Core Principles [Based on Psychology and Copywriting] To Write Cold Emails & LinkedIn Messages that Sell

I’ve been in business for almost a decade, and one of the first growth strategies I tried to get new clients for my agencies was cold email and LinkedIn outreach.

However, no matter what I did, I always ended up with no more than five replies.

And guess what?

All five answers would be “I’m not interested” or “Please remove me from your list.”

I got tired of seeing other people’s success with cold outreach. 

What was I doing wrong? How are they better than me?

Resilient as I am, I kept pushing and testing different things.

I dived into copywriting and psychology to understand the basic principles of sales.

After some time and hundreds of iterations, I realized that cold outreach (whether through cold email or LinkedIn) doesn’t work for one of two reasons:

1. You’re not contacting enough people (it’s sometimes a volume game, after all – although there’s a way to fix this without contacting thousands of people a day – but more about that in one of the following articles)
2. Your outreach messages are not well written, or you don’t know how to sell through cold outreach.

In this article, we’ll focus on the second problem and learn how to write the best cold emails and LinkedIn messages while keeping in mind basic psychology and copywriting principles and laws.

You can also use these basic copywriting and psychology principles in everything else you do, such as demo calls, project propositions, social media content, and more.

At the end of this article, you’ll:

• Understand the main goals of cold outreach (they’re not what you think they are)
• Learn the four crucial pillars of cold emails & LinkedIn messages that sell
• Learn how to write subject lines so good that they actually force people to open your emails
• Learn how to write the body of your emails or LinkedIn messages that get people to reply back
• Learn how to write follow-ups that will make even the most persistent people to get back to you

So let’s get started.

Two Immutable Laws of Cold Outreach

I’ll prove to you right now that everything you know about cold email and LinkedIn outreach is wrong.

And that’s why you’re failing or not getting as many results as possible.

You want as many leads as you can possibly handle to run your way and give you their money.

To do that, we first need to look at the cold outreach game from a different perspective.

The First Immutable Law of Cold Outreach

Let me ask you something.

What’s the goal of a cold email or LinkedIn message?

Is it to sign a deal? Is it to book a call?

BIG NO!

The end goal is gaining new clients, and cold outreach is just a tactic we use to achieve that.

However, the goal is different when we’re talking about a single cold email or LinkedIn message.

You first need to get a reply to sell something.

After receiving your email, no one will jump to your booking page to book a demo call.

That almost never happens.

So, the goal of cold email or LinkedIn outreach is to get a positive response. After that, it’s up to you to build a relationship with the prospect and eventually book a meeting with them.

When you think about it this way, you’ll find out that getting replies to your emails is way easier than you think.

Why?

Well, in the beginning, since you’re not focused on booking a call anymore, you’ll think more about what will motivate people to reply. 

So, that was the first immutable law of cold outreach.

What’s the second?

The Second Immutable Law of Cold Outreach

The second immutable law is based on one of the core copywriting principles.

Every sentence you write inside your outreach message has a goal.

It might sound weird, but it’s true.

The goal of every sentence is to make people read the next sentence. Then the next, and the next, all the way down to the call-to-action (CTA).

When you think about it this way, you’ll see that every sentence is important and that you should pay special attention to every sentence.

This is called open-loop, often seen in TV shows and books.

Do you know that feeling when you watch your favorite show, and the episode ends immediately before something exciting happens?

It leaves you wondering what will happen next, so you must watch the next episode to get answers to your questions.

It’s the same in copywriting and writing cold outreach messages.

After reading one sentence, people should be compelled to read the second one.

Now that you know the two immutable laws of cold outreach messages, you’ll look at the process of writing them differently.

Instead of focusing on the end goal (signing clients), focus on the first milestone, which is getting a reply.

To get a reply, pay attention to each sentence, as they must work together to get your prospect to respond.

Four Pillars of Cold Emails

To write emails that get replies, there are four core pillars besides the two immutable laws we just learned.

They are:

• Relationship
• Hook
• Relevancy
• Achievable Dreams

Let’s go through each, one by one.

Relationship

Relationships are part of the cold outreach that happens outside the outreach itself. In other words, they’re not visible in your email or message – but they’re rather triggered as soon as the prospects see your name in their inbox (if you have a relationship with them).

The best cold emails are the ones that are not cold at all.

The best thing you can do is nurture and build relationships with your potential prospects on social media (or communities) before reaching out.

This is possible (and necessary) if you’re working with fewer prospects or if you’re selling high-ticket deals.

Warm cold emails (let’s call them like that) will always have higher conversions and reply rates than ordinary cold emails.

On average, I get around a 20-30% reply rate with warm-cold emails.
For example, just recently, I managed to get in the door of one huge brand I had been trying to close for such a long time. We were chatting about other stuff (sponsorship deals for some events). When they refused, I sneaked a free offer/pitch at the bottom of the email:

Hey,

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner, I just returned from vacation.

All good, I understand.

This season lasts 11 months, so we can even perhaps introduce you as sponsors mid-season. When is the best time to reach out to you/when do you expect to have inventory in the UK? 🙂

PS

For better goodwill between us, I would like to do some pro bono/free consulting for your brands. I’m the founder of a content marketing & SEO agency that works exclusively with ecommerce/DTC brands. So, if you know how we can work on this, let me know. Perhaps I can look at your content and SEO strategies from my POV and offer you my thoughts?

It might be interesting since darts is my biggest passion in the world, combined with my unique content and SEO experience, it’s a killer combo (and I always wanted to work with a darts brand!) 🙂 All for free, of course – look at it as part of our sponsorship deal and more value for you 🙂 

I got a positive reply the same day:

After that, we booked another call, and they accepted my free offer. So far, they’re satisfied, and we’re likely going to sign a deal worth high five figures a year.

Building some relationships with the prospects beforehand is excellent, but it’s not mandatory.

You can play either a quality game (relationships & high personalization) or a quantity game.

A good (and not time-consuming) way to build relationships with prospects is to put all of them on a Twitter List and engage with their posts for a week or two before sending your outreach campaign.

Or even better, you can put them in an automated LinkedIn engagement campaign through Expandi. Just create a list of LinkedIn URLs and put them in an Expandi campaign that will automatically:

• Engage with their posts
• Visit their profiles

This way, you build awareness before reaching out to them. If they constantly see your profile picture for weeks, they will be more likely to reply to your email.

You can create this campaign in less than 5 minutes through Expandi. 

1. Create an Expandi account and connect it with your LinkedIn profile

When creating your first campaign, pick the Express Interest Before Connection template, and you’re ready to go ( just don’t forget to add your lead list before launching the campaign)

The Hook

Relationships are nice to have. However, the following three pillars (Hook, Relevance, and Achievable Dreams) are must-haves.

Unlike relationships, the next three pillars are parts of the actual email or a LinkedIn message that you send.
The Hook is something that motivates prospects to open your email.

In the cold email or LinkedIn outreach example, that would be your:

• Subject line
• First sentence

In the case of InMails or cold emails, it’s both (since you see subject lines and previews of the first sentence).

In the case of the ordinary LinkedIn message, it’s just the first sentence (since there are no subject lines).

Later in the article, we’ll learn how to write solid hooks and subject lines.

The Relevancy

Once the prospects are hooked to open your email or LinkedIn message, we need something to keep them engaged and interested in what we have to say.

That’s where Relevancy comes in the game.

Relevancy is a piece of information, sentence, or an icebreaker relevant to the specific prospect.

The first and second sentences in your email must be either:

• Niche-relevant – some specific information relevant to the prospect company-type or industry.
• Account-relevant – specific information relevant to the specific prospect inside your list.

The best thing to do is to combine both if you can.

To understand this better, here’s a snippet from one email I used to send:

As you can see, I started the email with niche-relevant information (finding leads for Web Design agencies is hard since their clients are mostly new companies without websites)

Then, I followed up with account-relevant information (I identified perfect new leads in the same industry as their high-profile clients).

It’s also essential to know what relevant information to mention.

It’s easy to mix up useful, relevant info with relevant spam.

Relevant spam, such as “Hey {FNAME}, how is the weather in {LOCATION}?” screams from miles ahead that you’re trying to sell something.

We don’t want that.

The personalization (or relevancy) that you decide to use in your cold outreach messages must somehow be connected to the problem you solve.

We’ll discuss this further in the section on writing the body of your outreach message. For now, it’s important to understand that relevance is crucial to making people read your outreach message or cold email.

The Achievable Dreams  

So far, we know that Hook makes people open our email, while Relevancy makes people decide to spend time reading our message.

The last thing our outreach message needs to do is make people take action or, in our case, reply to us.
We do that by making their dreams possible.

There are a couple of ways to do that (depending on the stage of customer journey – i.e. whether you need a reply to start building relationships, or the lead is ready to take the meeting):

• Offering value without asking for anything in return

• Social proof (success stories from other people in the same industry as our prospects)
• Good offer
• Explaining to people what their life can look like without the problems we solve
• Or by simply mentioning benefits.

All of them can be effective, although I like the combination of social proof and offer the most.

The Four Core Pillars of Cold Outreach Messages – Quick Recap

So far, we learned that:

1. The goal of each cold message we send is to get a reply
2. Every sentence we write must work together to get a reply. We use open-loop sentences to make people read to the end of the email/message, where we prompt them to take action.
3. Having even a tiny relationship with the prospect before starting your cold outreach campaign will drastically increase your performance.
4. The hook is essential to make people open our email.
5. Relevancy serves to make people decide to read our message.
6. Achievable Dreams prompt people to take action and reply.

Now, let’s start writing our outreach messages.

How to Write Subject Lines that Make People Open Your Emails

As we learned, the subject line is one of the hooks you’ll use to get people to open your email, along with the first sentence.

However, we won’t get far using the classical clickbait templates for our subject lines.

Let me show you how subject lines and the human mind work together.

Everyone receives hundreds of emails a day.

Over the years, our minds developed internal spam filters. 

So whenever we see a new email, immediately after seeing the first word or two, we can conclude whether it is spam or something important that we need to see.

Our goal with subject lines is to avoid internal spam filters and make our emails or InMail messages look important.

This is the only way to get people to open our message (based on the subject line).

How do our internal spam filters work?

In reality, people only open emails that seem either urgent or sent by the people they know, such as:

• Friends and family
• Employees/Colleagues
• Investors
• Influencers in the niche

If you’re not an influencer in the niche, we need to find a way to make our emails and messages look like they’re sent from the first three groups of people.

So, here’s a little task for you.

Go to your inbox right now and study the subject lines of the emails sent by your colleagues, clients, employees, or investors.

What trend do you notice?

All subject lines are simple, short, and they don’t look salesy.

There are no long and descriptive subject lines, which is the most common mistake people make when sending cold emails.

These are the common elements of subject lines that don’t pass the internal spam filters:

• First name in the subject line
• Over-personalization
• Too long
• Too detailed
• Many uppercase letters (in fact, subject lines that pass the internal spam filters probably don’t have uppercase letters at all – the same applies to question marks as well)

Instead, your subject lines should:

• Look natural
• Short (max 2-3 words)
• Relevant but still not too detailed

With all of this in mind, here are the general subject lines that usually pass the internal spam filters:

• quick question
• question
• thoughts on this
• your thoughts
• {prospectName} <> {yourName} (This looks like an introduction from someone else)

Some short subject lines like the ones below (although they check all the marks) will still look like sales emails because of the nature of their words:

• Opportunity
• New deal
• More customers
• More leads
• Etc

So pay attention to what words you use, and make your subject lines as natural as possible (sometimes even the (no Subject) emails can work like a charm).

How to Write Body of Your Outreach Messages that Make People Reply Back

Since we know how to write subject lines that make people open the email, now it’s the time to learn how to make people read the entire email and eventually reply back.

In the first chapters of this article, we learned the two immutable laws of cold outreach copywriting (the goal of each email and the goal of every sentence).

We also saw the Four Pillars of Cold Outreach (Relationships, Hook, Relevancy, Achievable Dreams).

Now, it’s time to put everything we learned into action.
The first sentence of your email/message serves as a hook since it’s automatically previewed in your Email:

In LinkedIn’s example, it’s important to be even more straightforward with your first line, since the preview in the inbox is way shorter than what you can see in the email inbox:

Hence, for LinkedIn, we need to focus even more on our hook and relevancy. Every word counts.

Writing the perfect first-line

Your space in the preview window is limited. So, you need to use your words wisely.

Try being straightforward. Avoid stupid personalization lines and icebreakers such as: How’s the weather in {Location} or even worse I saw you studied at {University}.

Icebreakers like these scream that you’re trying to sell something.

Try to avoid small talk as much as you can. If you have nothing of great value to use as personalization, there are other ways to solve that. But more about that in the later chapters.

So, what should you do?

Instead, I like to combine my first line with the relevancy.

Slight Hey {FName} personalization at the beginning of your message is more than enough to show the prospect that we didn’t mass email everyone.

Immediately after that, follow with something account or niche-relevant.

Look at what I did in the example below:

Or, for example, if you’re selling sales or lead generation services, you can write something like:

Hey {FName}, I found a lead for you similar to {ExistingClient}

If you’re selling software, you can engage with some specific problem your software solves.

That is how you write the perfect first line to prompt your people to open your message.

What’s next? We can use a few elements or frameworks to make our prospects read the entire email and eventually get back to us.

Below are my two favorite frameworks.

N-A-O Outreach Copywriting Framework

N-A-O stands for Niche-relevant – Account-relevant – Offer

It’s what I did in the example above:      

You start with a niche-relevant personalized fact and immediately follow with an account-relevant personalization.

You end your email with an offer or CTA (more on how to write that later).

You can also include other elements in this framework, such as case studies, success stories, or social proof.

However, be careful. We don’t want to make our emails too long. Instead, we try to keep them as short as possible.

P-O-S-O Outreach Copywriting Framework

P-O-S-O stands for Problem – Outcome – Social Proof – Offer

With this framework, we engage with either one account-relevant or niche-relevant problem that our product/service solves.

Then, we proceed with mentioning the outcome, either the potential results or explaining how the prospect’s life might look when we resolve the problem.

Note: An effective strategy here is to reflect on their entire life after the problem is gone. For example, if you’re selling the weight loss course, you can say something like: “After you lose 20kgs, you’ll have more energy to play with your kids” or “Your wife will find you more attractive.” Include other people in this as well. It will have a bigger impact on the prospect.

Once we present the outcome, we back it up with social proof, such as We did this exact thing to X more people who saw Y results, including {SimilarCompany}.

We end the email with a CTA or offer.

Here’s an example of this outreach copywriting framework:

Out-of-the-box personalization to use

If, for some reason, you can’t find any account relevancy or niche relevancy to use as a hook and icebreaker, you can use some of my out-of-the-box personalizations.

However, always aim to use relevancy if possible, even if that means spending ten extra hours collecting the prospect data and building lead lists.

I have two favorite out-of-the-box personalizations I like to use.

Mention the cafe in Prospect’s city

As I did in the example above, I like to mention specific places from their city to make emails or messages more personal.

You can just go to Google, find a good bar or restaurant with great reviews, and mention it in your email (including the address).

If nothing, it shows the prospect that you’re willing to go the extra mile.

Mention other colleagues

This strategy so far proved to be effective for me.

I chose two employees who might be my decision-makers from each company I like to close as a client.

Then, in each email I send, I include a P.S. section saying:

P.S.

I was unsure if you or {colleagueName} the {title} were the right contacts, so I contacted both of you!

If I had two prospects from the same company, Michael and John, I would have written each other’s names in the email. (In my email to Michael, I’ll mention John in the P.S. and vice versa.)

This proved to be effective because:

1. It shows that I did my research
2. It might make them communicate about this between each other, hence myself and my company are in the centre of their attention
3. It’s based on the peer pressure psychological bias, which states that people are more likely to do something if one or more of their friends are involved.

BONUS – Automatically get personalized info on prospects from their LinkedIn profiles

If you’re working with huge lists, it might challenging to get high-quality personalized info for every prospect.

This is where good automation comes in place.

I like to use Expandi to automatically scrape information from prospect’s LinkedIn profiles, and put them in my outreach sequence.

Less hassle, more results in less time!

Here’s a great guide on how to use Expandi to for different personalization use cases:

• How to scrape LinkedIn search results with or without LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• How to scrape LinkedIn group members
• How to scrape people who engaged with LinkedIn posts
• And other.

For example, one of my favorite workflows is to scrape people who engaged with specific posts from the influencers in my niche, and then use that as a personalization and icebreaker in campaigns.

How to write call-to-actions and offers that make people reply to your email

Call-to-action (CTA) is directly tied to the offer.

They’re the same thing, with the same goal, divided into two sentences.

First, you want to write the offer and then a CTA.

When discussing the offer, don’t try to sell your product or services, especially if they’re high-ticket or bigger than $1000.

No one will buy from you after receiving one email because they don’t trust you. 

Instead, you aim to get a reply and interest prospects in one of your lead magnets.

Once they consume your lead magnet, you should continue the conversation and make them book a call with you.

How to create irresistible lead magnets for cold outreach

Lead magnets for outreach have two important roles:

• Solve a micro problem your customers are facing for free
• Reveal the bigger problem the customer is unaware of (or the secret opportunities he’s missing).

So, your lead magnet must provide certain value to the customer.

Do you know when the sale happens?

From a psychological standpoint, a sale happens when the customer’s perceived product value exceeds his price.

And even if you’re offering your lead magnet for free, even though the prospect is not paying for it with money, he’s paying for it with time.

So, when creating your lead magnet, keep in mind that it must provide enough value to the customer to justify the price and also reveal the bigger problem (which your main product or service solves).

For example, since I run a content marketing agency, I like to offer my prospects free strategy and keyword research.

It costs them zero money and no time, and they’ll uncover secret possibilities to supercharge their growth.

Once satisfied with my free research, I slowly move them down the pipeline and convince them to start a pilot project with me to see if the secret possibilities make sense for them.

With all of this in mind, you can solve the micro problems for your prospects with different types of lead magnets, such as:

• Free research or consultation
• Free trial
• Ebook
• Software
• Calculator
• Micro SaaS
• And other stuff.

How to write an irresistible lead magnet offer and CTA in your outreach messages

Offers and lead magnets are directly related to the account-relevant and niche-relevant problems you discussed at the beginning of your outreach message.

So make sure that the copy you use for this is consistent with the rest of your message.

Let’s go back to our weight loss program example.

Our email can look like this:

Hey {fName}

{Account-relevant problem}

I helped 346+ other women aged 40-45, like you lose over 20kgs in less than 4 months with my program. – Social Proof

But besides my premium program, I also have a smaller pilot project we can go through together. It will help you lose 3 kg in a week. It’s free, and I can give you access to it immediately.

Are you up for it?

An important thing when writing offers and CTA is to offer only one choice.

People get confused when they have to choose between multiple options.

Even the American psychologist Barry Schwartz proved this when he discovered that people are more likely to buy when they have fewer options.

So for example, when your goal is to book a quick meeting with the prospect, you can say something like

Are you free to meet tomorrow at 3 pm CET time for a quick 10-minute meeting?

How to write follow-ups

So, now we have learned how to write an email or a LinkedIn outreach message that will get people to reply to you.

But what happens if they don’t reply?

You need to keep in mind that even if you did everything right with your message, people still might not reply for one or two reasons:

• They don’t experience the problem you solve
• Now, it’s not the right time (life happens).

That’s why we need to follow up with them constantly.

In 99% of cases, people ignore your emails and messages because they either don’t see fit or it’s not the right time.

If you stop contacting them, they’ll forget about you.

But if you follow up with them frequently, they’ll eventually reply.

Writing follow-ups is the same as writing the initial email or a LinkedIn message.

So, to write effective follow-ups, follow the same principles as above, but:

• Change angles of your approach or talk about different problems
• Offer different lead magnets if necessary
• Recycle and mention different sales collateral (success stories, etc).

I’m a fan of long sales sequences lasting around six months.

This ensures I cover multiple timeframes and minimize the now’s the not right time objection.

Here’s my usual follow-up frequency (both on LinkedIn and email):

You can use Expandi to create automated sequences and follow-up with people on both LinkedIn and email to increase the chance of getting the reply.

What do you do if you still don’t get replies?

Even if you follow everything I told you, there’s still a chance you won’t get a reply.

The reasons are again:

• Not the right time
• They don’t experience the problem
• Or they don’t see the value in your product/service – This is a copywriting problem. So, return to the writing board and test different angles and perspectives.

Unless you’re reaching out to a warm audience (prospects you already have some relationship with), sometimes, the only thing you need to do is CONTACT MORE PEOPLE.

I see many people sending 100 emails and saying cold outreach doesn’t work for me.

That’s not how it works. Even when I want to test something, I do it only on samples with more than 800 recipients.

A good metric to measure the success of your outreach campaigns is email the meeting ratio. For example, out of 500 prospects, you get one meeting.

The best lead generation specialists and outreach experts (such as Nick Abraham, who has a lead generation agency) have an email-to-meeting ratio of 600:1.

That means they close one meeting out of 600 people they contact.

So don’t expect to get any meetings if you contact less than 1000 people.

The Bottom Line

Now you know how to write cold emails and LinkedIn messages that get you replies based on the core psychology and copywriting principles, as well as the best practices.

Study the human mind. Study your market. Study what other companies are doing.

And most importantly, just send, send, send. Launch campaign, iterate campaign, launch again, iterate again.

Don’t run tests with less than 800 people on the list, since you won’t get any significant information and learnings.

Now it’s all up to you.

Go close some deals.