1. An opening that fits any company
"I came across your website and was really impressed" could be sent to anyone — so it reads as a mass email, and it is one. Fix: open with one specific, true detail about their work. A service they offer, a project they've posted, how long they've been trading. If the sentence couldn't be sent to a different firm unchanged, it's working.
2. Emailing the wrong companies
A brilliant email to a FTSE 100 careers inbox goes nowhere — it hits a system, not a person. Fix: target small and mid-sized firms where the founder or a manager reads their own email and can say yes without a hiring process.
3. Listing skills instead of applying them
"Proficient in Excel, strong communicator, hard-working" tells them nothing about your value to them. Fix: name the part of their work each skill would support — "having built valuation models, I could help with the analysis behind your advisory work."
4. Writing an essay
A busy person skims. Five dense paragraphs get the delete key. Fix: keep it under 200 words — one observation, who you are, your relevant value, a small ask. Stop there.
5. A vague ask
"I'd love any opportunity you might have" puts the work on them to figure out what you want. Fix: make it small and concrete — "a few days helping where you're stretched, or a short project" — and add when you're free.
6. Never following up
Most replies come after the first follow-up, not the first email. People are simply busy and it slipped down the inbox. Fix: send one short, polite nudge a few days later, then one final note — and stop the instant anyone replies.
The pattern behind all six
Every one of these comes down to the same thing: effort per email. A cold email works when the person reading it can tell you wrote it for them and no one else. That's also why volume is a trap — 200 identical emails signal the opposite. A smaller number of genuinely researched emails, each with a specific opening and a clear ask, will beat a blast every time.
The catch is that researching 30 companies properly takes hours. That's the exact problem Nearside was built to solve: it reads each company's site and writes the specific, personal opening for you, then sends from your own inbox with follow-ups that stop when someone replies. You still review and approve every email — you just skip the hours of research.
Start with the full guide to cold emailing for an internship or grab a template to adapt.