This is THE most important aspect of the cold email. This needs to be hyper personalised and the entire goal is to bring comfort to the end reader that you have done research into them, and put in time. Humans are naturally inclined to investment outputs, its the same reason why "length is wealth" works at times in sales. People feel inclined to support high investment products, products that look like people have put in 100s of hours into something vs just 1 hour.
Personal ice breakers that work best are usually compliments or a mention about what their company do and why its great they are doing so (compliment again). The goal is purely to make them feel comfortable. The icebreaker process is what will separate you from everyone else in the market sending out cold emails. If you're messaging executives, you should damn well know so is everyone else, so the way you stand out is through personalisation.
So how do you actually personalise your ice breakers, theres 2 ways to get this going at scale
Approach 1
Create an excel or google sheet, ideally given you've used the right scraping tools you'll get key meta data about the end prospect you can use for hydrating your icebreaker
The column format can be firstname, lastname, domain, linkedin, twitter, recent news, company description, icebreaker (as an example)
Fill these columns in using scraper tools like findymail, Snov.io, Phantombuster, Wiza, Meetalfred or Lusha (more of which I'll mention towards the end) . These tools will scrape data from Linkedin profiles as well as other avenues and create an enriched excel sheet for you.
Once setup, you're going to create the first icebreaker by focusing on something unique about the person, ideally you should check out their linkedin profile, find something unique about them (their education, previous jobs, something they've interacted with on linkedin) and compliment them on it.
PS be careful about referencing something someone likes, people like a lot of things impulsively and it won't stick in their head, if you want to reference an interaction they've made on linkedin, make sure you're referencing a comment or a recent article they shared.
Once you've created 1 or 2 icebreakers to set the tone, head over to upwork and create a job for an english writing lead gen specialist. Create a job description expressing you're looking to hire someone who has done linkedin research and can create angles of interest for 1 liner introductions.
You'll have several people apply and make sure you give each one of them a task of filling up atleast 10 rows, (you should pay them for this to be fair, consider it cost of quality control). Once you've gone through your candidates and their quality, which will significantly vary, narrow down to the top 1-3 people. Repeat the process except this time around give them a test of 50 one liners to write for you
This process is important because finding the right VA will 10x your entire system and make your life significantly easier. After this you should have condensed down which person you want to work with. Hire them on a short term contract and build a pipeline process where you automatically add leads to a sheet which notifies them via email for them to complete and notify you as soon as they're done
Take the output you've created and download them into a CSV which you'll upload into one of the popular mailmerge tools like Smartlead, Mailshake or Woodpecker to reach out to your potential customer base.
Approach 2
Paste in the urls of the companies you're targeting and smartwriter's AI will generate hyper personalised cold emails using the best angle for the type of outreach you have in mind (sales, SEO, podcast interviews)
The entire process will take a couple of seconds and you'll also have Linkedin profiles, news article mentions as well as verified emails all ready for you in about 1 or 2 button clicks.
Here's some quick examples we used to generate 10 personalised icebreakers in 27 seconds
Hey Domm , It's great to see Fast solve the issue of passwords and long form entry with your 1-click login solution.
Hey Ramesh, I'm a big fan of data-driven decision making and cenario is a great tool for that. It's really easy to connect it with your Stripe account, which makes it an awesome addition to any business.
Hey Henrique, I'm really excited to see that Brex is simplifying the process of managing your business finances. It's great to see you taking a unique approach building this company, and the no account fees and no personal guarantee seems like a great idea!
Hey Ryan, It's not easy to move freight around the world, so it's great to see Flexport make this a little more manageable with their plug and play solution.
Hey Aaron, I've seen first hand how difficult data management can get with devs and marketers wanting different things. Segment's honestly such a simple yet genius solution, kudos to you!
Hey Patrick , I first heard about Stripe when I was researching payment processing solutions for my SaaS startup, and after reading your blog post on building a payments API from scratch, it seems to be a great solution for me.
Hey Wade , I've been looking for a way to automate my workflow and zapier honestly is the best product i could find, congrats on building such a great product.
Hey Apoorva , I'm a fan of Instacart's app and it's good to see the company focusing on improving their delivery times.
I came across your service and thought you might be interested in how [we] have been using it. We've been using Remoteworkly to replace many of our meetings with asynchronous video calls. It's helped us reduce travel, save time and improve the quality of our meetings.
Hey Chris , I'm a huge fan of your BaaS technology. It's so much easier to get started than building from scratch. I'd love to see how you're using the APIs and what else you're working on to help banks and fintechs.
As you can see the accuracy is high and the compliments are genuine. This is what has lead to almost 80% on average open rates across all our email campaigns and 30% reply rates in some situations even if we were sharing a link. 1-2 Demo campaigns had 58% reply rates when the intent was booking a meeting
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