Why nobody replies to your cold emails: a real message, rewritten

Nobody replies to your cold emails when the message is all about you and the reader gets nothing for answering. Make the opening about them, say what they get in return for what you’re asking, or better still, give them something first so they want to give back.

A competitor sent me a cold LinkedIn message asking to be added to our list of the best lead generation agencies for AI companies. I didn’t reply. It wasn’t rude, and he clearly wanted something reasonable. It just had nothing in it for me.

So I took it apart line by line and rewrote it, which is the video above. This is the written version: what went wrong, the rewrite, and the two ways to make it even better. I’ve left his name out. The mistakes are common, and I’ve made most of them myself.

The message I got

Here are the parts that matter, as he wrote them:

Hi Xavier, I came across your list of the best lead generation agencies for AI companies. I run an outbound agency I started this year, and we write every email and LinkedIn message for one person from research on their accounts. … Would you consider adding us the next time you update it?

The first line is fine. He saw the list, and he says so. I can also see why he sent it: our blog posts rank in Google and get cited by AI assistants, and being on that list would help him. Everything after the first line is where it falls apart, for three reasons.

Count the I’s and we’s

Read the second sentence again and count. “I run”, “I started”, “we write”. That’s three I’s and we’s in one sentence, and nothing about me. Apart from “your list” in the first line, the message never mentions me at all.

This is the most common mistake in cold messages, and the easiest to check. Before you send anything, count the I’s and we’s against the you’s. The reader wants to know what’s in it for them, and your company, its founding year and its process don’t answer that.

Don’t ask a competitor for a favour

The second problem is who he sent it to. He runs an outbound agency. So do we. He’s asking a competitor to send him business by putting him on a list that ranks.

That can work, but only if the competitor has a reason to say yes. A stranger who competes with me, asking me to promote him on my own website, starts from a long way back.

Say what they get in return

If you’ve sent a lot of cold messages, you know where this is going. I’m the person being asked to do something. What do I get? In this message, nothing. There’s no reason to reply, no proof he’s good at what he does, and nothing about me.

You don’t need to offer much. You need to offer something, and say it in plain words next to the ask.

The rewrite: a trade in one line

His own message gave me the trade. He says his agency writes every message for one person from research on their accounts. Our agents send at scale. So the obvious swap is: he writes a few messages by hand for our best accounts, and we add him to the list. Here’s how I’d write it:

Hey Xavier, I came across your list of the best lead generation agencies for AI companies. Looks like your main bread and butter is sending cold emails at scale (based on that Prospeo case study you have on your website). How about you add me on your next listicle? And in exchange, I help you by MANUALLY writing 10 messages to your top 1% accounts?

PS. This is my moat. I have a small niche and do things by hand. So I think our skills can complement each other since you found a way to crack AEO.

What changed:

• The first line stays — it was already fine.
• The second line is about me — and it shows he read our website. We did send a lot of email for Prospeo, and you can read the Prospeo case study.
• The ask and the offer sit side by side — I know what he wants and what I get if I say yes.
• “MANUALLY” is in capitals on purpose — that’s something AI wouldn’t write, and it’s a small joke about everything else being AI now. It reads like a person.
• The PS gives a reason it makes sense — hand-written messages next to our volume, plus a compliment on the AEO work he’s clearly noticed.

Even if you stopped after the question mark, it’s far better than the original. If he’d sent me that, I would have replied yes and put him on the list.

Check whether they’re a competitor or a vendor

What he was trying to do has a name in our app: getting featured. We track which questions buyers ask AI assistants, weekly for every question and daily for the top 10, and one of the actions the tracker suggests is getting onto the pages the engines already cite. I wrote up the whole tracker in how to get recommended by AI.

Before we ask anyone to feature us, our AI checks whether the site belongs to a competitor or a vendor. We only reach out to vendors. If it’s a competitor, which almost every agency on that list is for me, the recommendation is different: don’t ask them, write a similar post on your own website, because that format is clearly working.

So for the person who messaged me, I’d say there are two good options. Message me with something in return. Or make your own version of the list on your site, in your own voice, with the agencies you’d recommend. A message with no reason to reply isn’t one of them.

Even better: give first

Cold outreach works when you use reciprocity. The rewrite above is a trade, and a trade is fine. But reciprocity in its pure form goes further: you do something for the other person first, and they want to do something for you back.

If he’d wanted to use it properly, he would have dropped the ask altogether:

Hey, I see you do cold email at scale. I write everything by hand. Can I write for 10 of your top 1% accounts? Let me know.

I would have replied to that straight away. I might even have asked what he wanted in return. And if I didn’t, he could ask once he’d done the work, ideally after booking me a meeting.

To be fair, the original ask is small. Being mentioned on our blog isn’t like being mentioned by Apple or Microsoft. But the principle holds at any size: the best cold messages offer something for free.

An offer so good it needs no problem

The usual advice is to name the prospect’s problem and offer to help with it. That works. But if your offer is good enough, you can skip the problem entirely.

Say someone wrote to me: “Hey Xavier, saw that you train Muay Thai. Can I give you 10 free classes with a coach in Thailand?” That doesn’t solve any problem I have. It’s just a great offer, and I’d take it. Ask yourself whether your offer is strong enough to work without a problem attached. If it isn’t, make it stronger.

Read it out loud before you send

You can get the lead list right, the data right and the sending setup right, and none of it counts if the copy isn’t good. None of it counts if the offer isn’t good either.

So read your message out loud before it goes out, and ask yourself two questions. Do I sound like I’m full of myself? Would I reply to this? If the answers are yes and no, write it again.

Frequently asked questions

Key takeaways

• Count the I’s and we’s. If the message is mostly about you, rewrite it.
• Put the ask and what they get in return in the same sentence.
• Asking a competitor for a favour rarely works. Check who you’re writing to first.
• The strongest messages give first. Reciprocity does the rest.
• A good enough offer doesn’t need a problem attached.
• Read it out loud. If you sound full of yourself, write it again.

Want your own cold email roasted? Comment it under the video or message it to me on LinkedIn (search Xavier Caffrey) with the email, your target audience and your offer.