Upworthy is well known for its “25 title” process. To create the click-worthy titles the company became famous for, team members had to come up with 25 possible titles for each article. It may seem like overkill, but in doing so they eliminated the weak ideas and allowed the great ones to surface. You can do the same with the subject lines of your emails. When learning how to write cold sales emails, think about 25 possible subject lines for each message. Experiment with different types. Include personalization elements. Try subject lines with questions. Be positive, negative and neutral. Once you've written down all 25, pick the two you think will work best for testing E-Commerce Photo Editing Service (more on upcoming testing in Lesson #7). While it's not realistic to do this every time, practice writing at least 5-10 possible subject lines for each cold email. Over time - and by observing the performance of past subject lines - you will become quicker at determining which alternative will work best. Opening lines Optimizing your cold email subject lines for better performance isn't exactly a secret. Even if you don't already, you probably know you need it. But where most people drop the ball after fixing their subject lines is with their opening lines (i.e. the first sentence of their posts). Your opening line is the first line of your cold email and, according to Colin Nederkoorn of Customer.io, it's one of the two most important parts of your message: