In this conversational coaching session, Nicolas Cole explains that cold email success has many "right" answers and constantly evolving tactics. He shares a high‑performing subject line—an uncapitalized question "can I give you a quick call?"—that broke pattern recognition and achieved a 90% open rate. Strategically, he distills cold outreach to two pillars: (1) highlighting an urgent, painful problem for the prospect, and (2) leveraging credibility or past results. He stresses minimizing cognitive load by keeping the first email extremely short, bolding the key point, and asking a simple, concrete question (e.g., “I couldn’t find your newsletter opt‑in—is that on purpose?”). Nicolas introduces a "gray‑hat" approach: point out something broken in the prospect’s business to provoke a reply, then quickly deliver value with a personalized Loom video that shows specific website mistakes. He argues that long, pre‑written email sequences are inefficient for solo operators because they lack contextual relevance; instead, focus on a few high‑impact, pattern‑breaking messages. The session concludes with a plug for his free ghostwriting masterclass and his book on ghostwriting, positioning ghostwriting as a lucrative path for writers.
Chapters
So the first thing I want to preface about cold email for everyone is that cold email and cold outreach is one of those topics where if you ask 100 different people what's the right way of doing it, you will get 100 different right answers. Okay? So I— that's a very important asterisk. Second is that cold outreach is one of those things where the game is constantly changing and the game never changes. And what I mean by that is tactically little things will pop up here and there that lead to better results. Like for example, one of the email subject lines that we, that we discovered absolutely crushed when we were doing cold outreach for our agency is we would, we would email someone and the subject line was literally just, can I give you a quick call? Nothing was capitalized. Everything— it was like, think about what's happening here. First of all, nothing's capitalized. It looks, it looks like a, like a messy text message. Second of all, you're like, well, who is this person?
Why?
Why would they be calling me? Third, it's a, it's a question. It's not a statement. It's not like an actual subject line. It's literally like, hey, can I give you a quick call? And like, because the subject line broke so many rules of things that it breaks pattern recognition, the open rate on that was like 90%. Like, everyone opened that email. And so when it comes to cold outreach, tactically, you will find little things like this that work really well. Strategically, though, strategically, All roads lead back to the same fundamental things, which are pointing out a problem, and ideally an urgent and painful problem, leveraging credibility or experience, which is like, you know, I achieved XYZ, I can do this for you. That's like pretty much it. That's like all, all cold outreach messages circle back to those two things. And I'm sure everyone here, like, just to show you examples of both, pointing out a problem is like, hey, I tried subscribing to your newsletter, but it seems like the form is broken. Is that on purpose? All of a sudden I'm like, hey, I tried to do this thing. You have a problem. Right. I'm pointing out a problem. And also you make it urgent by being like, I just tried to do this thing. Do you mean for your website to be broken? The other leveraging credibility. I'm sure everyone here has probably received an outreach message like this where the person's like, I just got a client of mine, 30 booked calls in 13 days. I can do the same thing for you. Interested, right? So you're either leading with problem or you're leading with result. I did this for someone else, I can do this, I can do this for you. Now, like, looking at your emails, there, there are two, two big things that, um, get flagged in my brain. First of all, everything comes back to And I like thinking about it as what is the cognitive load for me to understand what this is about?
Mm-hmm.
And right now, because of the way that it's written, formatted, the length of it, right, I actually have to sit here and block 45 seconds of my life and read this in depth to understand what you're saying. Too high. Instead, what you want is, let me take, let me take like this first email. Hi, name, hope you're doing awesome today. Like, I saw you this thing, whatever. There's the thing I want to point out is like, it's not that any, anything about this is wrong. Like, you could send this and be like, someone might respond, you know what I mean? Yeah. But if you're not getting, if you're not getting the results that you want, these are the things that I would start tweaking. Okay, so instead I would be like, hey, name, and then immediately go into— so see how it's like, I see you have this thing, is there a specific reason you decided to do it that way? That's, that's leading with this, like, that's a bigger thing to think about. It's like, hey, I noticed you have this contact page, uh, explain strategically to me why you're choosing to do that. Right? We can take the cognitive load of that down massively by saying something like, hey name, just wanted to let you know I was on your website and trying to find your newsletter opt-in but couldn't find any. Is that on purpose? And then I would like bold that so they can skim it, you know? And then I would literally like, that's the whole email. I don't need them to understand the whole solution yet. I don't need them to like go through this big verbose explanation as to why I'm reaching out about, like the best cold outreach message you could possibly send is, hey, name, just wanted to let you know I was on your website and typed in my email to your opt-in or newsletter, but nothing happened. Just wanted to let you know it might be broken. And then like, that's the email.
Okay, okay. Well, in both contractors, usually most of them don't really have newsletters. So do you think that's going to harm this, or do you think it's going to be the same? Because most of them don't really see the value of a newsletter, and that's why I tried to make it as verbose as possible, because I want them to understand what the real value of it is. Do you think it's going to be the same effect, or do you think I should change it in some way?
No, it doesn't, because again, it doesn't matter what the industry is, what the client is, whatever. You have to remember, what is the goal of the initial— not even the initial, like until they respond the first time, what is the goal?
For them to respond.
That the goal is not for them to understand it. The goal is not for them to see the opportunity. The goal is for them to respond because the moment they respond once, then the likelihood that you can actually have a conversation goes up. Yeah. So, so I'm going to, I'm going to put on a little— okay. In the marketing world, this is what's known as a little bit of gray hat thinking. Okay.
Okay.
It's not black hat. We're not doing anything malicious, but it's certainly not white hat because we're trying to, you know, we're trying to find ways to game the system. All right. So I'm going to introduce everyone to a little bit of gray hat thinking. Okay. The thing that is most likely to get you to respond is when someone reaches out letting you know that something about your existing business is broken. What does every business owner wake up in the morning worried about? They're worried that some part of their business isn't working, right? So for example, pool contractors. Hey, pool contractor, just wanted to let you know I went on your site and was trying to reach out to you, but seems like your contact form is broken. That I would literally just send that because what's my hope? My hope is that they go, "Hey, Hugo, thanks so much for reaching out. That's strange. Our contact form seems to be working here on our end. Did you run into any more issues?" Now I have— now we're having a dialogue. Do you understand? Like, where, where people, where people go wrong with outreach is they try and cram the entire conversation into the first email or each individual email. Okay, that's not the goal. The goal is I need them to respond so that I can engage in a dialogue so that I can eventually try and get them on the phone. That's, that is, that's the game.
And I'm assuming that after I get this type of response, I can go, oh, well, that's strange. I'm not sure why it's not working. By the way, instead of using a contact us form, what we got— XYZ result was achieved by X client by doing this, and then a link to a Loom or something like that.
Yeah, totally. That's the other side, is like, I want them to respond, and then I very quickly want to find a way to demonstrate value. So what are the ways that I can demonstrate value? Let's say that they respond here and then we go— I go, ah, okay. I wasn't sure if that was intentional or not. Real quick, I'm attaching a short Loom video here. Just wanted to point out a few things on your website I noticed as being Mistakes. Like, so what's happening? What's happening is I'm engaging in a dialogue without overwhelming with some explanation. I'm going, how do I deliver as much value as possible? Here's a Loom. I just am going to point— I'm going to educate. I'm going to point out the mistakes. Right. And if you notice, do you see how like these emails, the whole The whole secret is everything has to be written as if it's a text message to a friend.
Okay?
Like, look, look, like here, it's like, "This causes contractors to fight for their lives for high-quality leads." Like, no friend texts another friend like that.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah, no, it does. It makes perfect sense. Now, I have a follow-up question. I already sent like 250 emails. With like this and they're like in email 2 or 3 of the sequence. So, I guess just send the first initial message again in another sequence. Am I right? Yeah. And make the other emails like that.
Yeah, you can. But to be perfectly honest, like this is why I don't love using sequences like this. Especially because Like, you're not, you know, do you have employees? Like, do you have a team?
No, no, no.
Yeah, it's just like, it's like you're using a Ferrari engine to, you know, walk down the street. Like, you don't, you don't actually need a sequence of 50 follow-up emails. Like, what you, what you need is, is fewer people reaching out in ways that breaks the pattern recognition. And then how do you deliver high, like, as much value as you can to each one of those in individual people. The reason I don't like sequences is because they fail, they fail. Like, okay, at a certain point, if you have a team of 50 people, you know, you're gonna need to build stuff like this. But when it's just you, like, what sequences tend to miss is context, right? Like, you have all these messages pre-planned. It's very hard for those messages to be able to speak to the context of any individual thing that the client says back to you.
Okay, okay, okay, awesome.
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