Best Cold Email Template For SaaS Companies (2024)

Cold email is an effective way for SaaS companies to acquire new users.

I would know, since I own a SaaS company (Emailchaser), and have used cold email to successfully acquire hundreds of users.

In this article, I share the exact template I used in Emailchaser’s cold email campaign, which received a 30%+ positive response rate.

I will cover the following topics:

- What SaaS companies need to understand before sending cold emails
- My Emailchaser template (30%+ positive response rate)
- Best practices
- Final thoughts

What SaaS companies need to understand before sending cold emails

The most important thing to understand when sending cold emails is this:

Your lead list is by far the most important factor affecting the success of your cold email campaign.

Sending cold emails to generic business owners based on attributes like {location} and {industry} isn’t good enough.

If you do the above, you’ll receive a very low response rate and you’ll probably get your email accounts blacklisted by ESPs.

Just because a lead is a specific {job_title}, {location} or {industry} doesn’t mean that they need your product or service.

For example, if I’m trying to acquire users for Emailchaser, then I need to make a list of people that already use cold email software, since these people are 10x more likely to respond to my emails.

If I contact random business owners, I’ll have a very low response rate, since most people don’t even know what cold email software is. This low response rate will increase the likelihood that my email accounts get blacklisted by ESPs like Gmail and Outlook.

My advice is this:

Before you write your cold email, ask yourself where your ideal customers are located online, and then do whatever you need to do to build a list of these people.

It’s unlikely that a lead database tool like Apollo will be able to create such a relevant list.

Often, you’ll have to do something custom, like hiring someone on Upwork to build a scraper that can scrape people or businesses from certain sources, and then hiring a VA to manually find the email address and LinkedIn profile of the owner of each company. This isn’t easy or fun, but often, it’s the only way to build a lead list that gets a high response rate.

My Emailchaser template (30%+ positive response rate)

Below is a screenshot of the email I used when acquiring users for Emailchaser:

The above campaign received a 30%+ positive response rate.

The reason that this campaign performed so well is because I built a highly relevant lead list.

Sure, the copy and offer are great, but without the lead list, this would not have worked.

All of the people in this lead list already use cold email software.

Emailchaser is a cold email software, so the ideal type of person to reach out to is someone that already uses cold email software.

I made a list of people that gave one of our competitor’s (Instantly) a review on their G2 page. We then found their email addresses using Emailchaser’s Email Finder tool.

If someone gave a review to our competitor, then that person already uses cold email software, making them an ideal potential customer for Emailchaser.

There are many other ways of building lead lists; this G2 review case study is just one example.

Low response rates negatively impact your deliverability. This means that if you contact people that aren’t likely to need your product or service, then you’ll receive a low response rate, and your email accounts will get blacklisted.

If you’re interested in learning the framework I used when I wrote this email, then check out my article How To Write A Cold Email.

Best practices

Subject line:
If your subject line makes your email look like a sales email, then you will be ignored. To learn how to write a great subject line, read my article Best Subject Line For Cold Emails.

Signature:
Adding a signature to the bottom of your email can increase your response rate, as it helps your prospect quickly establish if you are worth responding to. Learn how to implement a signature in my article How To Write A Professional Email Signature.

Plain text:
You should send your cold emails as plain text (not html). Plain text emails have better deliverability. If you send your cold emails through Emailchaser, then they are sent as plain text by default. Learn more about this in my article Plain Text vs HTML: Which Is Better For Email Deliverability?

Word count:
I recommend that you keep your cold emails under 100 words. Your response rate will decrease if your email is over 100 words.

Final thoughts

If you’re launching a cold email campaign for your SaaS company, then the most important thing affecting your success is your lead list.

To learn how to build a relevant lead list for cold email, check out my article How To Build A Lead List For Cold Email.

Finally, if you want to understand the framework I used when writing the above email, then read my article How To Write A Cold Email.