Christian ranks five cold email offers, free result first

Christian (@coldemailchris) ranked the five offers cold email usually opens with and put the free result at the top, on the grounds that the prospect has to do nothing to collect it. His example line is "I've got 5 contacts searching for your service. Want them?" His read on whether it is working is 1,000 sends, and his benchmark when it is right is under 500 contacts per lead.

Christian

@coldemailchris

X

On cold email you get about 30 words to make one.

What he puts underneath it

The other four all ask the prospect to spend something before they get anything. Asking for 15 minutes asks for their time first, and a yes means agreeing to a sales call, which he says is fine for warm leads and dead on cold traffic. A free audit makes them hand over access before they have seen value, and he frames the process as 20 steps meaning 20 reasons to say later. A case study PDF is proof about someone else's business and takes a click, a download and a read before it gives anything back. A free trial still leaves setup on them, with value arriving weeks later if at all, and all the risk on their side.

The free result, by his description, is zero effort to say yes, value the same day they reply, nothing for them to risk, and it makes them money. That last part is the actual argument. The offer is a thing the prospect already wants, delivered before any call exists, rather than a description of a thing they might want later.

The constraint he is writing to

Christian invokes Hormozi writing a whole book on making offers so good people feel stupid saying no, then points out the format problem.

For people sending, this is one operator's ranking and not a split test, so treat the order as his judgement. The two numbers are the part you can check. A thousand sends is a low enough bar that most people running a campaign for a week already have the data sitting in their sending tool, and contacts per lead is a ratio you can calculate off a list you have already burned through. If you are above 500 contacts per lead, his position is that the offer, not the copy or the infrastructure, is what needs replacing. That is consistent with his earlier work on short, concrete offer lines, including the two line lending email he says took one client to 6 or more SQLs a day.