The Best Cold Email... Ever?

In partnership with

Good Morning! It seems we’ve finally seen the craziest LinkedIn employment update this week, when former FTX Exec, Ryan Salame, posted on LinkedIn saying he is ‘happy to announce that he’s starting a new position as inmate at FCI Cumberland’. Pretty much any job sounds better than that one… 🤣 

In today’s Follow Up:

• The best cold email ever? ✍️ 

• Isolating an objection 🗣️ 

• How to professionally ask for payment 🤑 

• Sales jobs, LinkedIn & a meme 😂

Sponsor The Follow Up | Subscribe

The Best Cold Email… ever?

Calling a cold email the ‘best ever’ is a big deal.

Especially considering our obsession with cold emails.

But this one might just take the cake…

Back in 2017, Ramp.fm came across an email on reallygoodemails.com that gave them the idea to send personalized images in their cold emails at scale.

Now keep in mind, this was back in 2017, when AI wasn’t a thing, and fancy tools to do this weren’t around.

So they built a system that would take someone’s email, find their company’s logo, and put that logo on a picture of their CEO wearing a blank white t-shirt.

And it was genius.

Every prospect received a personalized (looking) email, with a picture of Ramp’s CEO wearing their company’s logo on a t-shirt.

Just that customized photo alone was likely enough to get a response from most prospects, but they didn’t stop there.

They broke the traditional rules of cold email, and it worked beautifully.

Inside the Email…

They started the email off with the subject line “I’m wearing a [YOUR COMPANY] t-shirt!”. 

Which invokes curiosity. Who doesn’t want to open that up?

And inside the email, they put on a copywriting extravaganza...

The first two lines immediately call out that this is a cold email (disarms the prospect), and then point out the elephant in the room (the CEO is wearing their logo on a t-shirt).

After the picture, they call out the unsubscribe line, which is usually a small line hidden at the bottom. They gave the prospect the option to exit. That’s not the norm… but it builds trust.

So now that they’ve got the reader’s attention, and built up a bit of goodwill, they move into the pitch…

They keep it short and sweet and then show social proof.

Finally, they sign off with something useful, and answer the question that a lot of people are naturally going to have…. how did they make that picture?

Check out the email for yourself. 👇️ 

Like every email campaign (ever), they got 3 types of responses:

1. Incredible. 90% of respondents loved it, and/or bought from them right away.

2. Funny. A lot of people responded saying it was funny, but didn’t buy.

3. Mad. A few people hated it. Like, threatened legal action. But like everything in sales, you can’t win ‘em all.

The final stats looked something like…

• Open rate: 50%+

• Click-through rate: 25%+

• Revenue: They didn’t share exacts, but said it was in the tens of thousands of dollars.

How to replicate this…

With email providers constantly changing what is sent to spam, and what ends up in a prospect inbox, this exact email template would be challenging to replicate today, but here are two ideas.

1. Personalize at scale, but call it out. There are tons of AI tools that allow you to make personalized videos, images, or voice notes… but there’s one big problem with them all. Most people can tell they’re made with AI. So when you try to pass them off as real, you lose trust immediately. Instead, try calling out that it was made with AI, but show that you put in the work to create it, and are doing your best to get their attention.

2. Break the rules. Most cold email experts will tell you to keep an email under a certain number of words, hide the unsubscribe button, or make the email seem like it’s not a cold email. This email broke all of those rules, and that’s why it worked. If you want to stand out in an inbox full of cold emails, you need to break the rules that everyone else is following.

From our Sponsor:

Become a high-earner with these 3 tips

Learn what the highest-earning independent marketing and creative businesses are doing to stay ahead of the rest.

Learn more

Sales Around The Web 🗞️

✍️ 8 ways to professionally ask for payment through email.

🖥️ Oracle’s blog breaks down what sales development reps actually do at Oracle.

👀 LinkedIn reports a 23% year-over-year increase in the number of CEOs that are posting on LinkedIn.

🗣️ A communications expert says there is one change you can make in the way you talk, that will put you in a position of power and influence.

Checking In On LinkedIn

Do you keep your shoes on or off at an interview? 😂 

Sales Meme of the Day