When Sending Cold Outbound Email, You Should Think of It like Dating

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Here’s how I recommend you approach cold email, just as you would a romantic interest.

In dating, you don’t want to overwhelm your potential partner right off the bat at first glance. Instead of going into your whole life story and personal details immediately, you should approach the potential relationship step by step.​

First, allow your partner/recipient to briefly get to know who you are. The whole idea is to make a good first impression and provide a short introduction so they get acquainted with you. If you do this effectively, you’ll have your target intrigued, curious, and willing to have a second date or follow up. If you overwhelm them with information (or a long-winded email), you’ll likely get rejected and ignored.

On the second date (second step email), you will have already established context on who you are and what you represent. Because of this, it's the perfect time to offer a little more substance. In this discussion, you can build upon the introduction and context of the first message and add additional information, value, or context. Keep in mind you’re still in the early stages though, so if you’re approaching a target that’s hard to get then you may want more steps showing ‘social value’ and depth.​

There are a lot of tools and best practices that can help with your approach. If you get your intro and first few dates right, however, you’re on the right path to driving engagement and a genuine consideration of whether you’re a good fit for each other.

For the third and fourth dates though, this is where you’ll be diving into who you are. You can speak about your experiences, where you’ve lived, what type of value you can offer, and try to convince your recipient to take a chance. You can start to use case studies, name drop clients and success metrics, point out value, and try to convince them to take a chance. Getting them to take a call or demo is the goal. Remember though, at no point during dating do you want to overwhelm, oversell, or bombard your recipient -- this will only lead to frustration and distancing on their part.

Furthermore, just getting a reply or some level of interest doesn’t mean that it’s the right time to ask for their hand in marriage -- that would be a bit too forward. However, what it does do is set the stage for an earnest consideration of a relationship that would be mutually beneficial.​

Remember, setting up a good relationship takes guided steps and isn’t a sprint to the finish line. From this point, you can move onto evaluating each other more deeply (qualification, discovery, needs analysis) -- and get closer to a successful relationship.

Check out our Target Your Audience Article Next.