Build the list first
Forty companies. Not four hundred. Pick them by fit, not convenience: right size, right industry, and — critically — visible evidence they need what you sell. A slow site, a neglected blog, an ad running to a weak landing page, an inconsistent posting schedule.
That evidence is what makes the email work. Without it you're writing to a stranger about yourself.
Find the right person too. In a small company that's the founder. In a larger one it's the marketing or engineering manager, not the CEO.
The structure
Four lines. Genuinely four.
Line one: proof you looked. Something specific about their business. Not "I love your brand" — "Your pricing page loads in 6.4 seconds on mobile, which is where most of your traffic is."
Line two: the implication. What that costs them, stated plainly and without drama.
Line three: what you'd do. One sentence. Concrete.
Line four: a small ask. "Want me to send a two-minute video showing the three fixes?" Small asks get answered. "Do you have 30 minutes for a call?" doesn't.
No attachments. No portfolio dump. No paragraph of biography. Subject line: four or five plain words, lowercase, nothing clever.
Realistic numbers
Expect 20–40% opens and 5–15% replies if the personalisation is real. From forty emails that's a handful of conversations and often one project. If your reply rate is under 3%, the problem is almost always the list or line one — rarely the wording of line three.
Follow up twice
Day four and day ten, two sentences each, adding something rather than nudging. "Ran your site through PageSpeed properly — happy to send the report either way." Then stop. Two follow-ups roughly double total replies; a fifth one just makes people dislike you.
Do the free thing sometimes
The highest-converting version of this in every discipline is unrequested, specific, small: a two-page mini-audit for the SEO path, a rewritten headline for conversion copywriting, a 30-second cut for the video editing path. It costs twenty minutes and it removes every reason to ignore you.
Then close it properly
A reply isn't a client. Move to a short call, diagnose before pitching, and follow with a written scope and deposit — the sequence is in how to get your first freelance client and the document itself in writing a proposal that closes. For the warmer, slower version of this channel, see winning clients on LinkedIn.