Yes, P.S. lines can work — and the reason is straightforward: they exploit how people actually read cold emails. When a prospect isn't interested, they scan fast. Cold email practitioner Nick Abraham points out in his own experience that when a P.S. is placed under the signature with some spacing, it's often the first thing a scanner's eye catches. That's practitioner-level pattern recognition, not a controlled study, but it lines up with how skimming behavior works in practice.
The psychological case is real too. NSTProxy's email marketing blog notes that the P.S. functions as a "second chance" to grab attention — even if the main body gets skipped, a compelling postscript can pull the reader back. That's a qualitative argument, not hard data, but it's consistent with the recency effect: people tend to register the last thing they see.
Where P.S. lines get genuinely interesting is personalization. Campaigns that include three or more personalization variables achieve a 5.3% reply rate versus 1.7% for generic outreach — nearly a 3x difference — according to Lemlist's benchmark data. The P.S. is an obvious, low-friction place to add that third layer of personalization: a mutual connection, a shared interest, a relevant detail that didn't fit cleanly in the body. The catch? Only 5% of senders personalize every email, according to Mailshake's State of Cold Email research — which means a personalized P.S. is still a genuine differentiator if you're willing to do the work.
One tactical approach Abraham swears by: rotating motivational quotes in the P.S. using spintax — that's a technique where you pre-load dozens of message variations and your sending tool randomly cycles through them, so no two emails look identical to spam filters. He's had prospects reply specifically because they loved the quote. It also makes your emails harder for inbox providers to fingerprint as bulk sends. Whether that's your style or not, the principle holds: the P.S. is a place to be human when the rest of the email risks sounding templated.
One hard constraint worth keeping in mind: Gong's analysis of 28 million cold emails found that shorter emails get more replies, with the ideal word count at 100 words or fewer and the highest reply rates coming from emails with 3–4 sentences total. That's about the whole email, not just the P.S. — but it sets the ceiling. If your body copy is already pushing the limit, a meandering P.S. will hurt, not help. Keep it to one punchy sentence. Make it earn its spot.
The bottom line: a P.S. line isn't a magic reply-rate fix. But it's a low-effort, high-visibility slot that most SDRs waste on filler or skip entirely. Used for sharp personalization, a strong offer element, or a human touch that the body couldn't accommodate, it's one of the better levers available in a channel where average reply rates have slid to around 3% (Woodpecker, 2026). That's the environment you're operating in — every element of the email needs to pull weight, and the P.S. can.