I was quite surprised at the unexpectedly positive response I received for my blogpost, My Cold Email “Template”, I wrote a month back. From DMs by you, my curious readers, and my friends. A great question some of you brought up was:
“What if I have to write a longer email to get my point across?”
It happens. As some of you may already know from this post and my Contact page, I don’t believe that all cold emails have to be short. I, myself, am guilty of writing longer messages sometimes just because I can’t figure out a shorter way to express my interest in that person in a cold email. Regardless, if I think they have the time to read it or not.
Competing on Two Fronts for Attention
Nevertheless, you are still in a competition for attention. More likely than not, the person you’re reaching out to already receives an ample, possibly a surplus, amount of cold emails. To start off, address the ‘rock hyrax’/elephant in the room. How long will this take? Acknowledge their busy schedule. “I know you get hundreds of emails a day…” or some other variation of “I know you’re busy.“
Let’s assume they see your cold email and click to see the message. Now, if you have a long email, your words are competing with each other for attention. And at the end of the day, you want your call-to-action (CTA) to stand out. ‘Cause the person you’re reaching out to will be searching for it to answer the question: “Why am I even reading this?” If it takes longer for him/her to find it than you can keep their attention, as they say on Shark Tank…
The solution
So, I do 2 things:
- Bolding the question/CTA
- Adding a TL;DR at the top of the email, no longer than 2 sentences/150 characters.
Why the TL;DR? Offer optionality. If they are low on time, they can respond quickly without reading your essay on why you deserve attention. If they’re not, well, you still get to tell your story.
On the topic of optionality, I always end with: If it’s easier, here’s my cell (XXX)XXX-XXXX.
Some of my friends ask why I don’t just include a scheduling link in the email. Simple. A scheduling link (i.e. Calendly, Meetingbird, or my favorite, Woven) creates extraneous layers of friction. They have to:
- Open a new tab,
- Check their own availabilities on their calendar (most likely, opening up a 2nd tab),
- Book a time,
- Confirm that time,
- And, finally add it to their own calendar.
Some apps may help you do that 5th step, but that’s still 2 extra steps, compared to:
- They tell you when they’re free, or they send their own scheduling link;
- You sending a calendar invite that fits in their schedule.
A scheduling link also has a stigma (often warranted) of being:
- Cut-and-paste,
- And, not personal/friendly. If you wanna hang out with a friend or ask them what’s up, you would never send them a scheduling link. Before you even start interacting with him/her, you’ve established an unspoken gap of ‘we cannot be friends’.
In closing
Though this tactic has worked more often than not for me, feel free to tweak it to your liking. As long as you’s cognizant of the other party’s bandwidth. If they respond to you, they are doing you a favor, not the other way around. Stay humble. 😀
Photo by Joshua Newton on Unsplash
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