Marketing Baby

50 examples of real B2B cold emails

cold email examples, cold email templates

B2B companies are making heavy use of cold emails nowadays, and there are plenty of sites that offer cold email templates which are ready to use.

The people from Polymail have collected all the cold emails and follow-up emails they’ve received, anonymized them and made them public in this blog post:

50+ Cold Email Templates & Follow Up Cadence Examples

A great resource to look at if you want to see what B2B companies are actually doing to drum up new business via cold emails.

They’ve broken these email templates down by categories:

So if you’re in any of these industries, it’s particularly useful to check out what some of your competitors are doing.

To be honest—many of these emails aren’t particularly creative, but there’s still value in going through them to get a feel for what’s common practices, what you DON’T want to do, and in some cases you’ll discover a great idea you just want to use for your own cold email campaigns.

More cold email examples

Another great post that has a collection of actual cold emails is this post:

26 Cold Email Examples Broken Down To Help You Write Your Own

The author of the post has gone through the trouble of giving you a breakdown of what makes these emails work, what’s good about them and what not, and he’s got a good way of thinking about these things. So there are some really valuable lessons in there, plus it’s just recently been updated (September 2017).

A cold email example from Aaron Ross

Aaron Ross, Jason Lemkin, and Heather Morgan have written this blog post about one specific cold email example that has generated 16 new B2B deals:

The Sales Email Template That Won 16 New B2B Customers

Worth reading this as well—all three of these people are killers when it comes to B2B sales.

It’s a very, very short and succinct email that’s just super-well crafted.

The results of the email?

  • 57% open rate
  • 21% response rate
  • Outcome: 16 new customers

That’s really impressive. Now whenever you read about open and response rates, you need to keep one thing in mind: in and of itself, that tells you very little about how good the email actually was.

A lot of these factors depend on the quality of the leads the emails have been sent to, and the sample size.

For example, someone might claim “this email got a 73% open rate and a 19% open rate”, and that’s great. But how many prospects did they send this email to? If it’s been 100 prospects, will these numbers still hold up when they use the same email on 10,000 prospects? And how did they source them? Can they scale that approach, and keep the quality of the leads consistent? In many cases you’l find that it’s not just the cold email that determines the open and response rates, but the selection of leads you’re reaching out to.

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