The opening sentence in your cold email can make or break the entire interaction.
If youâre spending hours optimizing your subject line for opens, you should be spending double that writing your opening line.
Itâs your first chance to build rapport with your prospect, and it frames the rest of your email.
If you start with a generic, canned sentence, a busy decision-maker wonât read the rest of your email, and they wonât want to get on a call with you.
But, donât worry.
In this guide, Iâm going to show you how to write cold email opening lines that will help you instantly build real rapport with your prospects, demonstrate that you care about the interaction, and encourage them to read the rest of your email.
A warning: if youâre looking for shortcuts and want to find templates you can copy and paste to every prospect, this isnât for you.
Weâll look at:
- Why your opening line matters
- Common mistakes with opening lines
- Best practices for writing them
- Common frameworks to use
- How to create a process for writing opening lines
By the end, youâll be able to write opening lines that help improve your open rate and reply rate, and know how to quickly write and send cold emails with genuinely personalized opening sentences to every prospect.
Sounds good?
Letâs dive in.
Why Is Your Opening Line So Important?
When someone receives your email, they see three things.
- Your name
- Your subject line
- A snippet of how your email starts
That means your snippet is arguably just as important as your subject line , even though itâs not talked about as much.
The snippet is shown whether your prospect is on desktop and mobile, in Gmail and Outlook.
It often has even more screen real estate than the subject line.
People will look at your snippet before they open your email, and itâs the first thing theyâll read when they open it.
If it doesnât resonate with them, theyâre going to quickly decide whether itâs even worth reading the rest of the email.
Even if your subject line was perfect, if your opening line ruins that first impression, itâs game over.
How Long Should The Opening Line Be?
Good cold emails are usually short. They get to the point and make it clear why youâre reaching out.
With that in mind, your opening line needs to be short as well.
A rough guide is to keep it around 10-30% of the total email length.
Most cold email templates have a short opening line that builds rapport, then jump straight into the reason youâre emailing.
If you look at some of our favorite cold emails on Cold Outreach Templates , youâll see that the majority of opening lines stick to one or two short opening sentences.
Common Mistakes
Itâs easy to write a bad opening line. Here are some common mistakes cold emailers make when writing them.
1. Not Adding Personalization
Adding personalization to your opening lines can have a huge boost in your reply rates.
Personalization gives your prospects the impression that you send your email to only one person rather than a huge list of prospects. If you decide that saving five minutes is more important than personalizing your opening line, youâre committing your outreach campaign to have poor results.
In QuickMail, you can add a personalized opening line for each prospect upon importing the prospect:
And once you start sending out the emails, you can easily apply these personalized opening lines to your campaigns.
2. Your Opening Line is Too Generic
Ever received an email where it was obvious the sender has done zero research into you or your business?
Itâs a bad way to approach someone. Itâs common to see opening lines like:
- Love what your company is doing, awesome job!
- Iâm really impressed by your YouTube videos, keep them coming!
- Just visited your website, great to see you have happy clients!
Opening lines like those are far too common in cold emails. Itâs demonstrating that the sender hasnât done any real research, and the comments arenât genuine.
Theyâve simply written a generic compliment and decided itâs enough.
The opening lines could have been sent to anyone, so theyâre not going to resonate with anyone youâre emailing.
Even if you get lucky and someone does reply, itâs not a good way to start your interaction.
3. Youâre Making It All About You
Another common error is making it all about the sender, i.e., you.
The person youâre cold emailing hasnât asked for you to get in touch with them, so the burden of providing value and building a relationship is on you.
If you jump straight into your pitch, itâs clear you only care about the sale.
Thatâs not to say you canât mention your product/service. Your cold emailâs end goal is to get a new customer or build a new partnership with someone. But, donât make it the first thing you open with.
Examples of bad cold email opening lines could be:
- We just released a new version of our product â have you seen it yet?
- Thought youâd be interested in reading this blog post we published on {{topic}}
Opening lines like this are completely ignoring that youâre sending an email to someone else with their own motivations, goals, and interests.
Even if you have the best product/service in the world, no one will want to reply if you show you donât care about writing to someone in a personal way.
If someone was to cold email you but only wanted to talk about themselves, you wonât want to put in any of your own time and effort to reply to them.
How Formal Should Your Opening Line Be?
If youâre new to cold email itâs tempting to make your opening line formal and structured.
In some more traditional industries, there is still an expectation of formality; however, Iâd recommend avoiding falling too far into the trap of formality.
The people youâre emailing are just like you â regular people. If you have an interesting product/service that could help them solve problems theyâre facing, theyâll be happy to read your message.
They donât want you to waste their time, and if youâre writing long opening sentences with multiple compliments, mentioning things from their past, and trying to impress them, theyâre going to get bored.
Mention one or two compliments or things you might have in common, and get straight to the point.
And, remember, itâs fine to get personal, even with CEOs or department managers at big companies. Theyâre more likely to respond if you show youâve gone out of your way to personalize your email instead of sending a canned template that you could have sent to all of their competitors.
Frameworks for Writing an Email Opening Line
1. The Quick Compliment
One of the best ways to start a cold email is with a genuine compliment.
This means youâll need to do real research into the person youâre emailing and find something unique to them that you can bring up.
For example, did they get featured on a podcast?
Did they recently close a round of funding?
Did they do a talk at an industry event?
Even if your prospect isnât someone with a big public persona and doesnât attend these things, thereâs always something to bring up.
For example, you could mention a testimonial or case study they have on their site, something they shared on LinkedIn, or a local news story their company was in.
Here are some examples of the quick compliment framework in practice:
- Saw your talk at {{event}} â loved the unique insights and hoping to test some of those ideas over the next few weeks!
- Listened to you on {{podcast}}, really enjoyed your points on {{topic}}.
- Congrats on the recent funding for {{company.name}} â should be an exciting few months ahead!
- Saw you were nominated for {{award}} â congrats!
Fundamentally, theyâre simple opening lines.
But what they show is that youâve spent more than 30 seconds coming up with them. You will have had to actively seek out the content theyâre creating, talks theyâre doing, or company updates.
While theyâre not completely unique, theyâre a good way to show someone youâve done some research, and itâs hard to go wrong with them if youâre genuine, so theyâre low risk.
The only potential downside is that they can be a bit generic.
If youâre emailing a company that closed a round of funding, 50 other companies are probably sending an email mentioning that as well.
Find a unique angle, and add an extra bit of personalization. That will be enough to stand out in the inbox.
2. You Have Something in Common
If you have something in common with the person youâre emailing, bring it up. Itâs a great way to build instant rapport.
Some examples could be:
- You have a mutual friend who connected you
- You went to the same college or university
- You live in the same city or area
These arenât groundbreaking, but theyâre a simple, effective way to start an email.
Some opening lines using this framework include:
- {{mutual.connection}} said I should reach out to you.
- Saw you went to {{college}} â class of {{year}} here.
- Hope youâre doing well â always good to connect with people in {{city}}
- Iâm reaching out to other people working in {{industry}}, saw youâve worked with {{company A}} and {{company B}}.
All of these show a clear connection that helps you reach out more personally.
You donât need to be overly specific and get too personal (you donât know them yet), but showing that youâre not a complete stranger will help build a connection, which is important when the recipient doesnât know who you are.
A potential downside to this strategy is that you risk getting too generic.
For example, just because youâre from the same city or went to the same academic institution, it doesnât mean you have anything in common.
You could make it more personal by checking out your prospectâs LinkedIn account and seeing if they went to any of the same clubs at your school and youâll be able to mention that you were part of the same one.
Or, if you check their Twitter account, they might have posted about a particular coworking spot or location in the city that you know well.
The key is to always write an email that canât have been sent to two separate people, so adding the extra nuggets of personalization will go a long way.
3. Mention Recent Content They Produced
People are interested in themselves and the work theyâre doing.
If you can send them a genuine compliment proving youâve watched, read, or listened to something theyâve created, itâs a good way to open an email.
- Saw your latest industry report â incredible how {{statistic they mentioned}}!
- Just saw the case study you published with {{customer}}. Awesome how you helped them increase conversions by 15%.
- Really enjoyed your blog post on {{topic}} â will implement the advice in my next cold email campaign.
- Loved the article you shared on LinkedIn yesterday about {{topic}}, sent it straight to my teamâs Slack.
Youâll show your prospect that youâve genuinely enjoyed their content.
Iâd recommend picking a particular learning or takeaway you had from the content, as it shows youâve read or watched it.
Otherwise, the complement will be too generic, and itâll look like something you could have sent to anyone.
4. Agitate a Pain Point
A common copywriting framework is called PAS: Problem, Agitate, Solve.
This works in emails like it would on a landing page.
Use this in your cold email templates, and specifically, your opening lines to show you truly understand the problems your customer is facing.
- Loved your blog post on {{topic}} you published, hope itâs converting well
- Saw youâre using cold email at {{company.name}}, hope itâs performing well
- Saw youâre using LinkedIn ads at {{company.name}}, thought youâd be interested in how our company helped {{similar.company}} get 20% higher CTR with a few changes.
- Noticed youâre hiring for {{role}}, wanted to reach out to see if our software could help.
Opening lines focused on a relevant pain point (content promotion, cold emailing, advertising, etc.) are good ways to show youâve researched their current activities and set you up well to mention your service.
The examples above would work well if you had a service that did content promotion, cold email consulting, or were a LinkedIn advertising agency.
As you can see, thereâs no need to invent a pain point that your customer has. Look at what theyâre doing on their website and in their marketing (or whatever area of their business you can help with), take notes, and use that to craft a relevant opening line.
Donât try to focus on tactics like bringing in FOMO or clickbait â if a prospect replies and you canât live up to the promises youâve made, they wonât do business with you.
A Simple Process for Writing Opening Lines
Coming up with good opening lines for every prospect does take time.
But, itâs worth it.
You should approach it as a core part of your list-building process.
Some people will prefer to use a VA to do this, but if youâre focused on quality, you may want to take the extra 10 minutes per prospect to do it yourself.
After all, the ROI on your emails will be higher the more theyâre personalized.
Next to the usual columns in your CSV for fields like:
- Full name
- Company name
Add another column. This will be where your first line field goes.
Then, when youâre ready to email your list of prospects, all youâll need to do is add your {{first_line}} or {{opening_line}} field to your email copy and it will auto-populate in each email you send.
In QuickMail, you can easily do this with Attributes. When writing your campaign emails, simply add your field.
Every email you send will be uniquely customized, but you can still send them out automatically and ensure follow-ups are sent automatically as well.
You could also include a customized âPS.â or extra note that you can use in the opening email, or in your follow-ups.
If you want to get even more targeted, you can use tools like Crystal to find out what type of tone, delivery, and content type you could include in your opening line based on someoneâs real preferences.
You can make your cold email opening line even more refined, and help your email snippet stand out even more in their inbox.
Always Focus on Your Ideal Customer
When writing cold emails you may want to cut corners and send out the same template to everyone.
After all, isnât it all about volume?
Not anymore. Prospects expect a personalized email. The cold email success stories you hear about always have one thing in common â theyâre highly personalized and carefully targeted.
Always remember who your product/service is made for, and what they care about.
Be genuine, and make sure every email opening line could only be sent to the recipient. If itâs too generic, it wonât work and will backfire, as youâre just wasting time.
Go The Extra Mile to Get Replies
Cold email only works if you treat them as one-to-one communication.
Donât try to cut corners, or youâll get low email engagement.
Taking time to use a personal approach with custom opening lines will also have positive effects on your email deliverability. ESPs will see that youâre not sending identical emails so youâre less likely to get flagged for spam, and your personalized opening lines will lead to more positive replies, which is another good signal.
As well as this, even if your prospects donât want to reply, most people arenât going to flag your emails as spam if they can tell itâs genuine.
Even if you have plans to scale up your outreach, take a moment to consider the pros and cons.
With personalized emails, you are almost guaranteed to get better results than if you sent more emails but without any personalization.
Put yourself in the recipientâs shoes and make sure every email you send is one that you would be happy to receive.