The biggest secret in writing a cold email🥶

Growing up you were told in order to communicate a thought, you need to write a 1000 words essay.

Next thing you know, you’re an adult, and you realize quickly (I hope) that

This is especially true in your cold message, and in today’s entry I will show you how to communicate complex thoughts with less words.

Chapter 1: Get your reps in

I find that the best way to get better at this is to just write out everything you’re thinking about.

Say you are tasked to send out 10 cold emails for 10 prospects.

Write all of them down how you normally would.

First, just scan the email, and look at it.

I bet it looks way too long, I bet it looks like something you would not want to read.

Second, read it out loud.

I bet you weren’t a fan of how that sounded and I bet you got tired of your voice.

Alright, now that you feel frustrated, let’s channel that energy into something useful.

Chapter 2: AI

Well well well, did you really think AI wasn’t going to be mentioned in this news letter?

This has been one of my favourite ways to learn how to write less and say more.

I take my hot garbage of a cold email, input it into chat-gpt 4 and ask it

That’s right ladies and gents, it really is that simple.

Sometimes It’ll make it too short, and sometimes it’ll miss some information, so some additional prompts will be required.

A: It’s a great short term solution

B: It CAN be a great long term solution as long as you’re willing to read through the shorter version and compare the words that are missing, the structure of the sentence and more.

BUT

Let’s say you don’t want to use AI because you’re 74.

Then what I would recommend is to trim the fat.

Think about it like this:

“My goal is to bring up john’s pain point and mention our solution”

Anything that does NOT support that goal, is FAT.

Trim it, get rid of it, throw it out.

“John I hope this email find you well”

THROW IT OUT

“Hey John, hope you’ve been having a good week”

OUT THE WINDOW.

“I would greatly appreciate it if you can bla bla”

Please just throw it out.

Chapter 3: Bonus

When you ask GPT-4 to write a shorter version, you can add the following prompts to make the output even better:

• Make sure it’s no more than 60 words

• Make sure to use simple English words in your output

• Make sure to finish the email with a soft CTA like “is this worth a chat”

These prompts will ensure you don’t have to have too long of a back and forth with GPT-4.

PS: The Lavender team does an excellent job putting emphasis on this philosophy of saying more with less words.

Download their chrome extension to have a sidekick with you at all times that will tell you when your email is too long, and what words you should take out.

Plus, just follow their team on Linkedin and read their blogs, they go way more in depth than I could ever about this topic!