Your Outbound Copy Reads Like Marketing

Someone read her own outbound email out loud to me on a call.

She stopped halfway and said it sounded like a marketing person trying to sell her something.

She wrote it. She had been sending it for months. She had never read it as the person receiving it.

The tell

Open your best cold email and look at the first line.

If it describes what you do, what you are, or what you help with, that is the tell.

"We help revenue teams cut research time by 60%."

That is a value proposition. It is probably true. It is also the shape of every ad, every landing page, and every other cold email in that inbox.

Your buyer has trained on thousands of those. They can spot one before they finish the line, and the spotting is what ends the email, not the content.

The reason it fails

A value proposition asks the reader to do work.

They have to translate your claim into their situation, decide if it applies, and then care. That is three steps in an inbox where they have given you about two seconds.

Most people do not take step one. They archive.

Nothing about the claim was wrong. It just arrived in a form that gets filtered before it gets read.

What to open with instead

Open with a scenario they recognize.

Not a claim about you. A description of a specific thing that happens in their week.

Before:

We help RevOps teams build enriched, signal based prospect lists so reps spend more time selling.

After:

You're the only person who knows how the Clay build works. When you take a week off, it sits there.

The second one makes no claim at all. It does not mention what I do.

It just describes a Tuesday they have actually had.

If it is right, they feel seen and they keep reading. If it is wrong, they archive it, which is what would have happened anyway.

Why this is getting harder to fake

A scenario is specific, and specific is expensive.

You cannot write a scenario for 10,000 people, because a scenario that fits 10,000 people is a value proposition again. It has to be narrow enough that a whole segment would nod, and narrow enough that most of the market would not.

That is a feature. It is what makes it hard to copy at volume.

It also puts the work where the work should be. Not on the subject line. On knowing who you are writing to well enough that the first sentence could only have been sent to them.

A strong audience makes the message obvious. When the audience and the timing are right, the copy nearly writes itself. When they are wrong, no amount of clever writing saves it.

The three question test

Before a message goes out, it should answer three things without saying them:

• Why you. Something about this person specifically.
• Why now. Something that changed, or a moment they are in.
• Why relevant. A problem they would agree they have.

Most cold email answers none of the three. It answers "why me," which is the sender's question, not the reader's.

The rewrite

Take your current email. Delete the first sentence.

Write a new one that describes something they did, or something they are living with. No claim in it.

Read the whole thing out loud.

If you hear a marketing person, start again. That test is not scientific, but it has been more useful to me than any subject line test I have run.