Goodbye, Cold Email!
Lessons from your inbox
Over the past 6 years I've been a part of millions of cold emails, made thousands of connections who made millions in sales. A week ago I shut down my last cold email campaign.
Back in 2017 the toughest part of a cold email campaign was parsing the hundreds of replies - engaging with some, forwarding others to our clients. GDPR and tougher spam filters made it more difficult by making it tough to get to an inbox for a few years, but nowadays it's easy to find someone's email address, simple to send them a message, and effortless to do so en masse.
The reality is that nowadays everyone feels overwhelmed, annoyed, ... spammed. And I've come to agree: it's time to stop bulk cold email.
I want to share why, the lessons I'm left with, and I am writing this to hold myself accountable when I'll inevitably want to fire up a cold email campaign.
Lessons from millions of inboxes
1. Cold email can still work, but I'm done
If you're in the cold email industry, or sending a ton of messages yourself, you might think I'm biased or bitter.
You'd be right. This isn't about why cold email objectively sucks, it's about why I've drifted away from it, why I believe it's not right for me.
My main problem is that I know a lot of the tricks of the trade and I don't like using them. They're not in line with my values anymore - or rather, they never were, but I thought I could somehow make it work my way.
Writing and sending emails for hundreds of people over the years came easier for me because I was looking at their companies from the outside with a detached perspective: it wasn't my name on the billboard, so to speak, I was just designing it. Someone complaining was a datapoint I could use to improve the campaign, and I could usually get it working. Not so when they were complaining about me.
I started cold email campaigns for Task Engine under my name about a year ago, and it's been the toughest campaign I've managed. I broke some of the cold email basic tenets:
- I sent no follow-ups. Or, when I felt adventurous, I'd sent one. Industry best practices say you should send 4-9, and I just can't be this intrusive.
- I didn't focus on a narrow niche. Looking back on things now, I probably should have, just to give it my best shot, but at the time I thought our appeal was broad. All of our clients are different, and generalizing from one to say that we do great with all felt insincere.
- Our messages lacked a ton of personalization. Whenever I get an email trying to start small talk that I know will lead to a pitch, I feel taken advantage of, and I think automating personalization is similar.
I might've been too close to it to do a good job. Ironically, had my company been somebody else's and myself a few years younger, I could have probably applied the tricks of the trade and made it work.
And I do see cold email working for others even today. But I learned I don't want to do it anymore.
2. Cold email is not advertising
If your ad is seen by 10,000 people for each 1 who clicks, you're likely seeing one person who's interested and 9,999 who aren't. If your cold email is seen by 10,000 people and 1 replies, you're likely annoying thousands.
Sending a cold email is like ringing the doorbell when you already walked into the house. Once your recipient opens the message and reads it they already spend time and attention, and if they're not interested they'll feel like they lost that time and energy, however small.
Unlike ads, email is polarizing. You're either intriguied or annoyed, and I feel like in the grand scheme of things advertising should stay away from being annoying. Sure, annoying jingles stay with you for longer, but if you're selling a service based on shared values and trust, that's not the way to start a relationship.
3. Cold email is not genuine.
If you're a decision maker in a small business I've likely been in your inbox. When you replied, you messaged one of the hundreds of names these campaigns ran under, but it was my message.
This made me feel dishonest for years - perhaps because I was being dishonest. Despite trying to make messages sound sincere, the whole process was anything but.
This is one of the reasons we didn't use salesy tactics with Task Engine. We manage people's businesses, and that requires a level of trust that you can't build off of an insincere message.
I see it a lot in the messages I get: people emailing me about how they've been following our company's success, about how they saw our recent post, or that they saw our name pop up on their social media. I always ask about specific examples, and I've yet to receive any.
4. Reputation matters more than a sale
I always wanted to avoid annoyed replies in the inboxes I managed. My theory is that it's not merely an annoyed reply, that's a person in whose eyes your reputation is ruined.
And this is what statistics and A/B tests can't see: if you send 10,000 messages and get a few calls, are you actually ahead?
How can we calculate the ratio of brand recognition over poor reputation?
What's more, I feel like cold email itself has gotten a bad rap lately, and simply by doing it your reputation takes a hit.
Since it's a matter of trust, I believe this makes it that much harder to build a healthy long term collaboration.
5. Personalization and volume don't go together
Hi, %FIRSTNAME%! How are things at %COMPANYNAME%? Isn't that {RANDOM:funny|interesting|relatable}?
That's a sentence that a cold email expert would deem personalized. Email filters will likely allow a message filled with enough of these, but let's be honest: that's not personal.
A personalized campaign is one where you spend time researching each of the companies and people you reach out to.
A good rule of thumb is: if anyone calls you back from reading an email you should know exactly who they are and why you reached out after they introduced themselves.
6. You can always tell it's cold email
For the longest time I thought I could spot cold emails sent in droves because I've been in the industry. But nowadays, when everyone leading a business has received dozens, if not hundreds of unwanted emails, they all start to see the patterns.
As I've started to turn away from cold email, I began to focus more on actually building relationships, networking, meeting and interacting with people in my industry and outside it.
And one thing I always ask is: does cold email work on you? Is there the right message that will appeal to you?
I've consistently heard one answer: no. People have burner email addresses, they stop checking entire inboxes, they use filters and assistants to delete tons of noise.
And it's why cold email isn't working as well. It's why you need to send tons more to see a fraction of the interactions you used to.
And it's going to get worse.
7. Cold email is everywhere
I keep saying cold email. But it's not just email. It's LinkedIn, Slack, Facebook, Discord, it's anywhere people congregate.
Once upon a time, everyone went to email as their main hub of news coming their way. But as email got crowded, each message started to mean less, which led others to diversify.
So replace "cold email" in this post with "cold outreach", as this applies to almost every medium.
Which actually makes things worse for marketers - as people are overwhelmed everywhere, they respond less. To make up, marketers get more aggressive, which only drowns out your attention, and dilutes any one message.
8. It's spam.
Let's be honest: regardless of the legal definition, spam is essentially a message you didn't ask for, sent in bulk to you and countless others.
I was always careful to comply with CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and all the other nuggets of legislation we might be under.
Sometimes people would reply back and threaten with lawsuits, which I knew wasn't really an issue, but the fact that somebody would be that irritated with me reaching out did add to my growing sense of unease.
So even if you're ticking all the boxes and you're legally covered, it's still spam.
9. Cold email is one step away from being a great option
I spent a lot of time thinking about cold email, about how people can see a message from you, and how you can parse through a large volume of information in your inbox without missing anything and wasting a lot of effort.
And I'm convinced we're one step away from interacting differently with our inboxes. I believe there is a way towards an inbox revolution, once LLMs become embedded enough in our workflows and if we can trust them to read our private messages.
If my LLM which crafts emails talks to your LLM which reads them, tells you about what I sell, and your LLM knows you might be interested, and then (and only then) pings you about it, that basically takes all my frustration out of the equation.
And that's when cold email can be great again.
What's Next: Embracing Authenticity
For a long time now I've written stuff for an audience of one, so I guess this is a fitting start to the publication you're reading.
What's next for me? No more bulk cold outreach campaigns. I personally value depth over breadth. I believe in authentic connections, where each interaction is not just a potential sale, but an opportunity to understand, learn from, and genuinely engage with another individual. So I'll shift towards that, and writing publicly.
It's not just a strategic pivot, but a personal commitment to redefine what successful engagement looks like for me and my business.
What's next for you? I feel like a lot of people who took the cold email shortcut should be asking themselves the same question I have: is cold email still worth it? For me, the answer was no.
PS: If you want to unsubscribe just reply back and let me know and I'll remove you from my lis--- oh, sorry, force of habit