How to Write a Marketing Email That Gets Opened and Read

There's no one-size-fits-all template for a successful cold email. But, unless you're a spammer, that's no excuse for careless email writing. Simply adding a strong call to action isn't always enough to elicit a response, either.

If you want your email to stand out from the multitude of others that your prospective customers receive every week, you'll need to master three fundamentals of a cold email that gets opened and responded to. Let's start from the top and work our way down.

How to write a successful marketing email

First Things First: Get Your Email Opened

Think of the subject line as 50% of the success of your entire email. If you can get your recipient to click through and start reading, you're well on your way to getting a response.

To illustrate what makes a good subject line, let's first take a look at some bad ones. The following specimens were harvested from the bowels of my spam folder. (A couple of these actually escaped the spam filter—and then went straight to the trash unopened.)

• Consultation
• Top Search Rankings
• Increase Sales This Year
• Once in a life time offer
• Hi
• And my favorite … "Why my Grandpa carries a gun." (I couldn't resist clicking on this one, to the spammer's credit.)

These subject lines are clearly spam: They're vague, they're impersonal, and at least two of them contain spam trigger words.

To that end, there are three things you can do to make sure your emails get opened:

1. Add a personal touch. Work in your prospect's name or company, or a mutual connection; for example, "Lisa from XYZ Company suggested we talk." You could also reference something they recently worked on, such as a podcast episode.

2. Be specific. A little bit of intrigue can encourage more clicks, but you don't want to be so vague that your prospect has no inkling of the email's purpose. A subject like "Hey, look at this …" might work for your email subscribers, but coming from a complete stranger it sounds kind of spammy. Something like "Double XYZ Company's traffic in a month" or even "We doubled [insert competitor]'s traffic in a month" is much more compelling.

3. Choose your words carefully. While some spam trigger keywords seem innocuous enough, they'll land your emails in the junk faster than you can say payday loans.

Make a Personal Connection

While a personalized subject line goes a long way in grabbing your prospect's attention, personalized body copy sends an even stronger signal that you're genuinely interested in making a connection. The easiest way to do this is to address your recipient by name, but avoid doing it so many times that it feels unnatural, gimmicky, or downright weird.

If you've done your research beforehand, you should be able to find a stronger point of connection. With a bit of Googling, you can usually learn a lot about your prospective client before they even become aware of your existence. From there you could comment on a company press release or a blog post they recently worked on.

Sometimes, though, it's a bit tougher to find a point of connection. In this case, it's still possible to personalize your email by mentioning how you discovered your target client; for instance, "I came across your new podcast on Twitter." This will be enough to reassure your recipient that the email is, in fact, a personal email and not just part of an email blast.

Offer Proof

Social proof is a powerful thing. Nothing works better than some relevant data to make a prospective client sit up and take notice. Examples of data:

• Industry statistics
• Sales volume
• Analytics data
• Client testimonials

But what if you recently launched a new product or service and you don't have enough quantitative data to go by? In this case, use concrete examples that highlight the relevancy of your product, service, or clientele.

As an example, I worked on a newsletter several months back where I wanted to offer subscribers exclusive deals on products they were interested in. To do this, I reached out via cold email to a number of manufacturers. The site was in its infancy and I didn't have any numbers to brag about. Instead, I highlighted the quality of my subscribers:

My subscriber base is highly interested in [company's product name], since they subscribe to receive a free guide about [products the company is selling]."

This indicated to my prospects that the traffic I wanted to send them was likely to be very high quality, as opposed to generic leads. Needless to say, it got their attention.

Perfecting Your Cold Emails

If you include these core elements in your emails—a strong subject line, personalization, and quantitative (or qualitative) data—then you're well on your way to a successful cold email.

But don't stop there. If you send a large volume of cold emails, you can greatly increase your conversions by testing different subject lines and body copy and then tracking your results.