5 Mistakes Freelance Motion Designers Make When Writing a Cold Email Template

Writing a cold email template can be hard – you have an extremely limited opportunity to gain someone's attention before that chance, and your email is lost forever.  

Business owners are constantly being bombarded with emails from people and companies trying to sell their services. So as a freelance animator or motion designer, how do you break through the noise to gain the attention of potential clients and win new business?

At Motion Hatch, we help freelance animators and motion designers to do better business. And the first step towards doing better business is to find clients who are reliable, pay well and align with your values.

Writing a cold email using our cold email template is the first step to achieving just that.

Not only are we giving you a free cold email template that follows a proven methodology to win new clients, but we’re also going to share with you five common mistakes that freelance animators and motion designers make when it comes to crafting cold emails that convert.

1. You don't target the right clients

You could write the best cold email template in the world but if you’re not targeting the right clients, it’s as good as useless.

You’ve probably been on the receiving end of dozens of poorly written “We’ll make your website rank No.1 in Google!” emails when you might not even have your own website.

Cold emailing only works when the entire process is targeted from start to finish and it begins with making sure that you’re targeting the right clients.

Our free cold email template has been specifically designed to help you reach out to animation studios and agencies with confidence. – create a bloom pop-up – here is your email template download – then add them to a mini course

However, within animation studios and agencies, it can be hard to know who are the decision-makers that you need to target when it comes to winning new work.

Which brings us to our second mistake …

2. You don’t spend enough time finding the right person to email

As a freelance animator or motion designer, managing your time efficiently is likely to be something you work towards daily. 

The bigger the animation studio or agency that you’re trying to target, the more time-consuming it will be finding out who exactly you should be emailing. 

So after you’ve spent time writing a cold email, it’s fine to just send it across to the agencies’ general info email and hope for the best, right? 

Unfortunately in this day and age, people are bombarded with hundreds of emails a day. Therefore sending one out and then forgetting about it is one of the biggest mistakes that freelance animators and motion designers make when it comes to writing cold emails.

Finding the right person to send your cold email to can really make the difference between landing an amazing new client and your email being lost, never to be opened in somebody’s inbox. 

You’re probably thinking, but how do I find the right person to email? Most people don’t even have their email on their LinkedIn page because they don’t want to be spammed with emails.

However, there are some amazing tools and software that can help you to find exactly the right person to send your cold email to. 

One of the best tools to find peoples’ emails is Snov.io, a Google Chrome extension. Snov.io will help you to find leads from Google searches, websites, social networking sites and more.

If you can’t find who you’re looking for on Snov.io, there are a few other options. Voila Norbert is a handy lead-finding tool that allows you to search for up to 50 leads for free before moving into their paid subscriptions.

Lastly, you can try using a tool called Hunter.io. There are two ways you can use Hunter: The first is to use the Name Finder, which requires you to add in a first and second name of the contact and the domain name. It will then validate the email address for you.

The second way is to use the generic finder within Hunter.io, where you simply type in the web address of the company and it will list every email address listed publicly online. 

With these tools at your disposal, you should be able to find exactly the right person you need at any company. 

However, be sure not to email more than two people at the same company – you don’t want to seem like you’re spamming people and contrary to popular belief, colleagues and departments do actually speak to one another… sometimes anyway!

3. You put a lot of effort into the email but forget about the subject line 

Picture this – you’ve crafted the perfect cold email template. You’ve spent time sourcing the very best person to email at the company you want to target. And so you send the email, with the subject line “Freelance work enquiry” then weeks go by and guess what? You never receive a response. 

The email subject line is the single most important aspect of your cold email template. Writing a good subject line is the difference between an email that gets opened and an email that gets swiftly put in the bin. 

You can’t be hired by a new client if they haven’t even opened your email – so enticing them in is the first, most crucial step!

We go into more detail regarding subject lines in our cold email template, however, a few examples of engaging subject line ideas are:

  • “[referral name] suggested I get in touch” (great for if you already know someone at that company who recommended that you email this person specifically about potential work. You could also ask your referral to send an email to the person with you CCd in as an introduction.
  • “Talented [location]-based motion designer available for work”

You don’t have to be too out there, just don’t write something generic and boring as it will end up in the bin faster than you can say freelance motion design!

 4. You don't do enough research on the company

When you’re approaching a company, make sure you do your research. One of the key ways in which you can alienate a potential client is by sending them a cold email that’s very clearly a generic copy-and-paste job.

To write a good cold email template, you need to prove that you know about the company you want to work for. Step into their shoes – why would they want to hire someone who doesn’t even know about how they work and what kind of work they do?

Show that you’ve done your research – provide recent examples of their work that you liked and explain why you think you’d be a good fit to work together.

By adopting this approach you’ll see that potential clients are much more likely to respond to you.

And even if they don’t have any work for you right now, they will hopefully have you at the forefront of their minds for the future.

5. You don’t use a template that’s proven to work

When you’re starting out as a freelance animator or motion designer, it’s a tough and lonely road.

One of the reasons that we created Motion Hatch was to give help, guidance and support on the business side of things as we couldn’t see any existing resources to help freelance animators and motion designers on just that.

When it comes to writing a cold email template, you probably don’t know where to start. But the good news is you don’t have to – because we’ve created a concise cold email template and guide to help you – and it’s totally free.

This cold email template is the result of over 10 years’ of experience in motion design and 3 years’ helping motion designers build better businesses from our Founder Hayley Akins.

She has worked with clients including Google, The Gates Foundation and the United Nations and she’s passionate about helping fellow freelance animators and motion designers take their businesses to the next level.

Download our cold email template and start winning more clients today.