1
0 Comments

What's the strangest cold email subject line you've ever gotten? (Mine was "Shik Shak Shok")

No greeting, no context, no name. Just "Shik Shak Shok" — which, if you don't know it, is a 1970s Egyptian pop song that roughly every belly dance routine on earth is set to.

I opened it. Obviously I opened it. That was the whole point.

Inside was a pitch from an agency selling outbound as a service. Nothing in the email explained the subject line. No joke, no callback, no reason for it to be there. Someone had worked out that a nonsense phrase gets opened, and then stopped thinking.

I've been deep in cold outreach lately, on both ends of it, and that one stuck with me because it gets the mechanics exactly right and the point exactly wrong. It won the open and lost everything after it.

The ones that actually got a reply out of me were boring by comparison. Someone mentioned a specific thing we had shipped. Someone asked a question they clearly didn't already know the answer to.

So — what's the strangest one you've received? And separately, did it work on you, or only on your curiosity?

posted toAvatar for product kōdlo
kōdlo