Why “I wanted to” is a terrible way to start an email and what to use instead

Last week, while at a local brewery, I ran into an acquaintance of mine who excitedly told me that he had spent that day revising the terrible template emails his boss sends to leads. I support heavy revisions to templates generally. But I also knew that this acquaintance, a gentleman in his mid-30s, was not a professional writer and probably didn’t have a good sense of what would make writing “bad” or “good”.

He was eager to show me his revisions, and — because we have that kind of casual camaraderie that usually involves sarcasm and teasing — I said as he pulled up the messages on his phone, “Let me guess, your email starts with I wanted to.”

He looked up at me as if I was a mind reader. “How did you know?” I laughed. I’m pretty sure this person didn’t really understand what I do for a living until this conversation.

Sure enough, the email he so proudly displayed started with “I wanted to”. (Ok, it did say hello first, but the first sentence of the message body was as reported.)

Scanning the rest of the email, I saw that most of the other sentences also started with “I”. “My name is ______. I work for x company. I have an awesome team. I have this great product. I think this could help you be successful.” I, I, I.