TL;DR: Cold email works great for some audiences. For others it fails no matter what you write. Before you start, check if your audience even reads cold emails.
I build a cold outreach tool. So me saying cold outreach does not always work sounds weird. But it is true.
A few weeks ago I was planning a cold email campaign for lead generation agencies. My logic seemed solid. They run cold campaigns every day. They know the value. They have budget. On paper, a perfect audience.
Then I looked closer.
Lead gen agency founders send cold emails for a living. They have seen every trick. Every "Quick question" subject line. Every "I noticed you" opener. Their inbox is the most defended one in B2B. Sending them cold emails is like trying to sell a hammer to a carpenter. They already have ten hammers.
Look at the big players in this space. Apollo. Clay. Instantly. Smartlead. Lemlist. None of them grew by cold-emailing other cold email pros. Apollo sells to SaaS sales teams. Clay built a community. Instantly grew on YouTube. They sell cold email as a feature to their customers. Not as their own way to reach other operators.
So cold email is not a universal channel. Every audience has its own home.
For lead gen agency founders the home is somewhere else. It is peer referrals. One agency owner telling another beats 1,000 cold emails. It is niche communities. Pavilion, RevOps Co-op, agency Discords and Slacks. It is podcasts they run themselves. And LinkedIn comments under the posts they already read. Not your own posts. They will not find you there.
For other audiences cold email works really well. Think of a SaaS founder with no sales team. Pipeline is empty. No money for an SDR. No time to learn five tools. He wants demos. He replies when the offer is relevant.
Same product, same message. Different audience needs a different channel.
So before you launch a cold email campaign, ask two simple questions. Is cold email the right channel for this audience? Is this audience even the right first one for your product?
If your audience does not read cold emails, no clever subject line will save you. You will tune the wrong dial for weeks. You will think cold email is broken. It is not. Your audience is just not there.
If they do, cold email is one of the cheapest ways to fill a B2B pipeline. That is what we built Sellvance for. Try it on your audience with us.
Dmitry,
Founder of Sellvance