I Tried 165 Cold Email Subject Lines, These Are the 4 Best

You can spend countless hours writing the best cold emails, but if you don't know how to write an effective subject line that actually gets people to open and read up your email, it's not going to matter. Because I remember when I first started sending cold emails, I actually sent a couple hundred emails and no one would reply and I just didn't know why. I spent a ton of time writing these hyper personalized cold emails, reaching out to the right people, saying the right things, but just never getting any results. And over time, after sending over a million cold emails and booking thousands of sales calls, I realized it was because of my subject line. Because you see, if you don't have a good subject line, no one will read your actual email. And that's why it's critical, but an often overlooked aspect of cold emails. And think about your subject line like the COVID of a book. If your subject line sucks, if your cover sucks, no one's going to read it. If your thumbnail or your title sucks to a YouTube video, no one's going to click on it and watch the actual video, no matter how good, no matter how edited your YouTube video actually is. And the same exact thing applies with your subject line. So in today's video, we'll be breaking down exactly how to write the best subject line for your cold emails that actually gets opened and that actually helps you to get replies. All right, so before we jump into the specific subject lines, we really have to understand kind of the buyer's journey behind cold emails. What actually happens when you send a cold email to a prospect and what goes through their mind starts subconsciously before they even reply back to you and before they even book a call with you. So I broke it down into four key steps. So the first step is obviously they received the email inside the inbox, Outlook, Gmail. And obviously step one is for them to actually open up your email. Now, that has to do with deliverability and that has to do with your subject line. Let's assume that they open up your email because their interest is peaked. The second thing they do is they skim over the email. So you got to make sure that once you have people's attention and, and they actually look inside your email, that your email is short and direct. After they skim your email, assuming all of that checks out, the third thing they do is they actually just read it in detail, right? So they take a quick look for 5 to 10 seconds. If everything checks out, they go back and look at it in way more detail. They're investing a bit More time into understanding exactly what you do. And after they do that, because you have a strong offer, the step four is they go to your call to action. So what is the next step? What are you directing their attention and directing their traffic towards? Right. And what I like to think about is how can you have a low friction call to action or some form of sales asset. So those are the four key steps that people take in their buyer's journey with cold emails. And in terms of what happens when you send a cold email out before people actually reply back to your email. Now, obviously, for the purposes of today's video, we are mainly focusing on a step one, which is how to get people to open. Open up your email in terms of the subject line. Right. So in terms of what makes a good subject line, there's really five key points. The first one is you want to make sure your subject line is somewhat personalized in the sense where you want to have some form of variable, whether that's the first name, whether it might be their full name, whether it might be their company name, some form of variable to make sure it is a little bit personalized and slightly more relevant towards them versus just everyone as a whole. The second thing is you need to make sure your subject line is short. So one of the largest mistakes people can make is writing a full sentence with seven or eight words. Because even if you think about your own email provider, whether that's Gmail or Outlook, when you first get an email and you look at the subject line, it kind of cuts off. And if your subject line is just way too long, people won't actually be able to read the whole thing anyways. So you got to make sure that it's short, ideally three to four words max. The third thing is your subject line needs to create curiosity. Because you want to think about your subject line, kind of like the front cover to a book. If it sucks and it doesn't create any curiosity, people read it and it doesn't make them want to read more. It's not going to work. So you got to make sure your subject line actually creates curiosity. The next one is try to use power words or some form of verb, some form of action to actually grab attention. That's more of a copywriting psychology. And the fifth one is do not clickbait. Because even as you are reading through kind of what I'm seeing right now, these different points, maybe some people might think to themselves, oh, I'm just gonna write something extremely clickbaity, you look at YouTube titles and they're just super clickbaity. You click on it and it doesn't actually relate to the actual video of what they're talking about. And the same thing applies. You don't wanna do that with your emails. If you're selling lead generation as a offer, you don't want to be talking about running Facebook ads, you don't want to talk about selling a house. You don't want to be talking about irrelevant things. You want to make sure your subject line is relevant because what will happen is if someone clicks in your email and they feel like that you click baited them into it, they're going to report your email as spam. And long term you're going to have really terrible deliverability and none of your emails will be read because they'll just all go straight into the junk folder and into the spam box, right? So as I was putting this video together, I actually digged and found a couple of stats, seven key stats about subject lines. And I feel like this will be really relevant to keep in mind as you're putting together your own subject lines for your own cold email. So the very first point is 64% of recipients decide to either open or delete emails based on the subject line, right? So this reinforces the point that if your subject line sucks, people just won't read it at all. And in fact what this statistic is saying is more than half of people will just instantly delete your email. The next stat is 33% of users choose to open emails because a catchy subject line. So on the flip side is if your subject line is good, it could actually get people to just single handedly open it. Well, at least for 33% of people. The third point is a subject line alone is enough to entice 47% of email recipients to open the email. The fourth point is 69% of email recipients will report spam based on email subject line. So the fourth point is very important because that kind of reinforces the clickbait point as well that I mentioned earlier is if your email subject line is just too baity and people open it up and is not at all related to what they initially thought your message was going to be about, people literally just report your stuff as spam. The fifth point is on average subject lines between 61 and 70 characters are read the most at 17%. So again, right, this reinforces the point where the shorter your subject lines, the the better. Number six personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. Pretty straightforward, right? You would obviously open up a subject line that might say, hey John versus hello, how are you? Right, because one is just way more personalized and way more relevant than the other one. And finally, the seventh point is email subject lines where questions have a 50% higher open rate. Again, that's more of a copywriting principle, but it just creates just way more curiosity and, and way more intrigued, especially if it is a question. So with that being said, after sending over a million cold emails, booking thousands of sales calls, I really broke down. There's really four types of successful cold email subject lines. And anytime you think about subject lines, the way you probably want to think about it is break it down into the categories and then expand. And obviously it's very important to keep in mind that when it comes to cold emails, whether that's the messaging, the call to action to offer the subject line, it's always important to split test your subject lines, right? So don't just pick one subject line, send a thousand emails and call it a day. What you should probably be doing is pick two to three subject lines, brainstorm two or three and split test them against each other. Send a couple hundred with each variation of the subject line and then based on the statistics, based on the data, you will then know which one works the best. Right, so jumping into it then specifically. Right again, there are four types of subject lines. The first one is a desired outcome subject line and we're going to go into way more detail what that is. The second one is a pain subject line, the third one is a reference subject line and the fourth one is a curiosity based subject line. Jumping into the first one which is desired outcome subject line. What this type of subject line is is think about the offer that you're selling. What is the desired outcome? So if for example, you're selling lead generation as a service, maybe the outcome is landing more clients. So you want to talk about that in your subject line. If you're selling Facebook ads as a service, maybe your desired outcome is in turning return on ad spend, returning your roas. So maybe you could include that in your subject line. Pretty straightforward. You basically just want to talk about the desired outcome in your subject line. So for example, here's some examples of some subject lines that I've seen really great success with. Now obviously depending on your industry, who you're reaching out to and what you're trying to sell, not all of these are appropriate for what you're selling. Again, you just want to test it. So for example, helping your team with desired outcome, do you need more clients, for example. Or number three would be looking for more clients that would be more of a lead generation type of offer. Fourth one is interested in lead generation services, question mark. So you see how these are desired outcomes. Do you want more leads for company names? And you see how like I put an emoji there because I've seen sometimes it works again, you want to split test it and find out for yourself. The next one is SEO services to rank your industry. So if you're selling SEO services and maybe the next one is need help with landing page copy, if you're selling landing page as a service, so you're leading with more of a desired outcome. That way when people click on your email, they already kind of know what your service is before they even read your cold email messaging. So that's the first type of subject line, desired outcome subject line. The next one is a pain subject line. So now that we understand your own service in terms of what is the specific outcome that people are buying, what type of problem does it solve? Because in order for people to actually buy anything, they need to understand and be aware that they have a problem or some form of challenge and they feel like your service is the solution to the problem. So if we think about that and we kind of reverse that 180, what type of problems are people experiencing before they work with you? And you kind of want to call that out in your subject line, right? So another word for problem is pain, right? So think about that, right? So for example, examples of pain subject lines might be, are you having trouble with XYZ problem? If you're selling lead generation as a service or some form of sales service, you could leave a subject line that might be, do you not have enough sales? Are you struggling with sales? Do you have low reply rates? Do you have high cost per leads? With ads, stuff like that, you're thinking about problems and you're leading with that as a subject line. Now what I will say is when I have tested pain subject lines, they tend to not work as well for my own services, for my own lead generation services. However, when it comes to my own clients, I have had some really high performing cold email campaigns that did lead with pain subject lines. And you want to be smart with this because again, you don't want to oversell your services. There is a thing in terms of marketing and sales where you're overselling, you're just doing way too much and you want to be careful with it, where you're not kind of just being too salesy. Because if you're too salesy and you kind of just exaggerate the pain points that people have, it's actually going to turn off the audience, turn off your prospects way more than not using a pain subject line at all. So make sure you're being smart about how you're using the paint subject lines, talk about generalizations, and try not to over exaggerate the problem. The next one is some form of reference subject line. So these type of subject lines work really, really well. But. But it also requires a deeper level of research because when it comes to reference subject lines, what it means by reference is referring to something about them. Whether that is a podcast interview that they maybe went on, maybe that company just recently hit a milestone, maybe they just recently won an award. Whatever the case is, essentially what you're doing with the reference subject line is you're calling that out. And these work extremely, extremely well. Probably the highest performing type of subject lines, although it's. It actually does require more time because you can't just. It's very hard to just scrape a lead leak list off of LinkedIn or off of Apollo and be really relevant with this. Because the only reason this type of subject line works really well is because you're really personalized in terms of the person you're reaching out to. So, for example, an example of it is, let's say you find a company that you're trying to reach out to and you find out that they are a startup and they are in Y Combinator. You could lead with that. You can say congrats on making Y Combinator Class of 2024, something like that. But do you see how that wouldn't be relevant to every single startup in the world? Because not every single startup is on Y Combinator. You would probably have to scrape a leads list of startups in Y Combinator, or you have to go very specific and find these people one by one. The next one might be enjoyed your podcast on the Nelk Boys or enjoyed your podcast on Joe Rogan. You. So again, you see how this is pretty specific and it's not really applicable to just every single person that you might scrape off of LinkedIn or Apollo. The next one is Congrats on Case Study. This is a really good one that I like to use. So what I've done in the past for some of my own clients and cold email campaigns is I would build my links list and I would find case studies and I would call that. Oh. So I'd say something like congrats on your Case study with meta. Congrats with their case study with Google. Right, something like that. Because it's very personalized. So again, do you see how you need more research for this or even another one might be. Congrats. A new role at company name. So this works really well if you're using really different types of personalization. So for example, if using tools like Clay, where you're able to pull these different informations and these different data variables out of your list, you're able to call that out. But reference subject lines. Some of the top performing subject lines I have ever, ever used, although it is very relevant and very personalized and it doesn't work for every single person. Now finally, the fourth type of subject line is curiosity type of subject lines. So these are probably the most popular type of subject lines. When people think about subject lines or if you've ever received code emails, there's a very strong chance that a lot of your subject lines are some form of curiosity based subject lines. A lot of these are some form of question. We have the infamous quick question that just works really, really well. I've tested it, performs really, really well. But obviously you want to test it for yourself as well. But it's very, very popular. The next one might be question for company name. Real quick. John, right? You put their prospect name with your name or opportunity for John, something like that. So you see how curiosity based subject lines is. You're not necessarily leading with an outcome, you're not necessarily leading with a problem or a pain point. You're not even necessarily referencing something that is hyper specific to your lead. But what you're doing is you're making a more generalized type of question and it induces a lot of curiosity. However, these type of subject lines are closest to click baiting type of people. So again, just be careful with it. A lot of people use these type of subject lines as well. So if what you're trying to do is just stand out in the inbox and use a subject line that no one has ever used, more likely than not curiosity based subject lines are not going to be for you. So these are kind of the four types of subject lines that you can use. Again, make sure whenever you're using cold emails, writing cold emails, sending cold emails, you're split testing two or three of these subject lines rather than just picking one and calling it a day. Because at the end of the day every single industry is different, every single prospect list is different, every single offer that you sell is also different. And what works for one specific industry, and one specific type of offer may not necessarily translate to other types of offers and other types of industries. So that's pretty much the video. If you like this video, make sure you drop me a. Like, make sure you drop me a subscribe and I'll see you in the next video. See ya.