This defines everything when you're looking at the complete success rate of your cold email. The pitch is the outcome you're offering them. The reason they should care to even bother listening to you. This is the part your "WIIFT" effect comes to full play, they need to understand in clear concise terms what's in it for them.
This will be one of the most important aspects of your cold email campaign and one you'll be testing quite rigorously.
I'll reiterate the quote I mentioned at the start of this series "If you're messaging this person, so is someone else". In this effort to stand out from all the cluster the prospect receives you need to work out how you will be the one that hooks their eyes.
Lets walk through some examples of me pitching smartwriter to a marketing or sales lead:
"Double your email open rate"
"Generate more leads for your sales team"
"Save time with automated cold emailing"
"Automate your sales outreach job"
Look, they're alright, but I can assure you, that I wouldn't get the best open rates or reply rates if I went with this angle. Literally any potato with a list of emails can promise the above, and I assure you someone probably has already promised the above.
Lets spice it up using metrics, relevance and knowledge (I'll explain this in a second)
If you don't have results:
"Reach 3x your audience using our conversational DM strategy"
"Close ~25% more SEO leads using contextual AI in your funnel"
Once you have results:
"Competitors like <xyz> got 77% booking rates using personalised AI cold emailing"</xyz>
"Marketing agencies swear by our AI conversion emails for a ~32% increase in their booking rates"
"We helped 17 SDRs close an extra 50k in deals using personalised AI cold emails, with no extra effort"
"We helped SDRs like you close 40% more leads using our Personalised Email Tactics "
"Rumour says our crappy AI tool helped a bunch of sales people break their personal best records, thought you might be keen?"
If you've got any customer testimonials or case studies, you NEED to use them because the effectiveness of your outreach campaign will significantly improved. When we incorporated metrics and customer results we'd see 65%-80% open rates on a bad day.
Notice the key difference being the mention of stats and numbers, humans are automatically attracted to metrics vs grandiose verbs like "skyrocket, double, triple, half the time", they've just been so overused people are numb to it.
Second is the inclusion of the relevance, if i'm selling to sales development representatives, I'm sure to mention that this is important to them! Not to marketers, not to designers, but specifically SDRs. Also, no one wants to be the last and people inherently will do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. So by mentioning that others are already using your service or tool (provided this is true) will bump up the adoption.
Last is the knowledge, you've given them numbers and mentioned that this is solution is for them, but how are you achieving this? This same principle applies to landing page copy as well (similar to cold emails in one way). Try use the words "our, we, me" as little as possible and focus on "you, their, them", this will automatically force you to talk about what you can do for them and less about what you do.
You promise the dream but you need to explain to them how exactly, everyones bulls**t meter is up on alert in 2021 so giving them a condensed outline on how you do what you do will help ease their reservation and in fact peak their intrigue.
The goal is to not build desire, the goal is to channel an existing desire within your prospect using emotional hooks that get them to look at what you have to offer.
Another approach you can take that works really well is asking for advice. This puts people in a position of authority and makes them want to offer back advice, remember at our core we all like to talk about ourselves, our opinions and our views. Sometimes all you have to do is listen in sales and you've won the deal. Lets use Brex (They're a startup offering Credit Cards to startups when no banks do).
The angle they can take can be:
"Hey <startup founder=""></startup>
<icebreaker></icebreaker>
Pitch: I built brex to help startup founders get access to credit cards because banks just don't. It's been a fun journey but i'm looking for advice on how I can "grow" this.
Just after some advice on how I can get in touch with other startups who faced a similar problem."
The recipient may as well be the customer you're targeting, but their guards will be down because you're asking for advice. You'll get 2 things out to this, if they are your target customer, the pitch would have worked and they would actually also think "Hey even i'm facing this problem, let me try it out", and secondly since you put them in a position of authority/importance they'll get back offering you genuine advice i.e you've got a new potential customer and some more leads