How to Write the Best Cold Email Opening Lines
Uzair Rasheed
PublishedatMost marketers think that the subject line is the only thing that needs their attention. The subject line is indeed important and you must nail it to make your campaigns successful. However, getting your email opened isn’t just enough. You must grab your prospect’s attention and retain it till the end to chase a positive response.
One of the most important factors in cold emails is the opening lines. Your cold email opening lines can scare your prospects away if they are boring and generic. On the other hand, if you write an opening line that resonates with your prospect and is unique to them, then they will get curious and read your email till the end.
In this blog post, we will explain how you can write good cold email opening lines for your prospects and will also give you some examples to understand the whole process.
Why is the Opening line Important?
Let’s get into the thought process of a B2B prospect. If your subject line was good enough and it has piqued the curiosity of your prospect, then they will most likely open your cold email to see what it is about.
If you just wrote something too generic as an opening line like “I am reaching out to you on behalf of XYZ”, then they will know that it is just another email from a sales rep trying to sell a product or service. They will ignore your email immediately and will not even read further.
That's why your cold email opening lines should be personalized and unique to each one of your prospects. Your prospects don’t have any interaction with you and as of now, you have no connection built with them. A well-crafted cold email opening line builds immediate rapport and leaves a good impression on your prospects making them read further.
Personalized opening lines imply that you didn’t just send the same email to multiple recipients. Your prospects will know that you took an extra step to learn about them and wrote something unique about them. Therefore, you must avoid generic and typical opening lines that most sales reps use in their cold email campaigns.
Business email opening lines are very important as B2B prospects receive more cold emails than any other prospects. However, writing a good opening line for them is not so difficult. You can write it by following the process described in detail below.
How to write Opening lines for emails?
It is very important to do proper research on your prospect's business website or LinkedIn to write a good opening sentence for your emails. Find out what they are doing and explore their achievements as business owners. You can also note down what’s unique about their business product or service and compliment it in your opening lines.
If your prospect is not a business owner and is someone who works in a specific company. You can look at their LinkedIn profile and find out what they have been doing for the past few years. Write how amazing they are at their job and mention their recent wins or achievements at work in your opening lines.
An expression of praise or admiration for the recipient’s achievements is one of the best email opening lines. It’s a great strategy to personalize email content and make your prospects read your cold emails till the end.
Remember it’s always best to make your cold emails about them. You must write your cold emails around your prospects. Avoid writing emails about yourself or your product or service. They don’t care who are you and how good is your product or service. So don’t waste your words writing about yourself. What grabs their attention is how your product will be any good for them.
Common Mistakes with Opening lines
1. Hope this email finds
Starting your email with a phrase like “Hope this email finds you well” is very boring and overused while cold emailing. It will work for a query email as a consumer but when sending cold emails to introduce your product or service, you must write something unique that immediately stands out to your prospects.
2. Email greetings like "Dear Sir/Mam"
Greeting your prospects as “Dear Sir/Mam” is again not for B2B cold emailing. It’s not how you should start your email. You should rather do personalized greetings like “Hey {firstname}” to make your cold emails stand out. Even an absolute beginner should know that Dear Sir/Mam doesn’t sound right.
3. Asking them how they are doing
Don’t open your cold emails by asking how your prospects are doing. Cold emails should be very short and to the point. Writing generic lines like that will just waste your words and will make them longer. You should come straight to the point and focus on providing value to your prospects. Write about your prospect's pain points and benefits of your product or service instead to make the most out of it.
4. Allow me to introduce
Introducing yourself in your cold emails is another mistake done by email marketers. As soon as you reveal that you are a sales rep from a company, your prospects will know that this email is going to be a sales pitch. Most of the time your prospects don’t feel like they have got time for that. They will ignore your email and will not even read further.
5. Hope you had a great week
If you think that they don’t see it in most emails, then you shouldn’t be in sales writing at all. It’s a very common line that most people use for emails. We want our emails to stand out and that cannot be done with a cliche opening line or icebreaker like that.
6. Writing Friendly or Funny email opening lines
Using informal and friendly opening lines for your cold email campaigns isn’t a good idea. Asking them how their weekend was or writing anything beyond professional etiquette will not be welcomed by most prospects. They don’t know you and aren’t expecting you to be friendly in your first interaction. Make sure that you always write formal email opening lines for cold emailing.
These are some generic opening lines that are written without any prior research or study on prospects. The whole point of writing them in this blog post is to give you a better idea of what you shouldn't do when crafting your email openings.
Make your cold email look different from others. Stand out from most of them and you will have less competition. You can only do so by spending some time on your prospect's business website or Linkedin.
Best Opening lines for your Cold Email Campaigns
A good email opening line for B2B prospects is very important and we have compiled a list of first lines that will be a good example for you to start an email. Bare in your mind that you cannot write the same lines for your emails. Every business is unique and you must write your emails after proper research on your potential customers.
Examples of Best Cold Email Opening Sentences
1. The way you can use Nureply’s AI to generate email personalization in seconds is truly remarkable. Amazing how your service can rewrite the content and send emails in seconds. (First-line icebreaker generated for Nureply by Nureply)
2. Providing a platform for creating B2B testimonial videos seems like a very creative and productive idea. I would say that must be helpful in finding new clients and reducing friction in the sales cycle.
3. The competition with Amazon marketing is increasing day by day. It’s great how {company name}’s e-commerce experts provide effective marketing solutions to optimize, engage and convert.
4. Amazing how your creative advertising technology can deliver and optimize HTML 5 ads that can adapt to any size, shape, and variant. I must say that I am impressed.
5. {company name} seems like a promising platform for Digital Risk Management. Amazing how shadow map scans through the internet, deep web, and dark web to detect any data leaks and breaches.
6. Marketing solutions must be tailored and customized according to the business needs. Interesting {company name} provides result-oriented solutions to businesses
Nureply
All these unique opening lines you just read above are generated by Nureply's AI after studying our prospect’s business website or LinkedIn. We have implemented Nureply's AI in our cold email campaigns to boost our response rates and have seen amazing results.
If you want to chase a prompt response from your prospects, then make sure to personalize and write unique content for your prospects. You can hire someone to write those lines or you can use Nureply instead to generate the first-line icebreakers for your campaigns within seconds. Nureply can save you time and money while ensuring 2.4x more replies to your cold emails.
If you haven’t yet tried us, then try it for free.
Make sure to add value to your Cold emails
Opening lines are not the only thing that matters in your cold emails. Once you have got good opening lines for your prospects and have grabbed your prospect’s attention. You must also add some value to your email message to convert your prospects into paying customers.
Address your potential customer's pain points and briefly explain how your product can solve them. Write a benefit-oriented email that adds value to your email recipient’s business. Adding a case study or social proof to prove your claims is also recommended.
There are a lot of things that matter while writing emails that convert and the opening line is one significant part of it. If you want a complete guide on how to write a cold email to a potential client, then read our blog post.
Conclusion
Cold emails without good opening lines and personalized content look like Spam. Make sure that you aren’t just sending generic emails like many others otherwise they will not get a good response rate.
If you aren’t too sure how you can write good opening lines like the ones we just wrote above in our blog post, then get Nureply to do it. Personalization is not an option in cold emails, it’s something you must do if you want to see better results.