under other emails.

Testing, Optimizing, and Scaling Cold Email Outreach

After you send your cold emails, you will want to test your emailing strategies. This is where the email tracker will come in handy.

  • How many were opened
  • How many were responded to
  • How many have you followed up on
  • How many you got leads from

Keeping up with this will let you know if you need to change anything. It will let you know what kind of subject lines work and which ones failed.

Need a Specific Cold Email List

Is there a specific niche you are in and only need emails of people in that specialty?

EMAILzipcode has plenty on our specialty list. You are sure to find what you need, so be sure to check us out!.

Be on the lookout for more of our blogs that go more in-depth about what we talked about above!. You can also contact us with any questions you may have.