How AI can help you write better email opening lines for your cold emails?

We’ve all been there, trying to figure out how to write an attractive cold email that won’t make the recipient say: Oh great, another cold email based on a generic template…

We’ve also been in their shoes, just reading “professional emails” thinking how the person sending the emails hasn’t done at least part of their homework to research what you do and what your interests are.

How do we feel about this? 😩

Email personalization is nothing new, and the same goes for automated outreach. This is why it’s crucial to understand the importance of being unique among all those “personalized emails”.

You’ve probably read you can personalize anything, from the email subject line to the email body, with custom tags and dynamic images. 

But how do our sales reps break the ice when they send out cold emails to B2B recipients?

Let’s talk about email opening lines, why are they important, and how to best personalize them with ease, but still attract attention 😉

What to do to attract attention to your cold emails?

When writing your cold email you really need to make the prospect understand they’re special to you. In order to get mutual respect with them, you would have to convince the prospect that the email message you are sending is tailored for them specifically.

Catchy subject lines and setting up your email profile are just the basics you need to cover first. It sounds basic but you would be surprised by how many emails we get with the Send email as a field not set up. Which can look unprofessional when trying to connect with people you want to talk sales.

Make sure you set up your name and profile picture properly to your email profile so that you avoid the spam folder.

After taking care of the basics, the email snippet comes next. If the email intro doesn’t contain relevant content for the prospect you are targeting, your email campaign is probably prone to fail.

Keep your opening sentence short, around 10-30% of your entire email body, if you want to do the math, you should stick to a sentence or two tops, to do a proper introduction to your prospect.

Why should you focus more on your email opening lines?

The attention span of a person is just above 7 seconds. Now you must’ve asked yourself what can a person do in 7 seconds?

Drink a full glass of water, take a deep breath in and out, and read the first sentence of your email 🥤

This is why your email opening sentences should be the most attractive part of your entire email body, especially if it has the concept and a template of a cold email.

Email Opening Lines are also known as the Ice Breakers. Why?

It’s simply because they should break the ice between you and the person you’ve never met or spoken to before. Your email greeting also frames the rest of your business emails, as a busy decision-maker won’t be interested in reading generic, promotional emails with no value to them.

This is why it’s important to have a solid and informational Ice Breaker to really show you’ve done your research.

To show the prospect that you can correlate, a very good practice is to show appreciation and admiration of their work, activities, praise their speech of an event they’ve attended, and similar opening lines that play on the ego a bit.

But, we all know how time-consuming it is to craft a high-quality email, and it’ll take even more to write a good email opening. And imagine you are sending out an outreach email campaign to an email list of 3000 monthly potentials with 30 daily emails. 

For each, you would need to do proper manual research, check the company and what they do in order to address the exact things and their interests. 

How much time would it take an SDR or Business Developer Rep to do the research and come up with an introduction line for each prospect on their list?

If you do a 3-5 min research of the company and what they do, then find out if they recently had some events or news, and finally sit down and come up with a summarized sentence about it, which will probably take you another 3 min, the end math would be: 8 minutes x 30 recipients =  240 minutes or 4 hours a day. 

One other challenge here would be that you need to have the opening sentences in advance in order to schedule a campaign for all of the 3000 recipients, which means 400 hours of work…

Desperation mode is probably on at this point, but there is a way out of it! 💪

What is an AI Writer and how does it work?

The Technology behind an AI Writer is based on an autoregressive language model and it isn’t really artificial intelligence, but it’s pretty smart in summarizing sentences out of a set of data.

An AI Writer can come up with complete sentences according to the information you give in the input, combining other parts of wording, and giving you different sentences in the output.

In a nutshell, this means that your AI writing assistant will complete a sentence or section of text for you based on what it thinks you’re looking for.

For example, these tools are able to generate responses to prompts from the content on your website, or other datasets, then figure out what the best response would be.

Don’t worry, the AI Writer it’s still not developed to work independently to compete against human writing, without you giving the information to it, so they can’t replace a human. (We still don’t know how Skynet began, to be honest 😎 )

But they can still save you a large amount of time and effort for your next email strategy.

What are the benefits of using AI Writers?

Besides the fact that it’ll save you a ton of time, using an AI Writer will help with a wide variety of ideas and in our case, automate the process of writing formal emails. 

We already covered the importance of personalized emails for getting a solid response rate, so an AI Writer will be of huge help in email personalization. 

It can cover different ideas and approaches for the subject lines, the email opening lines even the entire email copy.

Artificial Intelligence in marketing can help us augment our talents to improve the quality of the final product.

How to use Sales.Rocks One-Liners for email opening lines?

Knowing the struggle behind a successful email campaign we’ve developed a new tool that is an addition to the Bulk Extractor and can be used for multiple purposes, mainly for generating unique email opening lines when addressing a b2b customer. 

You can use them directly through the Drip-Campaigns Module, or simply by exporting them into a .csv file.

The Sales.Rocks One-Liners work based on the same method explained above, just you won’t be needing the data as an external source, we will do this for you. 

The steps for generating unique sentences for any company are simple, you navigate to the Bulk Extractor tab, and choose to generate One-Liners. You simply upload a list of company domains (or let’s call them websites).

Next, you can choose the intro parts of the sentence you want the sentences to be generated with, or so to say to specify the tone of your email opening lines.

Finally, you choose the source of the data or the starting point of the information you want the sentences to be crafted with (this can be the website description, news articles, blog posts, or case studies of the company website) and submit the request.

Sales.Rocks will return a unique One-Liner for each of the found domains in our database. 

But, we know that AI Writers are not always returning the best results on the first attempt, so you can change the sentence up to 5 times for a single domain without spending any additional credits on the newly generated sentence.

An exported file of the request will also return 5 different sentences for each domain in the output file (this is the Export to Excel option).

Examples of effective email opening lines

Let’s go first with an overview of these opening lines:

“Hey FNAME, I love what you do at Sales.Rocks”

“Hi FNAME, I’m really impressed with your blog!”

“Hey FNAME, saw your website, I love it!”

How do we feel about them?

Everybody “loves” what we do at Sales.Rocks, but what do we actually do? Yes, our blog is great, but have you checked any of our latest updates to see what’s new? Yes we do HAVE a website and we know our website rocks, but so do many other great websites… In other words, what’s so special about us? 

This is where a good sentence generator comes in handy and will give you a great example of how you can target the company by their description. 

Good examples for email opening lines is when you can state exactly what the company’s core activities are and you’ve “done” your homework.

Let’s see how we can enrich these: 

“Hey FNAME, It’s fascinating that Sales.Rocks provides a data-rich platform that helps you find and connect with your business to grow it faster.”

“Hey FNAME, I’m really impressed with your blog content about B2B Sales Training and B2B Marketing.”

“Hey FNAME,  saw your website and I love how Sales.Rocks provides a 360° view of my target accounts and allows me to see the current trends and the best way to reach them.”

Do you feel that the sender knows about you already?

Showing your interest and readiness in a good opening line will at least provoke potential customers to a quick response and further follow-up emails will deepen the communication.

So, let’s wrap it up here so you can go and check the new One-Liners feature on Sales.Rocks.