Dissecting a Cold Email: Marketing Addition

Shelby McDaniel
3 min readSep 17, 2021
Photo by Torsten Dettlaff from Pexels

Every once in a while, I receive an email or direct message that makes me wonder if the person had one too many before clicking the send button. The example provided for this “what not to do” lesson was sent to me by a marketing consultant that left me wondering how my spam filter did not snatch this one up.

The Subject Line

According to Hubspot, you cannot see more than 30 characters on the subject line until you click into the email. Besides the glaring typos and the awkward phrasing, this subject line hits a whopping 51 characters. Additionally, the subject line comes across as very impersonal. This particular email was left unopened in my inbox for a week before I opened it (and only because of how bad it was).

The Intro

Last I checked, my name did not end with a .com. The impersonal introduction automatically was a put off and had I been even remotely interested in their services, I no longer was at that point.

The sender barrels right into their sales pitch without even touching base on the industry I work in. Looking at it from a marketing standpoint, I wondered if they even knew anything about the cannabis industry and its marketing regulations. This was a massive red flag.

The Sales Pitch

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Shelby McDaniel

Cannabis industry veteran | Coffee lover | Owner of The Hemp Bitch blog.