Networking Email Templates 2026: 12 Copy-Paste Scripts

What makes a networking email template work

Four elements decide the outcome, and all four fit in a message of five sentences. A precise reference to the person. One clear ask. A reason to answer that could only apply to them. And a line that lets them say no without awkwardness.

Two university career offices publish the mechanics of the request in plain words. Yale's Office of Career Strategy sets out a nine-step sequence, and its networking page says the contact step should indicate why you are connecting, request a meeting by Zoom, phone or in person, and say how much time you are seeking, which it puts at 20 to 30 minutes. It then tells you to be prepared to adjust your schedule, to ask when it is convenient for the contact to meet, and to send a brief note of confirmation once a date is agreed.

Berkeley's informational interviews page opens with a definition: an informal conversation, usually lasting 20 to 30 minutes, with a person working in a career field that interests you. Its instruction for initiating contact is one line long, and it is the line most drafts skip. Mention how you got their name.

Those four rows are the brief. The twelve templates below are arrangements of them.

The 12 networking email templates, by situation

Pick the row that is true about your relationship with the person. The strongest-sounding ask is rarely the one you have earned.

Rows 4 and 11 are the two that get misused. A stranger cannot refer you into a process, and asking a stranger for a referral ends the exchange. EY's interview tips page tells candidates to work all the angles, and says that if you know others from your network or university who work with a desired employer, you should use them to connect with decision-makers. That is a route through people who already know you.

Templates 1 to 3: cold outreach, events, lost contacts

Template 1, the alumni cold ask

Subject: Yale 2024, 20 minutes on your move into consulting

Dear Ms. Okafor,

I found your profile in the Yale alumni directory while looking for people who moved from a science background into strategy consulting, which is the move I am trying to understand. I am a final-year molecular biology student, and I have spent this term working out whether the analytical part of consulting resembles lab work at all.

Would you have 20 minutes in the next few weeks for a call? I am happy to work around your schedule, and I would mostly like to hear how the first six months went.

Thank you for considering it, and no pressure either way.

The first clause names the source. The second sentence gives a reason that applies to this person alone. The ask carries a number and offers to move around them.

Template 2, after a campus event

Subject: Following up from the Thursday case workshop

Dear Mr. Villanueva,

Thank you for the session on Thursday. Your point about candidates who build a structure and then abandon it under the first piece of data is the thing I have been getting wrong, and I went home and tested it on two practice cases.

Would you be open to 20 minutes on the phone later this month? I would like to ask how the office thinks about candidates from non-business degrees.

Either way, thank you for the evening.

Send this inside two days, while the person can place your face. The second sentence proves you were there and costs the reader nothing to verify.

Template 3, the contact you lost a year ago

Subject: A year on from your advice about market sizing

Dear Ms. Okafor,

We spoke last October and you told me to stop memorizing frameworks and start finishing arithmetic out loud. I did that, badly at first, and I have now worked through about forty timed drills.

I am applying to the Chicago office this cycle. Could I ask one question by email rather than taking your time again? I would like to know whether the office runs first round interviews before or after the written exercise.

Thank you either way, and thank you for the advice last year.

The second ask is smaller than the first. That is the correct direction, and it is why this template has better odds than template 1.

Templates 4 to 6: introductions and the ask for a call

Template 4, asking for an introduction

Subject: Quick ask, an introduction in the Chicago office

Hi Daniel,

You mentioned last spring that a colleague of yours moved to the Chicago office. If you are comfortable making an introduction, I have written a short paragraph below that you can paste or ignore entirely.

"Priya worked with me at the campus consulting club. She is a final-year statistics student applying for the summer associate intake in Chicago, and she is trying to understand how the office staffs its first-year analysts. She has asked for 20 minutes and nothing else."

No pressure either way, and thank you for thinking about it.

The forwardable paragraph is the part that gets skipped and the part that decides the outcome. Write it in the third person so your contact can forward it untouched.

Template 5, arriving through a mutual contact

Subject: Introduced by Daniel Okoye, 20 minutes on the Chicago office

Dear Ms. Laurent,

Daniel Okoye suggested I write to you after we spoke about the summer associate intake. I am a final-year statistics student, and the thing I cannot work out from the outside is how the office decides which analysts go onto which cases in their first six months.

Would 20 minutes suit you at some point in the next three weeks, by phone or Zoom? I will send a short agenda beforehand so none of it is a surprise.

Thank you, and please ignore this if the timing is wrong.

Name the mutual contact in the subject line. It is the one piece of information that earns the message a read, and burying it in paragraph two wastes it.

Template 6, asking for the call

Subject: 20 minutes on the Chicago office, any week in November

Dear Ms. Laurent,

Thank you for the answer about staffing, which was more specific than anything I had read. You mentioned the intake closes in January, and I would like to use the time before then well.

Could I ask for 20 minutes, any week in November? Tuesday and Thursday mornings are clear for me, and I will take whatever slot is easiest for you.

Thank you either way.

Yale's sequence puts a brief note of confirmation after the date is agreed. Send it the same day, and keep it to two sentences.

Templates 7 to 9: the nudge, LinkedIn, and advice

Template 7, the nudge after no reply

Subject: Re: Yale 2024, 20 minutes on your move into consulting

Dear Ms. Okafor,

Following up once on the note below, in case it arrived in a bad week.

The ask is 20 minutes on your move from a science background into consulting, at any time that suits you between now and the end of term.

If now is not the moment, I will leave it there, and thank you for reading this far.

One nudge, on the original thread, roughly a week later. It repeats the ask in one sentence and closes the loop itself, so the reader is not left owing you anything.

Template 8, the LinkedIn approach

Connection note: Final-year statistics student, hoping to ask you one question about the Chicago summer associate intake. No pressure to accept.

First message after they accept:

Thank you for connecting. I am applying to the Chicago office this cycle and reading everything I can find on the staffing model. My one question: do first-year analysts choose their industry, or is it assigned for the first year? Happy to take a one-line answer, and happy to hear nothing at all.

A connection note has room for about four lines, so it carries the reference and the ask and nothing else. The first message asks one question that a busy person can answer in a sentence.

Template 9, asking for advice

Subject: One question about the written exercise

Dear Mr. Villanueva,

We spoke after the case workshop in October, and you were generous with your time then.

I have one question I cannot answer from the published material. For candidates from non-business degrees, is the written exercise marked on the recommendation or on the quality of the supporting evidence? I am deciding where to put the last three weeks of preparation.

A one-line answer would be plenty, and no reply is an answer too.

A question with a stake in it gets answered. "Any advice you have" does not, because it asks the reader to do the work of deciding what you need.

Templates 10 to 12: thanks, referral, interview

Template 10, the thank-you after a call

Subject: Thank you for the 20 minutes

Dear Ms. Laurent,

Thank you for this morning. The part that changed my plan was your point that first-year analysts are staffed on availability before preference, which means my industry list matters less than I assumed.

I have rewritten the two pages of notes I was working from, and I will stop asking recruiters about industry choice.

Thank you again, and I will not take more of your time.

Berkeley puts the thank-you note inside one to two days. Name one thing that changed as a result of the conversation, because that is the proof the 20 minutes were used.

Template 11, the internal referral

Subject: Chicago application, and one ask

Dear Ms. Laurent,

I submitted my application to the Chicago summer associate intake on Monday, and I used the staffing point you made to rewrite my cover letter.

If you think the application stands up, would you be willing to flag it internally? If you would rather not, that is completely fine, and I would still be glad of the conversation we had.

Thank you either way.

This goes to someone who has already spoken to you, never to a stranger. The conditional phrasing matters: it asks them to vouch only if they believe it, which is the only version of the request they can accept without risk.

Template 12, the informational interview request

Subject: 20 minutes on public sector consulting

Dear Dr. Mensah,

Your name came up in the economics department newsletter, which listed you as an alum working in public sector consulting. I am a second-year student trying to work out whether that practice looks anything like the private sector work described in the recruiting material.

Would you have 20 to 30 minutes for an informational interview, by Zoom or phone, in the next month? I will keep to whatever time we agree.

Thank you for reading this, and no pressure either way.

The last line of the ask repeats Berkeley's instruction to respect the agreed timeframe. Saying it in the request is what makes it credible when you do it.

Networking email subject lines you can copy

A subject line does one job: it tells the reader who you are or what you want, in the inbox list, before they open anything. Below is the line from each template above, stripped of names. Template 8 is on LinkedIn, which has no subject field, so eleven of the twelve carry one.

• Yale 2024, 20 minutes on your move into consulting
• Following up from the Thursday case workshop
• A year on from your advice about market sizing
• Quick ask, an introduction in the Chicago office
• Introduced by [name], 20 minutes on the Chicago office
• 20 minutes on the Chicago office, any week in November
• Re: [the original subject line, unchanged]
• One question about the written exercise
• Thank you for the 20 minutes
• Chicago application, and one ask
• 20 minutes on public sector consulting

Three patterns run through them. A shared institution with a year. A number of minutes. A single named topic. None of them is clever, and cleverness is what makes a subject line look like marketing.

Networking email mistakes that get a message deleted

Five habits show up in drafts, and each one is fixable in a single edit.

1. A subject line with no content. "Quick question" tells the reader nothing and buys no priority. Name the institution or the topic.
2. A history of yourself. Yale's samples place status and affiliation in one sentence. Anything longer competes with the ask.
3. An open-ended time request. "Whenever suits you" is harder to answer than a number. Give 20 minutes and let them counter.
4. A request the person cannot grant. A stranger cannot refer you. A stranger can tell you how their office staffs first-year analysts.
5. A paragraph a model wrote for you. BCG's guidance on using AI in an application says to use it to support your thinking and to avoid generating responses that do not accurately reflect your background. McKinsey's interviewing page draws the same line around polishing. Drafting with a model is normal. Sending a claim you cannot defend in the conversation you just requested is a different act.

The fifth one has a practical test. Read your draft out loud and ask whether you could answer a follow-up question on every sentence in it. If one sentence would collapse, it belongs to the model and not to you.

What these networking email templates cannot do

They cannot make a referral happen. No firm publishes what a referral is worth in its process, and anyone who gives you a number has invented it.

They cannot replace the conversation. Yale's sequence puts preparation after scheduling, because the message buys 20 minutes and the 20 minutes is the thing. Our coffee chat guide covers what to do inside it, and our follow-up templates cover the note afterward.

They cannot tell you how many messages to send. We have no measurement of reply rates to this kind of email, and the pages publishing such figures sell outreach software to sales teams. Send enough that one silence does not decide your week, and keep the count in a sheet. Our application tracker has a column for the forwardable paragraph from template 4, which you will want again three firms later.

They also cannot make you ready when the conversation turns into a case. If a consultant offers to run one, you are in the territory our method page describes, where Coverage 45 is the heaviest weight on a structuring answer and the one an unprepared candidate loses first. Our drills grade that answer at volume, and they teach no business content at all, so the reading stays yours to do.

How to send your first five networking emails this week

Five messages is enough to learn what a reply feels like and small enough to finish. Yale's sequence ends with two steps that cost nothing and get dropped first: keep a spreadsheet of names, dates and notes, and send a note of thanks after every meeting.

Then stop and wait. The replies arrive over two to three weeks, and the only thing to do in the meantime is prepare the questions for the calls you booked. Every accepted conversation triggers template 10 inside two days, and the agreed length is the length you keep.