3 cold email frameworks:
- AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action
- BAB: Before, After, Bridge
- PAS: Problem, Agitate, Solution
For those frameworks to perform with your cold emails you need to know your ICP / Buyer Persona / Their pain points
- ICP: Ideal Customer Profile
- Buyer Persona: Character created to represent a user type that might use your product
- Your prospects’ pain points
And of course, to make your outreach successful, you need the right data — having a verified email and phone number of your decision-makers ensures your message actually lands where it should.
1st cold email framework: AIDA
Attention:
Most SDRs and BDRs are selfish in their cold email
They think about themselves, not their prospects
They:
- Forget the “WIIFT” (What’s in it for them) part
- Write “Me, me, me” cold emails that only talks about them, their company and product.
- Think they’ve done a great job
- Don’t understand why nobody answers their cold emails
- End up thinking “Cold email is dead”
A cold email and an ad have a lot in common.
You need to grab your prospect’s attention
Stand out from the crowd (we receive on avg. 121 emails/day)
2 spots to catch your prospect’s eyes:
- Subject line (1-3 words max)
- Opening line of your email
The ideal form of personalization is correctly identifying your prospect’s specific need or problem.
To connect with your prospects you can use:
- An observation
- A genuine mutual connection: Same college, mutual friend/contact
- Real flattery: Show you’ve made some research about them (Blog post about them and what you’ve learnt from it)
- Humor or personal reference
- Offer something of value that can help them solve one of their problem
E.G.
Subject line: {{firstName}} <> Arnaud
That subject line shows you want to establish a connection with your prospect
Opening Line:
Hey {{FirstName}}, I noticed you’re hiring 1 country manager in Singapore
PS: Always optimize your subject line and Opening line for Mobile
Interest:
Sending cold emails without having clarity on your prospects’ problems is a waste of time
You end up writing:
- generic cold emails
- Not directly related to solving their problem
- And focused more on you than your prospect
Your cold email won’t resonate with them
High chance they stop reading
In this sentence, you need to show them you might have identified their needs
A need is often linked to a problem.
E.G
Attention:
Subject line: {{firstName}} <> Arnaud
That subject line shows you want to establish a connection with your prospect
Opening Line:
Hey {{FirstName}}, I noticed you’re hiring 1 country manager in Singapore
Interest:
Usually, that means you want to start growing and generate pipeline in APAC
Desire:
Most sales people say “Way too much” here.
- They give irrelevant examples to the prospects to sound credible.
- It’s often too generic
- Prospects can feel you’ve send this example to 1000+ people
The desire part is for your prospect to think: “where has this guy been all this time?”
It’s the place where you can share your most compelling social proof, qualifications, and/or results.
Wrong:
We’ ve 500+ happy customers including 43 fortune 500 companies and we’re in the ranking Great place to work, so it means we’re great and our employees are super happy”
Good:
We helped {{Company}} generate {{results}} by doing {{action}}
The company preferably needs to be a company they can relate to.
Action:
Don’t be pushy like the majority of sales people.
I receive ~ 20+ cold emails/day.
99% of them have a hard Cold-To-Action
“Are you interested to schedule a call with me at 2 pm on Thursday?”
Here is my calendly: [Calendly URL]
In this case, the prospect could feel forced.
The best option is to let them evaluate on their own if they should have that conversation with you.
3 goals with a Call-To-Action:
- Create a sense of urgency
- Make a clear, simple request that doesn’t seem too difficult, costly, or time-consuming
- Stand out visually from the rest of the email.
E.G.
” Worth a chat?”” Open to discuss?”” Does it make sense for you?”
Best cold email templates (b2b)
e.g.
[Attention]:
Subject line: {{firstName}} <> Arnaud
That subject line shows you want to establish a connection with your prospect
Opening Line:
Hey {{FirstName}}, I noticed you’re hiring 1 country manager in Singapore
[Interest]:
Usually, that means you want to start growing and generate pipeline in APAC
[Desire]
We helped {{Company}} generate {{results}} by doing {{action}}
[Action]
“Worth a chat?”
Ready to put AIDA into action?
Stop guessing emails and start reaching real decision-makers.
Try Scalelist email finder free for 14 days — get 60 verified contacts in minutes.
2nd cold email framework: BAB
The BAB model is effective. It uses storytelling to evoke an emotional response.
