How to write a cold email from a buyer's import history

Most exporter cold emails get deleted before the buyer reaches the second sentence. Not because the product is wrong or the price is off, because the email reads exactly like the last twenty he got from other suppliers this week. He scans the first line, sees nothing that applies specifically to him, and hits delete. If your reply rate sits around 1-2%, the problem is not your product. It is your opening. This article shows you exactly how to fix it, using signals that already exist about every buyer in your target market.

The email every buyer has already deleted a hundred times

Here is the template most exporters send, with minor variations: "Hello, we are a leading manufacturer of [product] with high quality and competitive prices. Please find our catalog attached." The buyer reads the first five words and deletes it. He has seen this exact email a hundred times. Nothing in it proves you wrote it for him, it could have been sent by anyone, to anyone, about any product in any category.

Some exporters try to fix this by adding his first name. "Hello Marc, we are a leading manufacturer..." It does not work. He gets the same templated email with his name swapped in from ten other suppliers every single month. He spots the substitution in two seconds, and it actually makes things worse, the email now reads like a personalisation attempt that did not try very hard. The reply rate sits at 1-2% and starts to feel like a normal outcome. It is not. It is months of wasted prospecting time, compressed into a number that sounds manageable.

Or the other extreme: a long email packed with spec sheets, certifications, and catalog links, written in English, sent to a procurement director in Germany or Turkey who reads three emails in his own language before he even gets to yours. That email never stood a chance, not because of the product, but because of everything surrounding the product.

What real personalization actually is

Real personalisation is not a name, a flattering line, or a generic compliment about his company. It is one specific fact about his actual business that only he and his current suppliers know to be true.

How many tons of what product he imported last year. Which countries his current suppliers come from. His peak shipping months. Whether his volumes have grown, shrunk, or shifted to a new origin over the past two years. A fact like that in your opening line tells him immediately: this person looked at my business before reaching out. That is a completely different dynamic. The question in his head is no longer whether to delete the email, it is what you are going to say next.

The problem has always been scale. Looking up one buyer's import records, his current supplier countries, his hiring activity, and any relevant recent news takes 20 to 30 minutes, and that is if you know exactly where to look and have direct access to trade data. Multiply that by five hundred buyers, or a thousand, and you are looking at weeks of research that realistically never gets done. Which is exactly why almost no exporter ever does it, and exactly why it works so well when someone does. Genuine research about a specific buyer is so rare in cold outreach that buyers notice it immediately.

What to pull before you write a single word

Before you write anything, you need four types of signal about each buyer. These are the inputs that turn a generic supplier pitch into an email that reads like you actually did your homework.

• His trade data: the products he imports, the countries his current suppliers come from, his volumes, his peak shipping season, his last shipment date, and how all of it has grown or shifted year over year. This is the core of every personalised email, start here. (Find the companies already importing your product if you are still building your buyer list.)
• His company profile: size, industry, any expansion announcements, and the positions he is actively hiring for. A buyer who just posted a Head of Procurement role is actively reorganising his sourcing operation, that is a timing signal worth using in your opening.
• Public news: tariff changes affecting his country or product category, shipping disruptions on his trade routes, regulatory shifts in his market, any media coverage from the last quarter. If something just changed in his supply chain environment, he is already thinking about it, and you can walk right into that conversation.
• The decision-maker himself: his title, department, seniority, and employment history. A Head of Procurement does not respond to the same hook as the founder of a 15-person import business. Reaching the right person with the right signal is half the work, reach the buyers who actually sign the orders before you worry about the message.

The opening that makes a buyer stop scrolling

When you have those signals, AI ties the most relevant ones into a single tight opening. Here is a real example built for a European olive oil importer, using his own trade data as the foundation.

A buyer who reads an opening like that stops scrolling. Every fact in it is true and describes his own business. Nothing in it is flattery, and nothing in it is about the sender. The question in his head is no longer 'is this another mass email', it is 'how do they know that, and what exactly are they going to say next.' That is the only question you want him asking. Once he is asking it, you are no longer a cold email. You are a conversation.

Write in his language, not yours

A German procurement director expects German. A Turkish buyer responds better in respectful Turkish. A French or Italian buyer reads his own language first, and often does not open English emails at all when a French one is already sitting in the same inbox, from a competitor who did take the time to adapt.

Sending the same English email to every buyer on your list is not a neutral default. It is a signal, one that tells him you did not bother to find out where he works or how he communicates. The cultural codes matter too: the greeting, the level of formality, the way you frame the ask. A hook that lands cleanly in the Netherlands reads differently in Italy or Saudi Arabia. AI writes every email natively in the buyer's language and matches the tone and cultural register that actually gets responses in his market. Same personalised facts about his business, right language, right register.

And none of it matters if the email never reaches the inbox, domain reputation, authentication records, and sending patterns decide that before language ever becomes relevant. See why you get no replies to your cold emails.

Common mistakes that kill your reply rate

Even exporters who understand the principle make these errors consistently. Check your last ten outbound emails against this list.

• Using a first-name token as personalisation. {{first_name}} is a mail-merge substitution. Buyers receive name-swap emails from dozens of suppliers every month and recognise the pattern immediately. It signals mass outreach, not genuine research, and it makes the rest of your email harder to trust.
• Talking about yourself instead of him. Your ISO certifications, your production capacity, your years in business, none of it matters until he decides you are worth five minutes of his time. Lead with his business. Save your credentials for the actual conversation.
• Sending everyone the same English email. A German, Turkish, or French buyer who receives your English pitch will often choose not to reply, not because he cannot write back in English, but because a supplier who writes in his language feels more credible, more prepared, and easier to work with.
• Opening with a specs dump or a catalog link. A cold email has exactly one job: earn a short conversation. It is not a product delivery system. One specific hook, one concrete benefit, one simple ask. Everything else belongs in the follow-up after he replies.
• A well-crafted message from a domain that lands in spam. Personalisation does not matter if the email never reaches the inbox. If your sending domain has no SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records, or you are sending volume from a brand-new domain, your carefully researched email is sitting in a folder he never opens. Fix the deliverability foundation first.

The only shift that matters

You are not trying to send more emails. You are trying to stop looking like every other supplier in his inbox on a Tuesday morning when twenty of them arrive at the same time.

One specific true fact about his own business, his volumes, his supplier countries, his peak shipping months, pulled from trade data and written in his language, does more than a hundred generic templates ever will. The buyer who reads a fact about his own import history does not ask himself whether to delete the email. He asks what you are going to say next.

That is the entire shift: stop selling from your side of the table, and start from his.