27 cold mails we sent, and what we’d change now.

A new agency has no case studies, no referrals and no reason for anyone to reply. What it does have is the thing it is selling. So we wrote to twenty-seven brands we wanted to write for, and made each mail the sample.

You can read all of them on the work page. This is the part that is more useful: the thinking, and the mistakes.

The rules we set ourselves

• One mail, one brand. No mail merge, no “Hi {{First Name}}”. If we could not find something specific to say, we did not write.
• Short enough to read standing up. Most are under 150 words.
• No attachments, no deck, no calendar link. Nothing to download before deciding whether we can write.
• The mail is the portfolio. If the writing is not good enough to get a reply, the portfolio would not have helped.

The subject lines that earned the open

A subject line has one job: make opening it feel like less work than deleting it. These did that.

• “i love you” to The Souled Store. The first line inside: by “you” i mean the company. The joke pays off immediately, which is the only way that subject line survives.
• “ive gone bald” to Beardo. A grooming brand cannot not open that.
• “i think you forgot your power bank” to Matter, who make electric bikes.
• “vending machine for underwears - how does that sound?” to Bummer. Half pitch, half product idea.
• “to be very honest. Your website deserves a solid 2/10” to Monzy.co. Rude, and the only one where the body had to be twice as generous to earn it.
• “ganja milega ???” to MyBageecha, who sell plants. Stupid. Opened.

The best of them are specific to one company. A subject line that would work for any brand works for none.

The five we would delete today

Some of them borrowed authority they did not have. A few subject lines pretended to be a legal notice, an FIR, a raid tip-off, an earthquake warning. They get opened. Of course they do. That is the problem.

• They spend someone’s alarm to buy thirty seconds of attention.
• The reader’s first feeling on opening is relief, then annoyance at you specifically.
• A brand that would be a good client is exactly the brand that will not find it funny.

We left them on the site because deleting them would be the same trick in a different direction. But if you are writing your own, the line is simple: a joke is fine, a fright is not. You can be strange, rude, wrong, too casual, too early. You cannot make someone’s stomach drop and then ask for work.

What goes in the body after the joke

The subject line buys three seconds. The body has to earn the next thirty, and a joke cannot do that twice. Every mail that worked had the same four things, in this order:

1. Land the joke, then drop it. One line to pay off the subject. Then stop.
2. Prove you looked. One sentence about their product, their page, the thing they got wrong last Tuesday. This is the part nobody fakes well.
3. Say what you do, in one sentence. Not a list of services. One.
4. Make the reply small. Not “book a 30-minute call”. Something they can answer with one line while walking.

What we’d change if we started again

• Write to a person, not a company. Most of these went to whatever address the website offered. The ones that felt addressed to somebody read better, and you can find the right person in five minutes.
• Follow up once. We mostly did not. A single line a week later, with something new in it, costs nothing.
• Cut the fright subjects. Four or five of them. The mails underneath were good enough without the costume.
• Put one line of proof in. Even early on, we had work we could point at. We were being coy when we should have been useful.
• Send fewer, and rewrite the rest. Twenty-seven in a burst is a campaign. Five a week, written properly, is a business.

If you want to steal the shape

Here it is, without the jokes, which you should write yourself:

• Subject: something only this company could receive.
• Line 1: pay off the subject.
• Line 2: the specific thing you noticed.
• Line 3: what you do, once.
• Line 4: a question they can answer in one line.
• No attachment. No signature block the length of a receipt.

That is the whole method. The hard part was never the format; it was being willing to send something that sounds like a person wrote it, to a stranger, with your name on it.