How to write a cold email with AI

What are cold emails?

A cold email is the online equivalent of a cold call. It’s an unsolicited message sent to a receiver without any prior contact. Instead of promoting a service to the general population, the goal of this email is to initiate a business conversation with a specifically targeted individual.

There are warm emails as well, which are sent to a recipient who has previously interacted with your brand or business. They aim to nurture a relationship towards further engagement or a sale. Cold emails are the step before a warm email as they entail sending a message to someone for the first time with hopes of beginning a business relationship.

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Using AI for cold emails

While it’s possible to grow your business by buying ads on social media, email tends to be more personal, making it ideal for reaching out to potential customers. Use generative AI to locate and organize leads, create customized templates, and more.

Define your ideal customer

When you’re looking to grow your business by sending cold emails, the first thing you’ll need to do is figure out your target audience—who you’re going to send these emails to. Identifying buyer personas isn’t always the easiest task, which makes this a perfect job for AI. Identify your ideal customer personas, organize them, and tailor your emails appropriately. Try it yourself with these or your own prompts:

• Analyze the collected customer data and organize it by demographic and preference.
• Create ideal customer profiles for my business using the uploaded data. Sort the data by potential goal, preference, and buying behavior.
• Identify three customer personas that would potentially be receptive to a cold call or cold email.

AI recognizes patterns and trends in data that you might have missed. It also organizes data in a meaningful way to show you who your business and product would resonate with.

Generate a cold email template

Focus the content of your cold emails to resonate with your audience with AI’s improved targeting abilities. Upload your ideal customer profiles into AI and prompt it to create email templates to reach specific consumers. Create a custom cold email template using prompts like these:

• Using the uploaded consumer profiles and the information about my business, create a cold email template for each profile that effectively introduces my brand.
• Create a generic cold email template that I can send to identified customer leads.
• My ideal customer profile is an someone between the ages of 28-40 years old and lives in an urban area. They’re tech savvy and gainfully employed. They are more likely to rent than own and are frustrated by the current housing market. Using these details, help me create a cold email with a strong value proposition and a clear call to action.

Create custom responses

AI is an excellent tool for analyzing data. Put this capability to work when a potential customer responds favorably to your cold email. Upload their response to AI and create a follow-up that speaks to your business and strikes a chord with the customer. Get started with prompts like these:

• Analyze the email I received from a potential customer and create a response that addresses their questions while setting up next steps in this business relationship.
• What’s the best way to respond to this email that corrects their misconceptions while still moving the conversation forward?

Use AI to help your business in other ways; it can write a press release, improve your site’s SEO, and more. Streamline your workflows with AI-powered productivity tools and apps for free with Microsoft 365.