5 Best Cold Emails We’ve Ever Sent + Downloadable Templates

Estos ejemplos de correos electrónicos fríos nos aportaron muchos clientes potenciales.

¿Desea enviar mensajes de correo electrónico en frío de eficacia probada para la prospección?

Entonces esta es la guía adecuada para usted.

We will cover 👇:

Cómo estructurar cada paso del correo electrónico en frío en la secuencia
Cómo no enviar correos electrónicos en frío
Cómo conseguir que su CEO aparezca en cientos de podcasts
How to prospect with your competitor’s partners
Cómo crear asociaciones con consultorías
Cómo construir su sitio de integraciones
Cómo enfocar la captación de backlinks
What we tried that didn’t work

Cómo estructurar cada paso del correo electrónico en frío en la secuencia

To start off, I’ll break down how to structure each step of your cold email sequence. Then I’ll go into detail using 5 cold email examples we’ve sent that brought us a 32% reply rate on average. 💪

Eso significa que, de media, 32% de personas respondieron a nuestras 5 mejores secuencias de correo electrónico en frío.

When the average cold email response rate is 1%, you know we’re onto something! 😏

Primer paso del correo electrónico en frío

Above anything, it’s important to write each email as if you were writing it to one person. When you frame your mind as if you’re going to send this email to one person, your cold email will come off way more personal and less like an automated blast sent out to a huge list.

For your first cold email step, it’s important to:

Establish quickly why you’re getting in touch
Indique claramente qué puede ganar la persona con su correo electrónico
Ask a very low barrier question (no, people don’t want to “jump on a call” right away…)

Por ejemplo, casi siempre les pregunto quién es la persona adecuada para hablar.

It doesn’t make sense to bombard someone if you aren’t even 100% sure they’re the person you’re supposed to be cold emailing anyway. 🤔

Plus, once someone puts you in contact with a colleague, you’re almost certain you’ll keep getting answers.

Segundos (y más) pasos de seguimiento por correo electrónico en frío

El correo(s) de seguimiento, dependiendo de cuántos envíes, es donde debes intentar dar un ángulo diferente a tu propuesta inicial.

For example, ask if there’s a form to fill out or establish a bit more credibility to show them why your email adds value to them. This helps you approach the situation a little differently, without starting over from scratch.

I’ll go into more detail on the different angles you can take in our cold email example templates below.

El correo electrónico de la ruptura

Our last email in our cold email examples are what we call the “breakup email”. 💔

I always let the person know I won’t be following up more after this. This gives them a warning that if they’ve been too busy to answer, now is the time – otherwise the email will get lost in their inbox forever.

Although it may not sound too crazy – it works! I often get replies to this email from people letting me know they are interested but haven’t had time to dig in and it’s best to follow up in a certain amount of days, weeks or months. 👍

Cómo no enviar correos electrónicos en frío

Before we jump into our cold email examples, I’ll quickly touch on what doesn’t work. 🚫

There’s nothing more frustrating than getting a bad cold email. The type of email that comes off lazy and makes you do all the work to figure out what they want. The one that gives you the feeling that the sender is blatantly inconsiderate of your time.

Algo parecido:

Un gigantesco muro de texto
Highlighting what they want out of you and not what’s in it for you
Y no se ajusta en absoluto a su sector

Avoid this at all costs. It may seem obvious, but we’ve all received them.

At best, you’ll get ignored; at worst, you’ll be marked as spam, hurting your deliverability rates.

If this was you in the past – don’t sweat it. We all started somewhere and everyone has their own embarrassing cold email prospecting fails. 🥴

It’s time now to leave those types of cold emails in the past. Use our cold email example templates in this guide to nail your prospecting. 🎯

Now for the good stuff – below you’ll find 5 examples of our best cold emails we’ve sent at Salesflare.

I’ll state the goal of the sequence, explain why we structure each step like that and why it works.

Save these cold email templates for reuse instead of re-typing the text from this guide by downloading the templates here. 👇

Don’t have a list of leads to cold email yet? First, build your lead list.

Podcasts: Cómo conseguir que su CEO aparezca en cientos de podcasts

Goal: get our CEO, Jeroen, on a podcast. (We’ve written a detailed guide on how to get on podcasts to.)

My podcast sequence is my best performing sequence with a 48% met goal rate – meaning about half of the people I sent the sequence to replied. 🤯

48% of people replied to the sequence! 🤯 (as measured by Salesflare‘s built-in email workflows)

I’ll break down how I set this sequence up. 👇

Before writing my first email I tried to think in the podcast host’s shoes. They probably get hundreds of requests like this a week. How can I stand out?

First, I focused on making it as easy as possible for them by asking if they’re the right person to talk to. If not, they can quickly pass it onto the person responsible for me to discuss further.

I made sure to establish our company a bit by including that we’re the #1 CRM on Product Hunt, but I didn’t bombard them with a ton of information on Jeroen or Salesflare before finding out if they’re the right person to pitch to.

Concéntrese en quién es la persona adecuada para hablar

A continuación, intenté enfocarlo desde otro ángulo. Intenté pensar de qué otras formas un presentador de podcasts podría investigar a posibles invitados.

I first reiterated my question of who the right person to talk to is, assuming with no answer they may not be the right person. Then I approached it from the new angle, asking – is there a form I should fill out instead? 📝

All of this still keeping in mind that I’m trying to make this as easy as possible for them.

Para el siguiente seguimiento, mi enfoque es aún más diferente.

I can assume they’re ignoring me either because they’re not the person who handles this or because I haven’t built any trust with them yet and they don’t know who Jeroen or Salesflare is.

To establish ourselves, I provide a bit more information on Jeroen and point them to Jeroen’s personal podcast link. That way, if they were skeptical, they can quickly do a little research on Jeroen, but I’m also not bombarding them with information yet without them giving any sign of interest.

I also leave a note that I understand it’s hard to weed through all the messages to show them that I’m also human and understanding, but to establish confidence that I indeed think Jeroen is the right fit. ✅

Last is the aforementioned breakup email. If they’re interested but haven’t answered by now because they’re busy, they may still be somewhat relying on my follow up.

I send this email out as a last Hail Mary to show that I won’t follow up anymore and that if they are indeed too busy, they can send me a quick note to let me know or else it will get lost in their inbox forever.

With a 5% reply rate – again, this email does work! 100% of the replies at this step are people telling me that they’re really busy but they’re interested and to check back in x amount of weeks/months. If I didn’t give them this warning, we could have missed out on that last 5%.

And that’s how, in the end, we’ve booked hundreds of valuable podcast appearances in the past year!

Partners: How to prospect with your competitor’s partners

Objetivo: conseguir una llamada con los socios de HubSpot (el gran gorila) para discutir las posibilidades.

In the first email we try to gauge their interest by finding out – are they loyal to selling HubSpot? Or are they the type of consultancies that sell multiple products based on what fits their customers best?

I let them know why I’m reaching out and tell them what’s in it for them by framing the email around giving their customers another option if HubSpot isn’t the right fit.

I lastly ask the same question as from the first sequence – I check if they’re the right person to talk to or if there’s someone better to reach out to.

In the second email, I try to gain a bit of credibility by showing them how we compare to HubSpot. I included a visual of how Salesflare compares to HubSpot from G2 (the world’s leading B2B review platform).

I ask at the end to let me know if they think it’d be interesting to partner together.

In the 3rd email, I tried to sell us a little bit more over HubSpot by quickly pointing out the main advantages to Salesflare compared to HubSpot. The short list is easy and quick to read and can help them connect to what their customers may be looking for and how it may fit them if HubSpot isn’t the right choice.

I also ask to get on a call if they’re interested. What’s important here is that I explain what the agenda of the meeting is. That way they can understand exactly what the call would be about and that it’s not just another cold sales call where I try to push something on them.

In all honesty, with a 1% reply rate we probably could have done way better. Maybe with a shorter email or another call to action we could have had better results, but we didn’t test it further at the time.

Lastly, another version of our breakup email. I ask them one last time to book a meeting if they’re interested, otherwise I wish them the best. 👋

This sequence didn’t have a massive result like the previous one, as many of the people we emailed weren’t a great match as a potential partner, but that’s something we only learned along the way.

Además, probablemente podríamos haber mejorado los resultados con mensajes más cortos y claros y mejores llamadas a la acción.

Still, 18% reply rate is 18x better than 1%. 😏 And we did get on a whole lot of calls!

Consultorías: Cómo crear asociaciones con consultorías

Objetivo: conseguir que las consultoras de ventas rellenasen un formulario para que pudiésemos añadirlas a nuestra lista de mejores-programas-de-formacion-en-ventas (y, esencialmente, empezar a construir una relación con ellas).

44% respondió a esta secuencia de correo electrónico

For the first email, I wanted to let them know what my intentions were – to build a list with them in it and get it ranking in Google. Then I thought, if I got an email like this I’d think, “too good to be true”.

That’s why I made sure to add the P.S. section letting them know exactly why we were making the list and that there are no strings attached.

En el segundo correo, les pregunté si eran la persona adecuada con la que hablar, pero esta vez también me aseguré de incluir el enlace a la encuesta. Así podían comprobar las preguntas y confirmar nuestras intenciones.

For my last email, I again let them know that it was the last time I’d be following up in case there was still any interest.

Puede que empieces a ver aquí el patrón recurrente que expliqué arriba.

It’s really simple but powerful, especially when you build the cold email sequence with a large dose of empathy. 💌

Let’s go on and explore a few more possible applications of it, before showing you what didn’t work for us. 👇

Integraciones: Cómo construir su sitio de integraciones

Objetivo: aparecer en los sitios de integración.

42% respondió a esta secuencia de correo electrónico

I started off this cold email by establishing our relationship by explaining that we both integrate through Zapier. And since we both had an integrations site, I let them know I’m happy to add them to ours and asked if they would add us to theirs as well.

De este modo, sabían exactamente cuáles eran mis intenciones y podían entender claramente lo que les ofrecía.

Para el segundo correo, lo planteé en relación con sus clientes. De este modo, podían ver que añadirnos a su sitio de integración no solo sería beneficioso para ellos, sino también para sus clientes.

Like always, I ended it by letting them know I wouldn’t be following up anymore. This helped create urgency for them to get back to me if there was still any interest.

You can see how well this worked this time with a 27% reply rate! 🚀

Enlaces externos: Cómo enfocar la captación de backlinks

Goal: get companies to link to blog posts we’re trying to rank.

Although this sequence doesn’t have the highest reply rate, I’ve noticed that if they do reply, we’re able to build a long-term relationship that goes beyond this type of quick-win SEO tactics into stronger and more sustainable content partnerships.

For the first email, I tried to think about the person receiving this email again. I imagined they get tons of backlink requests in their inbox. That’s why I kept it clear and concise.

La esencia: Tenemos un sitio web muy bien posicionado, podemos darte enlaces, ¿te gustaría que trabajáramos juntos para mejorar la posición de ambos?

Para el correo electrónico de seguimiento, me centré en encontrar a la persona adecuada con la que hablar. De ese modo, podrían pasarlo rápidamente si estaban demasiado ocupados o no eran responsables.

Lastly, I sent them the breakup email letting them know that I wouldn’t be following up anymore.

That’s it. Super simple. ✅

In very short: when writing these cold emails, it’s important to first decide what you’re going after, feel empathy for the other person as if you were in their shoes, and clearly define what they can get out of the email.

Want to re-use some of the text I wrote? (Again, keep in mind that empathy comes first! So do adapt it carefully to your specific case.) Then you can get the above cold email templates sent straight to your inbox by clicking “download the templates” below.

Bonus: What we tried that didn’t work

Some things work, some things don’t. Even when following the simple guidelines above, it doesn’t guarantee success.

Here’s two email sequences we tried that didn’t work… and why they probably didn’t.

Enviar automáticamente correos electrónicos a las personas que están en el sitio

¿Conoces esas herramientas que rastrean qué empresas visitan tu web?

We used to use Leadworx. It’s discontinued now, but there’s multiple similar alternatives listed on our integrations site.

Here’s how we had it set up:

Leadworx detectaría qué empresa visitó el sitio (basándose en la IP, etc.)
Si la empresa acierta nuestro filtro para el público objetivo, buscará automáticamente a las personas adecuadas en la empresa, incluidos sus datos de contacto.
A través de la integración con Salesflare se añadiría una cuenta, una oportunidad (en un pipeline específico) y los contactos relacionados a Salesflare
Esto activaría un flujo de trabajo de correo electrónico en Salesflare automáticamente (con email tracker incorporado)

True magic! ✨

However… only 5% of people replied.

That’s still 5x more than 1%, but also 5x below our expectations.

The gist of our email: we detected you’ve been browsing, can we help?

¿Te parece un plan?

Bueno, el principal problema aquí es que a pesar de que recibimos múltiples 10.000s de empresas que comprueban nuestro sitio cada mes, Leadworx sólo detectó con éxito 112 empresas con contactos en un lapso de casi 10 meses.

And when we look at who replied, it was a potential partner, a competitor of ours, and a few people who changed jobs in the meantime 😝

The conclusion here: we don’t know for sure whether this email works or not, because the lead list we targeted was too imprecise and too small. This is crucial too!

Envíe un correo electrónico a los periodistas sobre nuestra última ronda de financiación

For all the talk about empathy above, we didn’t do a great job on this one.

Everyone tries to grab the attention of journalists, so if you’re reaching out to them, you need to go the extra mile when it comes to using your empathy and bringing clarity fast.

That’s unfortunately not what we did here… and we got 0 replies.

Aquí nos entusiasmamos demasiado con nuestras noticias, lo que nos hizo perder el contacto con lo que los periodistas querían leer.

Does a journalist get excited if we say it’s exciting? No.
Do they care that another journalist has written about it already? It might.
Do they consider yet another funding round newsworthy enough? Probably not.
What about one where a co-founder of a competitor invests? That may actually do it! 🧐

If we’d send this again, we’d probably lead with that as follows:

¡Hola {{ first_name }}!
El cofundador de uno de nuestros competidores ha liderado nuestra última ronda de inversión, cerrada esta semana.
This got covered by De Tijd (the Belgian equivalent of the Financial Times) already, but it hasn’t hit international tech press just yet.
If you’re interested, I’m happy to give you the inside scoop. Just call me soon at <myphonenumber>.

If we’d have structured it like this, the journalist could have been hooked by the first sentence, reeled it by the second, and called to action by the third.

Or not… You don’t know before you actually try it… Next time! 😄

To achieve reply rates similar to the ones we’re usually getting (around 30%), it’s not just important to write great emails, but also to use a great tool to send them out.

We – of course – use our own software, Salesflare, whose CRM also allows you to follow up and build relationships after they reply. Because getting a reply is only 20% of the work…

Here’s how it works in short:

With Salesflare, once you’ve built your lead list, simply import the contacts with a certain tag, for example, and they’re automatically entered into your cold email sequence (called email workflows in Salesflare).

Once people reply to your cold email sequences, you’re able to move them down the pipeline in Salesflare based on what stage of the sales process you’re at.