Cold email that gets replies (and stays legal)

Most cold email is ignored because it could have been sent to anyone. A reply comes from being obviously relevant to the person reading it, easy to read in ten seconds, and easy to answer.

Write to one person, for one reason

Before you write, be able to finish this sentence: "I am writing to you, not to anyone else, because..."

Good reasons are specific and checkable:

• They are hiring for a role your service replaces or supports.
• Their site runs on a platform you specialise in.
• They recently raised money, moved office or appointed a new director.
• They published something you have a genuine view on.

Find Leads records these as buying signals, with where and when each was seen, under Why this lead on the prospect. Use one of them. See Discovering companies with Find Leads.

Keep it short, plain and human

• Three to five short sentences. If it needs scrolling on a phone, it is too long.
• Write like a person: no emojis, no dashes, no exclamation marks, no bold, no images.
• Lead with them, not with you. One line about who you are is enough.
• No attachments, and at most one link. Links and attachments in a first email hurt deliverability and trust.
• Do not pretend you have met, or that this is a reply to something.

Make one ask

End with a single question that can be answered in a line:

• "Is this something you are looking at this year?"
• "Would a 15 minute call next week be useful?"
• "Are you the right person for this, or is someone else?"

Two asks halve the chance of either being answered.

Subject lines

Short, lower-key, and specific to them. Three to six words is plenty.

A subject that misleads about the content is not just bad practice: it breaks the trust the rest of the email depends on.

An example

Subject: Your ecommerce manager role

Hi Priya,

I saw Example Retail is hiring an ecommerce manager. We help Shopify
brands your size move their product feeds off spreadsheets, which is
usually the first thing a new hire inherits.

Would it be useful if I sent over how two similar teams set it up?

Thanks,
Sam

ClientTurn adds the source line (where you got their details) and the unsubscribe link to a cold first email for you. See Telling people where you got their details.

Follow-up cadence

Most replies come after a follow-up, not the first email. Keep each follow-up shorter than the last and add something new, rather than "just bumping this".

A new campaign starts with four steps: day 0, day 3, day 7 and day 14. You can have up to five steps, each up to 30 days after the previous one.

• A reply stops the sequence for that person. Connect your mailbox with IMAP or POP3 so ClientTurn can read replies. See Setting up email outreach.
• An opt-out, an unsubscribe or a bounce stops it too, and every step is checked again at the moment it is sent.
• If there is no answer after the last step, stop. More emails turn a polite silence into a complaint.

Deliverability basics

A good email that lands in spam gets no replies.

1. 1Step 1: Authenticate your domain. SPF, DKIM and DMARC should all be valid before you send cold email at any volume. Settings → Connections → Sending domain health checks them daily against DNS.
2. 2Step 2: Warm up gently. A newly connected mailbox starts with lower daily limits that rise as it builds history. Do not try to get round them with extra mailboxes on a brand-new domain.
3. 3Step 3: Respect sending limits. Sending is capped per mailbox each day. Settings → AI & selling → Channels shows today's caps.
4. 4Step 4: Send to verified addresses. Bounces and spam complaints are what damage a domain, and both are watched.

Catch-all domains

Some mail servers are set to accept mail for any address at their domain, real or not. This is called a catch-all (or accept-all) domain. A verifier asking "does sam@example.com exist?" gets "yes" for every address, so it cannot tell a real mailbox from a made-up one. The message may then be silently discarded, or bounce later.

That is why "valid" is not the same as "delivered". On a prospect's Verification card you will see one of:

Only a Verified address moves a prospect on automatically. Anything else sends the prospect to review; for Catch-all, Risky and Unknown the reason shown is Contactability could not be confirmed automatically. Look for a better address (the person's own address published on the company's site, for example), or decide to accept the risk for that one prospect.

Guessed addresses

ClientTurn itself never guesses an address from a name pattern such as first.last@. A licensed contact-data provider sometimes returns one it has inferred rather than one it holds. ClientTurn records that the address was guessed, and a campaign will not send to it until it has been verified. Until then the prospect shows in review with The address was guessed from a name pattern and has not been verified.

Bounce protection

• A hard bounce suppresses that address for email straight away, so it is never tried again.
• If hard bounces on a campaign pass 5%, or spam complaints pass 0.3%, sending is paused to protect your domain, with the reason shown on the campaign.
• Sending also pauses if your mailbox stops working, its health degrades, or the suppression list cannot be checked. Nothing is sent on a guess.

Related

• Reaching the decision maker
• Suppression, STOP and unsubscribe
• Corporate and individual subscribers