How can I write an effective outreach message?

Writing a quality outreach message is the single highest leverage action you can take in your cord account. It’s your first interaction with someone you might work with in the future, and first impressions count.

The highest performing outreach messages get over 45% positive response rate, which is 2x higher than low-performing messages. 100s of people will read your outreach message and an effective message could make a significant difference in the number of people you source each month.

This short guide will explain the essential things you need to be doing to make sure that you consistently get positive responses from people and will also cover the product features that enable you to do this. We’ll cover:

Messages you write to people should be personal, short and sent to them as soon as they start looking for work.

Personal: Messages should always have a personalised opening line and include at least 2 variables. Personalised messages get a 13% higher response rate. The person receiving it should feel like the message could only have been written to them. We have some clever tools that help you do this using variables.

Short: Messages that are between 300-600 characters long get the highest positive response rate (between 10-20% higher than messages outside this range). This is around 3 short paragraphs made up of 2 sentences each. Avoid copy/pasting job specs at all cost.

Speed: Message new people within 24 hours of them signing up. On average, messages sent within the first 24 hours can help increase your positive response rate up to 51%.

This next section of the guide will cover how to create a message template and use the variables features to send highly personalised messages in seconds.

First, go to Message Templates in your account and create a new template.

You can use variables from the candidate’s profile and yours to write personal message templates that the whole team can use. Just click one of the variables on the right-hand side to include it in your message. For example, you can write:

The message would read:

You can review your message with the variables from a candidate's profile before sending them, so you can check for any potential issues then.

With variables explained, this section will cover more practical guidelines on the structure of your opening message. In general, successful messages are broken down into 3 short sections.

1st paragraph (1-2 sentences): Personal

Why are you interested in them? The first line of your message should be highly personal and specific to the person you are messaging. Use candidate profile variables to make this easier.

2nd paragraph (2-4 sentences): Hook

Why would they be interested in you? Give the candidate a hook by providing interesting information about the position and company. If messaging engineers, talk specifically about technologies and the engineering team. Edit this section ruthlessly to keep it short and interesting.

3rd paragraph (1-2 sentences): Call to action

When are they available for the next step? You should aim to have an interview booked within 3 messages. The easiest way to do this is to integrate your calendar and use the Interview Scheduler (80% of all interviews booked within 3 messages are booked through the calendar feature). You can then add an interview invite directly to your message.

Once these three sections are brought together, you should have a message resembling this one:

Below your opening message template, you can add a follow-up message. Using a follow-up message typically increases your response rate by 15%. A follow-up message can be scheduled to be sent anytime between 2 and 14 days after your first message, and will only be sent if the candidate does not respond before then.

Your follow up message should be even shorter than your opening message (max 400 characters, 3-4 short sentences). It should give additional value and information to the person - you should avoid just saying ‘did you see my last message’. You can use variables the same way as for opening messages.

Here's an example of one:

Now that you’ve got your opening and follow-up message templates built, sending a personalised message takes only a few seconds. Go to the Discover page, find a person that you want to message and select your template from the dropdown. Your templates and variables will automatically populate the message.

Before sending, it is always worth checking and perhaps adding a few things:

For example:

Personalised messages are the key to obtain a 45% positive response rate and should take no longer than 30 seconds to send.

Need further inspiration? Find more outreach message examples here.

Watch this short video on how to Write Effective Outreach Messages