Saw this gem of a line on Reddit earlier:
“Come to the conclusion that most “personalized” emails aren’t personal. They’re just templates with variables.”
Oh MAN get this guy a Pulitzer Prize!
I’m not kidding, this is some “what if Socrates studied cold emails” magic right here.
Anyone with a business email gets bombarded with cold emails. It’s inevitable.
80% of the ones in my inbox look like this:
“Hey Nick, saw that you do X, Y and Z—love it!
ANYWAY, enough about THAT boring stuff!
Have you ever wondered how much your business could GROW if you paid my random company—that I run out of a local cyber cafe using child labor—a monthly retainer?
THOUGHTS??”
I think not!
Even if you don’t receive cold emails, you DO get emails from 151 brands that start like this:
“Good morning NAME!
SALES PITCH
BUY HERE”
Look…
I guess back in 1781 when George Washington first discovered merge tags during the Siege of Yorktown, adding someone’s first name to an email must have seemed like witchcraft.
Now?
‘Personalization’ has the opposite effect.
You expect it.
That’s why I rarely use merge fields in my emails, FIRST NAME LAST NAME.
Swinging back around to cold emails, the original, ulterior motive of personalization was to stand out in the client’s inbox.
Because personalization no longer has this effect, you have to find other ways to stand out.
Cold emails are totally saturated with templated responses, and it’s a tough way to close clients if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Definitely not ‘beginner friendly.’
Well…
No job-getting platform is really ‘beginner friendly.’ But Upwork is about as close as you can get.
The good thing about Upwork is that the bar for GOOD outreach (aka proposals) is MUCH lower than cold email.
Take it from me—most of the proposals I get are clearly written by AI, and a lot of ‘em still have random placeholders like [insert joke here].
That’s the perfect opportunity for you to jump in with GOOD proposals…
Which you can learn to write by reading my emails right here:
