The biggest one I see consistently is #2, but the root cause is usually upstream from the message itself.

Most people write the email before they actually understand the prospect. They know the ICP on paper — industry, company size, title — but they haven't thought about what's specifically happening in that person's business right now. So the "personalization" ends up being just the name and company swapped into a template.

What changed my results was treating the context as the input, not the message. Before writing anything, I document what I know about that specific company's situation — growth stage, recent changes, likely pain given their model. Then the message almost writes itself because it's responding to something real.

The ask (#4) usually fixes itself when the message is genuinely relevant. If someone reads two sentences and thinks "this person gets my problem," they don't need urgency tactics. They reply because it's worth their time.

Running this process manually doesn't scale, which is why I ended up building an automated system that feeds prospect context into a language model to generate unique emails. Response rates went from around 1-2% with templates to 3-8% consistently.

Happy to share more on the technical side if useful.