Having a good cold email subject line can sometimes be the difference between having your email opened and having your email deleted. With that being the case, there is a lot of curiosity in the sales world around what makes a good subject line.

We will try to provide some logic here to help with that and here are a few concepts to keep in mind when you create your emails:

Try to avoid sounding like a salesperson
Your prospects get sold to a lot. Whether it is incoming emails or incoming cold calls, there is a lot of noise and traffic hitting your prospects from people that are trying to sell something. With all of this noise in the environment, your prospects will be a bit guarded and closed off when they detect that someone is trying to sell to them.

If you agree with that, you can factor this into what you say in your cold email subject line as you can write it so that you don’t sound like a salesperson trying to sell something. In other words, try not to sound like all of those other salespeople so that you don’t trigger guardedness that will get your email deleted quickly.

Here are a few things to consider with that:

  • Avoid words written in all caps
  • Avoid exclamation points
  • Don’t use any of these words or words similar to discount, special price, promotion, purchase now, trial, etc.
  • Avoid mentions of the product or service that you sell

Try to not appear to be a mass email
Your prospects will receive a lot of mass emails (emails that are sent out to a lot of people at once). When a prospect receives an email that is clearly sent out to a lot of different people at once, they can delete it without reading with more confidence. In other words, they can delete mass emails with a quicker reflex and not have to worry about missing anything.

With that being considered, you can apply this to the cold email subject line that you create. Even if your email is a mass email or a one-to-many email, you can still write the subject line so that it does not make this so obvious.

Focus on the problems or challenges that you resolve
The other tips listed focus on minimizing the likelihood of a quick delete or a delete unread. After you take some precautions with that when writing your cold email subject line, you can then try to focus on writing something that is enticing or gets the prospect to open the email.

One thing that can help with this is some sort of mention of the problems or challenges that you help to fix. In theory, your product or service should resolve some sort of challenge for the prospect. And the prospects that would fit well with what you have to offer are the prospects that have the problems that you help to fix.

If a prospect has one of the challenges that you help to fix, they should have some sort of interest in resolving that or learning more about it. This will create a scenario where a cold email subject line that mentions a key challenge or problem that you help to fix is fairly attention-grabbing for the prospects that can relate.