TL;DR: This is edition #003 in our series breaking down great cold emails. In this edition, we’re looking at an email that journalist John Seabrook sent to Bill Gates (then one of the richest people in the United States!) back in 1993. He received a reply just 18 minutes later. Below, we’ll show you the email and what you can learn from it.

In 1993, most Americans did not even have an email account. The term “cold email” was foreign to basically everyone, including people in the technology industry. Sending personalized cold outbound at scale—today one of the best ways to grow revenue—was hardly a concept.

But some people were wondering about email’s potential. And so John Seabrook, working on a piece about Bill Gates for The New Yorker, sent the following message.

You may object that this is not really a cold email, since John Seabrook was writing a piece about Bill Gates and so it was not completely cold. That’s true. But it was cold in the sense that, in 1993, this was not the default way that journalists got information about people.

Seabrook wrote that he “realized that I could try to communicate with Bill Gates, the chairman and co-founder of the software giant Microsoft, on the information highway… Not tell anyone I was doing it, and see what happened.”

So, in another sense, this is very much a cold email. Maybe one of the first documented ones. Gates did not know that Seabrook was going to email, and Seabrook was not sure if Gates would respond.

What makes this email great

While this is not a modern sales email (and so we will skip the bullet-point list of takeaways here), there are still a few things to learn for your modern email campaigns:

  • It’s a very human email. You can tell this is a real email written by a person to another person. It’s short not because it was hyper-optimized to be short, but because there was only so much to say. It speaks to Gates as a normal human, not a prospect to be pitched.
  • It’s direct and relevant. It opens with a line that immediately demonstrates why the email is relevant. There is a clear next step. There is no filler, no case study, no conversion copy. It’s just some words and a question.
  • It works because it’s authentic. This email to Bill Gates is, strangely enough, a better cold email than most outbound out there.

This isn’t to say that all the templates, the copywriting, and the optimizing don’t work. In fact, in the last edition of this series we covered an effective email that feels optimized and could easily be a template.

It can, however, become too easy to get lost in the sales side of it. To treat everything like an absolute science, to download a list of 99 Effective Cold Email Templates, to plug pieces of real human data in as if they were revenue numbers in a spreadsheet. To obsess over copywriting formulas. Sure, to an extent you may want to do this, and to an extent it can work.

Just never forget that, when you send a cold email, you are emailing a human. And sometimes, there is only one thing you should be optimizing for when you send an email: to be more human.

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If you’d like more inspiration, go here to read edition #002 in our Great Cold Emails series.

Or, you can read the New Yorker piece E-Mail from Bill, which is also great.