With a cold email, you can either drive hundreds of thousands in pipeline or send your prospects running for the hills.
We have plenty of resources on writing effective cold emails at Sales Hacker. But sometimes the difference between an okay cold email and a great one is specific feedback on what you have.
The teams at Outreach and REGIE created the Cold Email Grader to help you — you guessed it — write better cold emails.
It’s as simple as copy and pasting in your email subject line and email body.
The robust machine learning algorithm has been trained by combing through millions of real business emails to find out what works when writing a cold email. The Cold Email Grader can detect grammar, spelling, sentiment, social proof, personalization, and more.
Grade one cold email or test out 10 different iterations — just make sure you test out the suggestions and watch how it affects your results.
Quick Guide for Using the Cold Email Grader
This section has been adapted from the Cold Email Grader FAQ for more clarity on the tool.
Each cold email is given an overall grade out of 100 — 100 being a perfect score and 0 being a terrible idea to send to another human being on planet earth.
- A score of 65 or less will show Red. You might want to try again.
- A score of 65 to 75 will show Orange. You probably have a lot to add or change.
- A score of 76 to 85 will show Bronze. You just need a few more tweaks before it’s good to send.
- A score of 85 or more will show Green. You’re ready to send that cold email!
Scores are broken down into the 4 main components of a good cold email and weighted by how much they matter in the conversion of that cold email to a positive reply.
Subject: This is what gets your email opened in the first place.
We look to make sure the subject line is legible in common English, doesn’t use vulgar language, and isn’t too generic or spammy. Then we look to make sure the length is good. Ideally, the subject line will be between 10 and 30 characters and 2 to 6 words. Lastly, it should trend towards positive sentiment and feel personalized to the reader.
Body: Don’t miss your chance to say the right thing!
We look to make sure the body length is good, positive sentiment, and it’s not spammy. Then we look to see if there’s good use of social proof (ie. listing 2-3 companies that use your product or service), good use of ROI (ie. users show a 200% increase in productivity over the first 3 months), check to see if it’s personalized enough for the reader, and if there’s a good ending Call To Action.
Mechanics: You don’t want to come off looking uneducated or unprofessional.
We look at your line spacing to see that you’ve spaced out the email well so it will be easily readable on any device. We also check spelling, grammar, and syntax of the body of the email.
Deliverability: Very important, but weighted a little lower than the rest of the categories.
We just want to make sure you use language that won’t get you caught in spam filters or sent directly to the trash bin. This takes into account the spamminess of the Subject Line and Body. We make sure you don’t say the wrong things like Free Gold, Buy Now, or anything else that might set off alarms in your prospects mind.
Looking at the individual scores that you receive when your email gets graded will allow you to understand where you might need to tweak to score higher on the next try.
You can use a Sales Engagement Platform to send personalized cold emails, run A/B tests, and create sequences. For a great resource to learn more about this topic, check out our Sales Engagement book and podcast.
