For sales teams
Not from the merge fields — everybody fixed those years ago. From the shape. Four short paragraphs, a compliment, a soft ask at the end, and a subject line that promises a quick question. Your prospect receives nine of those a day and deletes them by rhythm alone.
“I loved your recent post about supply chain resilience” is personalised. It is also instantly recognisable as the first line of a template, because the only reason anybody opens with a compliment to a stranger is that they want something.
What actually distinguishes an email worth reading is that it demonstrates specific knowledge of the recipient's problem in the first two sentences. Not their company, not their post — their problem, described in enough detail that they can tell you have met it before.
That cannot be templated, and it is also the only part that matters. Everything else in the email is packaging.
We write cold email too. This is a real pair of openings from a campaign to energy companies — the first draft, and what it became after somebody pointed out what was wrong with it.
First draft
“Quick question about incident reports. […] Worth ten minutes?”
Apologetic. “Quick question” is asking permission to exist, and “worth ten minutes?” invites the answer no. It also gave the reader nowhere to go — it described something without linking to it.
What it became
“Run an incident report through a general writing tool and it tightens the prose. Sometimes it tightens ‘the valve failed’ into ‘the valve failed because the crew skipped the pressure test.’ Reads better. Different document. And the second one is evidence.”
No compliment, no permission-seeking, no question at the end. It opens by describing something the reader has seen happen, which is the only thing that earns a second sentence.
Shorten, on the first draft
Cold email is nearly always a third too long, because the first draft includes the reasoning that got you to the point. The reader does not need the reasoning. Run Shorten and see what survives.
The agent, as your prospect
"Read this as a drilling supervisor who gets nine of these a week. Where do you stop reading?" It is the closest thing to sending it and finding out, without the cost of finding out.
Formal or Casual, deliberately
Most cold email sits in an uncomfortable middle — too stiff to be human, too loose to be professional. Pick one on purpose. Both beat the average.
Fluency, on the follow-up you wrote at speed
Follow-ups get written in batches when attention is low, and it shows. Ten seconds each is cheaper than the reply you did not get.
Deliberately. The part that makes a cold email work is knowing something specific about the person receiving it, and no tool has that — it is the research you did, or did not do.
What this does is stop a good insight arriving in bad prose. That is a real problem and a smaller one than it sounds, which is why we would rather describe it accurately than promise you a pipeline.
Working with a team rather than alone? The shared-workspace version is ABCcount Teams.