The average reply rate for a cold email campaign is between 1% and 5%, according to the second website that Google gave me when I searched up, “average cold email reply rate.”
The first website was Reddit, and as much as I love memes, it isn’t exactly the most evidence-based source of information 🙂
Now, the past few months I’ve been reaching out to a variety of CEOs in the healthcare and life sciences industries to learn more about their specific challenges and bottlenecks.
And the reply rate for my latest campaign was exactly 20%.
So here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how I wrote these emails:
Subject-line
My first step is crafting a subject line that either shows the prospect that this email was written just for them, or capitalizes on an unfair advantage that I have.
It can also do both, but I’ve found that just using the unfair advantage is sufficient to get most prospects to open the email.
So how do I prove that I wrote the email just for them?
It’s simple: hyper-specific personalization.
For example, one physician whom I reached out to shared pictures of his two dogs on his website’s “About” page.
So the subject line of my email to him was:
“{Dog_1_name} and {Dog_2_name} are so fluffy! + Student-entrepreneur looking for advice”
Figure 1: The email with PI covered up
This specific subject-line is an example of one that is hyper-personalized and capitalizes on an unfair advantage—in other words, it’s overkill.
The unfair advantage here is that I’m reaching out to a physician who attended medical school at the same university I got my undergraduate degree from.
Also, part of the physician culture is a willingness to help students pursuing a career in healthcare.
Even though I graduated a while ago from college and haven’t started medical school yet, actively applying to schools demonstrates a level of commitment, so I can still position myself as a student-entrepreneur.
The Right Name
Next, I do my best to include the name of the person most likely to see my email first.
Obviously, it’s not always possible.
For example, if a medical practice lists an email on its website, chances are a medical assistant is going to be monitoring the inbox.
But practices usually don’t list the names of their medical assistants on their websites.
So when I reach out, I include one of the physicians’ names within the first three lines of the email by saying:
“I’m not sure if Dr. __ checks this inbox, but I wanted to reach out regardless.”
However, I do not address anyone in the opening line of the email:
Figure 2: Another email with PI covered up
Just so you know, I have yet to get a reply to an email that I didn’t include the right name in…
Not A Salesman
This I’d argue is the main reason I’ve gotten such a high reply rate to my emails.
I’ve learned that people don’t want to feel like I’m selling them something, even if they’re willing to buy from me.
All of these conversations that I’m having with prospects are still sales conversations, but that’s not how I’m positioning them.
When I reach out to a prospect, I have absolutely no intention of selling anything at that moment.
I also have no intention of pitching something after I get them on a call. It’s only if I genuinely believe I can help them that I offer anything.
So in every email, I tell them exactly what I’m doing upfront—speaking to people to learn about their problems so that I can build a solution.
During our conversations, I also tell them why this matters to me—why I want to serve this specific group of people.
They know that I’m building a for-profit business, and they know that I’m going to charge a fair price for whatever I offer.
But, they also know that I genuinely want to help them.
It turns out, people are more than willing to support someone that they trust has their best interests at heart—that support comes in the form of money, time, referrals, testimonials, and more.
When I stopped focusing on selling and I started focusing on serving, sales became 100x easier.
In fact, every single CEO I’ve spoken to volunteered to chat with me as many times as I needed after our initial conversation.
I didn’t even have to ask them because they wanted to support me.
I think if you start with the right intentions, and you can communicate that you care, profit will follow easily.
Convenience
This last thing is really simple, but for completeness I wanted to include it here.
Make it really easy for them to say yes.
Some people prefer to communicate over the phone, others like email, others like texting, others like Instagram, so on and so forth.
When I ask for someone’s time, I do my best to accommodate their schedule and their commitments.
That’s why if you look at every email that I send, I always conclude by saying that I’m willing to accommodate whichever mode of communication they prefer:
Figure 3: Another email, demonstrating convenience for the prospect
Takeaways & Recommendations
A Battle: Volume Vs. Efficiency
So my latest cold email campaign was sent to 45 prospects, and I got 9 interviews (without sending a single follow up message).
Therefore, my conversion rate, or efficiency, was 20%.
I sent every email manually because of how personalized I was making each message, and I ultimately canceled my subscription to a cold email software because right now I’m prioritizing efficiency over volume.
As you scale cold email campaigns, it becomes more difficult to personalize each message, and as a result, your reply rate drops.
This is when agencies, for example, start investing in enrichment tools and lead databases that allow them to gather a lot of information about each prospect to plug-and-chug into a cold email template.
This is personalization at scale, but obviously it has its limits.
However, when you send enough emails, you compensate for the loss in efficiency.
For example, a 20% reply rate from sending 100 emails gets you fewer responses than a 5% reply rate from sending 1000 emails.
In the beginning, I’ve learned that it’s best to find a winning template through split-testing, and then pour gasoline on the fire by bumping up the volume.
Now you might be wondering, “If my cold email strategy has a 20% reply rate, why don’t I bump up the volume?”
My answer is in the following section.
Market Size Dictates Priorities
The market I’m going after does not have millions of potential customers.
From most estimates, it’s between 10,000 and 30,000 businesses.
That’s why I’m prioritizing efficiency over volume; I don’t have as many leads to burn through.
The product that I’m building will also be relatively high-ticket (the annual subscription will cost at least a couple thousand dollars), which means longer sales cycles.
This doesn’t mean I’ll never bump up the volume—I’ll definitely have to, but my priority, especially right now, has to be efficiency because I’m going after a smaller market.
Also, because my customer LTV is going to be much higher than the average business, I can spend more resources to acquire each of my customers.
And since I’m just starting out, the main resource that I’m investing is my time.
Deliverability is King
The final thing I want to share relates to what I’ve learned is the purpose of every cold email software in existence.
The goal of all of these tools is to make email servers and the person receiving the email believe that a human wrote that email just for them.
These companies offer a bunch of fancy features like spintax, pre-warmed domains, etc. because they make it harder for email servers to detect non-human email activity.
If your email address gets flagged for non-human activity, then the emails you send will start landing in your prospects’ spam folders instead of their inboxes.
I mean, it’s not normal for a single person to be sending 1000 emails per day (that’s more than sending an email every minute for 16 hours straight).
The most I can do in an hour, assuming I’ve already gathered information on every prospect, is 15-20 high-quality emails, which is what I’m doing.
I’m manually sending fewer than 30 emails per day from an email address that I’ve been using for the past 7 years.
The fact that I’ve been using this address for so long means that the server trusts that I, a person, is using the account.
Since I’m also hyper-personalizing each of my messages, neither the prospect nor the server think I’m just spamming the same copy pasted message in each of my emails.
Again, it’s not normal for a person using an email address for day-to-day communication to individually send the same exact message to 50 different people.
So both of these factors demonstrate to the server that I’m using my email address like a normal person, which is why my emails always land in the prospect’s inbox and don’t get marked as spam.
And the hyper-personalization also proves to my prospect that I, a person, wrote the email specifically for them, which improves my reply rate.
This is why all the cold email gurus say that deliverability is king.
It’s because you could literally have the best cold email campaign in the world, but if the prospect doesn’t see it because it didn’t land in their inbox, you won’t get a reply.
The Final Musing
So I’ve covered quite a few things about cold email strategy, tactics, and considerations in this musing.
However, all of that stuff aside, the most important thing I’ve learned has nothing to do with writing cold emails, and everything to do with my goals.
My goal is to serve, to have a positive impact, and to support businesses that I believe are doing amazing work.
I think if you have such intentions, and you can show your customers that you actually care, then you won’t have any problem generating sales.
That’s all for this week.
See ya next Sunday 🙂
Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help you:
- Newsletters: Our newsletters provide tactical information that innovative entrepreneurs, investors, and other forward-thinking people can use to scale their impact.
- Community: Coming soon! You’ll automatically be added to the waitlist by joining any of our newsletters.
