How to Write a Cold Email Call-to-Action (With Examples)

For any B2B business looking to grow, a solid outreach campaign is an effective method. The most effective outreach tactic, according to a Databox survey, is cold email (36%). The next closest outreach tactic is cold calling (18%), which is much more time-consuming than cold email outreach which is half as effective as cold emailing. Overall, business professionals around the world rely on cold emailing to generate leads and land meetings with potential customers.

However, there is one major problem that you face when sending these emails to prospects, and it’s that the reply rate can often be quite low, with 1-3% often being cited as an average. That’s a fairly minuscule percentage of your contacts that respond — but how can that be? Surely that must mean people aren’t opening cold emails sent to them. Or it means they are ending up in spam folders, right?

But the open rate can be much higher than the response rate. So why are a small fraction of potential customers responding? If they’re opening the email, then they obviously intend to read it. And if they read it and didn’t respond, that could only mean one thing: you didn’t give them a strong enough reason to take action. Or what marketers often call, an email call-to-action (CTA).

What makes a good email call to action?

Simply throwing in a green button at the bottom of your email that says Book Now or Get in Touch or Shop Store is technically considered a call-to-action. But is it enough to separate your cold email from the hundreds of others people receive in a day? Probably not, considering it’ll look just like most of the other 126 or more business emails they receive in a day. Most of us have trained our brains to filter through our email inbox.

That’s why the key to writing a good email call-to-action is to catch someone’s attention before your cold email falls victim to filtering. But that’s easier said than done. How do you separate your email call-to-action from the pack? Well, there are few ways to do that:

Personalize it so it is relevant to the recipient

You have to know the interests of your cold email outreach target audience to intrigue them with relevant information. That’s the only way they’ll click on something — to pursue what will solve their business needs. Getting someone you don’t know to like something they weren’t interested in before is an uphill battle. But when you have something they want, they’ll take time out of their busy schedules to obtain it.

In Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, he famously wrote, “The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.”

And that’s exactly what a CTA is — showing your prospects what they want and easy directions to find it. You can keep the copy as simple as this:

“Show me how”

Or even better and more personalized:

“Show me how [product name] can save me 30 minutes every day”

Make it easy for them to take action

It’s often best to only include one cold email CTA in your correspondence. Offering multiple call-to-actions can result in what is known as Decision Paralysis, where people can’t decide what to do. Instead, they make no choice — and give up. You want to make your email call-to-action as simple as possible to follow. Decide on only one thing you want them to do. For cold emails, this might include replying, booking a quick meeting or demo, or downloading a helpful piece of content like a whitepaper.

You may still have other links in your email for them to click on (such as a link in your signature), but only have a singular call-to-action and ask them to do one thing. More is less with a good email call-to-action. Here’s a good email call-to-action to get them to your website — it’s clear, easy to understand, and doesn’t sound pushy:

“Check out the full list of [how you can help them] here”

Establish trust before sending anything

Even before the pandemic, workers were somewhat aware of phishing emails and scams. But now that companies have prioritized cybersecurity and trained employees on what to look for, people are even more hesitant to click on links or attachments. That’s why it’s important to establish trust before sending anything.

That’s the point of cold emailing — to build a relationship and move them along through your outreach funnel. Nobody wants to be told what to do, especially when it’s coming from a total stranger. Instead, ask permission to send them something. Here’s a good example:

“Would you be interested in a 2-minute video about how we can [what you can do for their needs]?”

Provide a calendar link

Instead of giving them a specific date and time to talk, give them the freedom to choose. It’s all about making it as easy as possible for your cold email recipient. Plus, it makes things easier on you because you don’t have to email back and forth to figure out which time works for both of you.

Here’s what you can say for your email call-to-action:

“Here’s my calendar link. Book a 5-minute call at your convenience.”

Restate your value proposition

Your email call-to-action is an excellent opportunity to remind them of the most important parts of your email. In a sense, you’re summarizing what you just told them. This works great because there might be prospects that read quickly through the body of the email and miss key points. This ensures they don't miss the most important reason you can help them.

Take this CTA for example,

“Book a 15-minute call to see how our product/service can increase your revenue.”

While these are certainly examples of solid email call-to-actions, they’re not the magic solution to turn leads into sales. You need to lay the groundwork in the body of your email for these CTAs to work. Your call-to-action is there to give them a little push in the right direction.

If you’re going to be cold emailing prospects with an effective call-to-action, you’ll need a list of email addresses for professionals. Skrapp.io provides an advanced prospecting email tool to help professionals launch cold email outreach campaigns.

Let us help you find emails for those well-written email call-to-actions with our email lookup web extension!