The Tim Ferriss Cold Email Template, Measured Against 14 Others

You have the name, the address and one chance with someone who does not know you. The tim ferriss cold email template is a four-part note. It tells the reader the email takes sixty seconds, says who you are in two lines, asks one specific question, and gives them permission to ignore you. We measured it against 14 others.

Our newsroom took the template as Alex Banayan published it, the model email Ferriss himself praised on his blog in 2008, and the first cold-prospect template on the template page of 13 sales software companies and outreach sites, from Salesforce and Mailshake to lemlist and Apollo. We counted the words, the sentences, the asks and the exits. Every row below links to the page we read on 6 November 2026.

What We Found

Across 15 published cold email templates our newsroom measured, the median body runs 45 words, Tim Ferriss’s matches it before its two blanks are filled, and 11 of 15 open with the recipient rather than the sender.

Six of the 15 name a specific amount of time, from “under two minutes” to a 15-minute call. Five give the reader an explicit way to say no. Four do both, three of them built on the Ferriss shape and the fourth from Woodpecker. The shortest template is 20 words. The longest is the 212-word email Ferriss held up in 2008 as an example of how to do it well.

What Is the Tim Ferriss Cold Email Template?

The tim ferriss cold email template is a short structure for reaching a busy stranger. The opening line admits the reader is busy and promises the email takes sixty seconds to read. One or two lines say who you are. One line asks a specific question. The close says a short reply would help and no reply is fine.

The version most people mean is the one Alex Banayan published in Entrepreneur in June 2018, after working out as a teenager how Ferriss emailed people he wanted to reach. Banayan’s reconstruction has seven lines including the greeting and sign-off. Two of those lines are blanks for your own credibility and your own question, which is why its measured length of 45 words understates what you will actually send.

Ferriss’s own writing on the subject is older. In May 2008 he published 5 Tips for E-mailing Busy People, built around an email from a reader raising a seed round for his software company and asking whether Ferriss knew any investors. His five reasons for liking it still describe the template. The request was clear, the sender had not worn out his welcome with content-free check-ins, he showed what he had already tried, he asked whether Ferriss knew anyone who might help, and he said plainly that it was fine to be too busy to answer.

The 15 Templates, Measured

Body words exclude the subject line, the greeting and the sign-off, and count each placeholder as one word. “Opens with” records whether the first sentence is about the reader’s situation or the sender’s.

Source	Template	Body words	Sentences	Specific time ask	Easy out	Opens with	Page
Tim Ferriss, as published by Alex Banayan	The busy-person email	45	4	Yes, sixty seconds to read	Yes	Recipient	Entrepreneur
tim.blog (Robert J. Moore’s email, published by Ferriss)	Seed investor ask	212	10	No	Yes	Recipient	tim.blog
Mailshake	Congrats! (trigger event)	73	7	No	No	Recipient	Mailshake
lemlist	Problem, impact, next step	33	3	No	No	Sender	lemlist
Yesware	The Beyonce Effect	83	7	No	No	Recipient	Yesware
Woodpecker	Specific observation opener	43	6	Yes, 15 minutes	Yes	Recipient	Woodpecker
Salesforce	Not sure who to contact	29	5	No	No	Sender	Salesforce
Close	The authentic referral cold email	34	3	No	No	Sender	Close
Alex Berman	B2B adaptation	52	6	Yes, 10 minutes	Yes	Recipient	alexberman.com
Emailchaser	The two-minute ask	43	5	Yes, under two minutes	Yes	Recipient	Emailchaser
ZoomInfo	The introduction cold email	20	4	No	No	Recipient	ZoomInfo
Pipedrive	The cold introduction email	71	5	Yes, 10 minutes	No	Sender	Pipedrive
Hunter	Follow-up question on a talk	63	6	No	No	Recipient	Hunter
Apollo	The recent event hook	32	4	No	No	Recipient	Apollo
Smartlead	Tech stack trigger	66	4	Yes, 15 minutes	No	Recipient	Smartlead

Take the 2008 email out and the median of the remaining 14 templates is 44 words, so the finding does not depend on one long outlier.

How Long Should a Cold Email Be?

Between 40 and 60 words of body text. The median published template is 45 words. Boomerang’s 2016 analysis of its users’ emails put the sweet spot at 50 to 125 words, with response rates above 50 percent in that band. Past 125 words the rate falls slowly. Under 50 words it falls faster, and a 25-word email did about as well as a 2,000-word one.

Boomerang’s sample is its users’ everyday email, not a set of cold emails, so treat the 50 percent figure as a ceiling you will never see from strangers. Backlinko’s 2019 study of 12 million outreach emails found that only 8.5 percent received a response. The same study found personalised message bodies got 32.7 percent more replies than generic ones, which matters more than length once you are inside the 40 to 60 word band.

A short email only works if it still contains something the reader recognises as theirs. ZoomInfo’s 20-word template is the shortest in our sample and it still spends its first line on something the reader’s company did recently. Length sets the budget and personalisation is what you spend it on.

The 212-word email Ferriss praised in 2008 was long because the sender had a specific, complicated situation and a reader who had met him before. For a true stranger, that length will fail now. Ferriss himself published an autoresponder telling senders he checks email “no more than once a week, often less”, and a reader who batches email that hard is skimming for the ask.

Why Do 11 of 15 Templates Open With the Reader?

Because the first sentence decides whether the second gets read, and a sentence about the reader’s own company, talk or week survives that test more often than one about the sender. Eleven of our 15 templates open with the recipient. Three of the four that open with the sender introduce a product or the sender’s own name, and the fourth opens with “I’m reaching out”.

Ferriss’s opening is about the reader without flattering them. “I know you’re really busy” is a plain fact, and it earns the promise that follows. Compare Yesware’s “Beyonce Effect” template, which opens by telling the reader they are a fan of someone and then spends 83 words on the comparison. Our newsroom would not send that to anyone senior, and none of the other 14 templates tries anything like it.

If a 45-word note to a stranger makes you feel like a fraud, our guide on how to overcome imposter syndrome covers the mechanism. The template itself helps, because it leaves no room to oversell.

What We Would Cut From the Median Template

The typical sales template in our sample, Mailshake’s or Pipedrive’s shape, runs around 70 words. It has a trigger or an introduction, a line about who the sender is, a claim about a similar company, a request for a quick call and a calendar link. Here is what we would take out, in order, until it reaches 45 words.

First, the sender’s introduction. “My name is X with Y” is six words the signature already carries. Pipedrive’s template spends its whole first sentence on this. Delete it and the email opens with the reader, which moves it into the majority group for free.

Second, the unspecified “quick call”. Six templates in the sample name a time and nine do not. “Quick” asks the reader to guess how much of their day you want, and a senior reader will guess high. Name the number. Ten or fifteen minutes, as Woodpecker, Berman and Smartlead do, or sixty seconds of reading, as Ferriss does.

Third, the similar-company claim when it is a placeholder. Five of the 15 templates name a peer company and a result it got. Keep it only when you can fill it with a company the reader would recognise and a number you can defend. An empty version is 10 words of noise and the reader can tell.

Fourth, the calendar link. It makes the reader do scheduling work before they have agreed to anything. Replace it with one question that fits on a line. Ferriss’s version is a question about the reader’s own expertise. For a sales email it can be “Is this yours, or someone else’s?” Both are answerable in five seconds.

What remains is the four-part shape with a sales purpose: a reason tied to the reader, a specific time, one question, and an exit. If the product cannot be explained in that space, start with our explainer on what is a business model rather than with the email.

Should a Cold Email Name a Time Ask?

Yes. A specific number of minutes tells the reader the cost of saying yes, and a vague “quick call” makes them estimate it. Six of our 15 templates name a time, from Ferriss’s sixty seconds of reading to a 15-minute call. The named times cluster at 10 and 15 minutes. Anything longer belongs in a second email, after a reply.

Ferriss’s number is about reading time rather than meeting time. “This will only take sixty seconds to read” asks for nothing beyond attention, and the reply he hopes for is one or two lines. Our position is that the reading-time ask is the stronger opening for anyone senior, because it defers the meeting until the reader has chosen to engage. Ask for a line, get the line, then ask for the fifteen minutes.

A small, stated cost gets accepted and an unstated one gets assumed to be large. Our explainer on what is an expense ratio makes the same point about fund fees, and readers price an email request the same way.

Does the Template Need an Easy Out?

It does, and most vendors leave it out. Five of our 15 templates tell the reader explicitly that not replying is fine. Ten do not. Ferriss praised the line in 2008, Banayan’s reconstruction keeps it, and the reasoning holds. Giving someone permission to decline lowers the cost of reading, so more people read to the end.

The exit also changes what silence means. Without it, silence is a rejection you have to interpret; with it, silence is the outcome you offered. People are travelling, off sick or on leave, and our piece on stress leave from work is a reminder of how often an empty inbox has a human reason behind it. One follow-up after a week is reasonable.

The strongest exits in the sample are short. Woodpecker’s “If the timing’s off, happy to check back later” is nine words. Emailchaser’s version tells the reader to ignore the email “with a clear conscience”. Berman’s says he did not want to assume. Each costs under ten words.

Where the Template Breaks

The tim ferriss cold email template was built for asking a stranger for advice. It was not built for selling, and three of its parts strain when you use it that way.

The sixty-second promise is a promise about reading time. A sales email with a product paragraph will break it, and a reader who is counting will notice. Either keep the body under 60 words or drop the line, because a broken promise in the first sentence is worse than no promise at all.

The “one or two line reply” close assumes the reader can answer from memory. A sales question usually needs a decision, a forward to a colleague or a look at a budget, none of which fits in two lines. Ask a routing question instead, the way Salesforce and Close do, so a two-line reply really is possible.

Senior readers are also reading for conduct. How you ask tells them how you will behave in a meeting, and our study of leadership behaviors covers what that conduct looks like once you are in the room.

Using It Outside Sales

The template was written for the situation most readers of this piece are in. You want advice, an introduction or an answer from someone who does not owe you one.

A prospective student emailing an admissions director should keep the sixty-second line, give one line of background and ask one question the website does not answer. Our list of the cheapest online mba programs shows the kind of detail worth asking about, such as whether a listed price includes fees. A candidate emailing a hiring manager can ask the dress question in one line; our study of interview outfits found that 29 large employers mostly leave it open.

Someone negotiating pay keeps the sixty-second promise but turns the question into a request for a specific conversation with a specific agenda. Our guide on how to negotiate salary covers what goes in that conversation. An employee who wants to know what their plan pays can send the same four lines to HR; our 401k match study used the same counting method as this one, reading what companies publish, and “what is the match and when does it vest?” fits on one line.

What the Template Teaches About Writing

Boomerang’s data adds two habits worth adopting. Emails that asked one to three questions were 50 percent more likely to get a response than emails that asked none, and emails written at a third-grade reading level did best. Short words, one question, and a number the reader can hold in their head.

Writing a 45-word email that a stranger answers is a copywriting skill, and a teachable one. Our ranking of the best online learning platforms includes several with short writing courses, and cutting a 70-word template to 45 is an exercise you can run on your own sent folder this afternoon.

Alex Hormozi’s offer framework, summarised in our piece on the hormozi value equation, treats the reader’s time and effort as costs to drive down, which is what the template does. Warren Buffett’s focus rule, in our piece on the warren buffett 5 25 rule, is a useful filter for which 25 people deserve a cold email at all.

Answering cold email is work too. The founder who replies to every inbound at midnight is building the habit our piece on burnout and mindfulness describes, and the template’s exit line is a courtesy to that person.

How We Did This

On 6 November 2026 our newsroom measured 15 published cold email templates and model emails: the tim ferriss cold email template as reconstructed by Alex Banayan in Entrepreneur, the model email Ferriss published on his own blog in 2008, and the first template addressed to a cold prospect on the template page of 13 named sales software companies and outreach sites. We skipped templates that rely on a named mutual connection, follow-ups and emails to existing customers. For each we counted the words and sentences of the body, excluding the subject, greeting and sign-off and counting each placeholder as one word, and recorded whether it names a specific amount of time, whether it says not replying is fine, and whether the first sentence is about the reader or the sender. HubSpot’s and Gong’s pages could not be read in text form, Nutshell’s templates are images, and three other pages would not load, so they are excluded. Where a site published a “Ferriss template” whose wording matches neither primary source, we used the site’s own template instead and noted the attribution. The full dataset, with a supporting quote and source link for every row, is available on request.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the four parts of the Tim Ferriss cold email template?

A first line that admits the reader is busy and promises the email takes sixty seconds to read. One or two lines that say who you are. One very specific question. A close that says a one or two line reply would help and that no reply is fine. Alex Banayan published the structure in Entrepreneur in 2018.

How many words should a cold email template be?

Aim for 40 to 60 words of body text. The median across the 15 published templates we measured is 45 words, and Boomerang’s analysis of email response rates found the best results between 50 and 125 words, declining slowly after that and faster below 50 words.

Does the Tim Ferriss template work for sales emails?

The shape works. The content has to change. Keep the reader-first opening, a named amount of time and the exit line, and replace the advice question with a routing question the reader can answer in one line. Drop the sixty-second promise if the body runs past 60 words, because a broken promise in line one costs more than no promise.

Every measurement in our sample points the same way. Say what the email costs, ask one thing, and make leaving easy.