A crazy insight from our study of 85M+ cold emails with Gong and 30 Minutes To President's Club

A crazy insight from our study of 85M+ cold emails with Gong and 30 Minutes to President's Club.

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"Offers" outperform "interest-based CTAs" by 4x

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This is THE 2025 cold email data point everyone needs to pay attention to.

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An offer is NOT:

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- A free demo

- Gifts or gift cards

- A "meet and greet"

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Here's a breakdown of the types of cold email call-to-actions we analyzed:

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⛔️ Ask for the meeting

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Reduces reply rates by 44%.

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Examples:

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“Can I get 15 minutes of your time?”

“Are you free to meet tomorrow?”

“Does 2pm work for you this Friday?”

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It's not that you should never use these types of CTAs. Just use them sparingly.

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⛔️ Open-ended problem questions

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Reduces reply rates by 29%.

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Examples:

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“How are you handling [problem] at [company]?”

“What are you seeing at [company]?”

“How does this compare to your experience?”

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These questions are really hard to answer. And you're asking a complete stranger to tell you about their problems.

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✅ Interest-based CTAs

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Increases reply rates by 9%. These used to be the holy grail.

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Examples:

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“Open to learning more?”

"Want to see how?"

"Are you seeing this right now?"

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These still work great.

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✅ Offers

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Increases reply rates by 28%. This was validating.

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It's what we've preached to our clients for a few years now.

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Give the prospect something valuable. Promise something of value.

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1. Talk up who they'll be meeting with

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Hype up the AE, sales engineer, or yourself. This works great for more technical solutions.

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Example email CTA:

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"Our welding solutions engineer, Paul, is working with Hitch manufacturers like CURT to help overcome the welder shortage and produce consistent, high-quality welds.

Interested in a quick intro?"

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2. Promise to share insights & benchmarks

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Competitive benchmarks, industry research, or best practice guides. Need great content for this one to work (or leverage AI to build an insight for you).

This has to be GOOD. The equivalent of the data in this post for salespeople, but for your buyers.

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Example email CTA:

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"We ran a benchmarking analysis with a few of your peers like Ultromics and MEDRhythms to find avg. study start times, drop-out rates, insights on how they shorten build times.

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Interested in seeing how you stack up?"

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3. Custom offers

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Custom-tailored experiences or resources. This could be offering a custom cyber risk analysis. If you sell ecomm, it's doing a cart audit and sharing a preview of it. Offering free data, etc.

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Example email CTA:

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"We compiled a report of how WCUS stacks up against the top schools in WA & OR.

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Free next week to run through the report together?

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Tom

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P.S. If nothing else, you’ll see how other PNW school districts are minimizing student inequity and achievement gaps to increase student readiness and graduation rates"

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~~~

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Want to check out the full episode where Nick Cegelski and I break down 9 more cold email data points like this?

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Watch here.

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