The only thing the first line has to do
Prove you know who you are writing to. Not flatter them — prove it. The reader's first question is *is this addressed to me or to ten thousand people*, and they answer it in about two seconds from the opening line.
Anything specific and checkable works: something they shipped, wrote, announced, or a detail about how their company operates that a list-buyer would not know. Anything generic fails, including the ones that feel personalised:
- *I came across your profile and was impressed* — says nothing, could be anyone.
- *I see you're the Head of Sales at Acme* — that is the merge field, visible as one.
- *Congrats on the funding round!* — true, public, and in every other email they got that week.
One ask, and make it small
The purpose of a first email is a reply, not a sale, and not usually a meeting. The bigger the ask, the more the reader has to decide before answering — and a decision they cannot make in ten seconds becomes a decision they make never.
*Are you the right person for this?* outperforms *do you have 30 minutes on Tuesday?* for the same reason a small favour is easier to grant than a large one. It costs the reader one word to answer.
The structure that works
- 1One line proving relevance. Specific, checkable, about them.
- 2One or two lines on the problem you suspect they have. Framed as a question or an observation, not a claim about your product.
- 3One line on why you are credible. Optional, and cut it if it is thin.
- 4One small ask. A single question, ending the email.
That is four lines. Under a hundred words. If yours is longer, the extra is almost always about you.
Read your draft and delete every sentence that would be identical if you were writing to a different company. Whatever survives is the email.
Subject lines
Short and plain beats clever. Three to five words describing the actual subject — the thing the email is about — reads like internal mail, which is what you want, because internal mail gets opened.
Avoid anything that promises more than the body delivers. Curiosity-gap subject lines do get opened; they also teach the reader that you will mislead them for attention, which is an expensive lesson to teach a prospective customer in the first thirty seconds.
The mistakes that kill an otherwise good email
- A wall of text. Anything over roughly 125 words is scanned, not read, and scanning finds only the ask.
- Attachments in a first email. They trip spam filters and nobody opens them from a stranger.
- Multiple links. One at most; more looks like a campaign.
- A calendar link before a reply. It asks the reader to commit before they have agreed there is anything to discuss.
- Formatting. Coloured headers and images make a one-to-one email look like a newsletter, which is the one thing it must not look like.
What to measure
Replies. Then clicks, if there is a link worth clicking. Open rate is the number every tool shows most prominently and the one that will mislead you, because a tracking pixel loads for reasons that have nothing to do with a person reading anything — privacy proxies pre-fetch images, and security gateways open and click everything before delivery.
Reply rate is harder to inflate and directly connected to revenue. Optimise for it and the rest follows.
Two follow-ups on this: how many follow-ups, and how far apart, and why open rates cannot be trusted in more detail.