Cold email
When Cold Email Makes Sense vs. When It Doesn't
Updated
Cold email works.
We've seen it work extremely well.
We've also seen companies spend a lot of time and money on campaigns that were never going to work in their current form.
Usually, the difference isn't whether someone knows how to write a clever email. It's whether the outbound strategy makes sense for the business in the first place.
Who are you trying to reach? Why would they care? How does the buying decision happen? Can we identify the right people? Is email the right way to reach them?
Those are much more important questions than the subject line.
Cold email works when there's a market we can reach
The fundamental advantage of outbound is that you can choose who you want to talk to.
If you sell to a particular type of company, we can find those companies. If you're looking for a particular role, we can identify those people. If there's a business event or characteristic that makes an account more likely to need your product, we can build that into the targeting.
The market doesn't need to be enormous.
A few hundred highly valuable accounts can be an excellent outbound market. So can hundreds of thousands of prospects.
The strategy changes with the market.
What matters is whether there is a group of potential customers we can identify and reach with a relevant reason to have a conversation.
Don't get too hung up on B2B vs. B2C
The labels aren't particularly useful here.
A business can buy your product. An individual can buy your product. A team can use it while someone else controls the budget. A purchase can involve one person or ten.
The more useful question is:
how does someone decide to buy?
If we can understand that process and identify the people involved, we can figure out whether outbound makes sense and how we'd approach it.
And you don't necessarily need to know all of that before you come to us.
Figuring it out is part of the work.
You don't need a perfect ICP
A lot of companies think they need to spend months defining their ideal customer before they can start outbound.
In reality, you need a strong enough hypothesis to start.
Maybe you know exactly who your best customers are. Maybe you're confident that a particular industry is going to be a great market. Maybe you're entering a new category and have a few ideas about who will care.
We can work from there.
The job is to turn those assumptions into a real outbound strategy and see what the market tells us.
Sometimes the results confirm what you expected.
Sometimes they don't.
Both are useful.
Cold email is only one part of outbound
We wouldn't recommend email simply because this article is about cold email.
Sometimes email is the right channel. Sometimes the best campaign combines email with LinkedIn and calling. Sometimes a small group of high-value accounts deserves a much more targeted approach.
The right channel depends on the audience.
If your buyers live on LinkedIn, we'll use LinkedIn. If phone is effective with your market, we'll call. If email is the most efficient way to reach the audience, we'll use email.
The point isn't to prove that cold email works.
The point is to create conversations with the right people.
What about complicated products?
A complicated product doesn't automatically make cold email a bad idea.
The first message doesn't need to explain everything your company does. It needs to establish enough relevance that the right person is willing to talk.
That's an important distinction.
Outbound isn't supposed to close the deal in the inbox. It's supposed to open the door.
Once the conversation starts, your sales team can handle the complexity, answer questions, understand the situation, and determine whether there's a real opportunity.
What if you don't know exactly what to say?
That's part of the process.
You can spend weeks debating the perfect positioning internally, but eventually the market gets a vote.
The response to an outbound campaign gives you information.
Some messages resonate.
Some don't.
Some audiences respond.
Some don't.
Sometimes you discover that the thing you thought was most important to your market isn't actually the thing they care about.
That's not a problem with outbound.
That's one of its benefits.
The key is having the experience to understand what the response means and knowing what to change.
What if you've already tried cold email?
We'd want to see what happened before deciding it doesn't work.
Who did you target? How was the campaign positioned? What did prospects respond to? What didn't they respond to? Were the right people taking meetings? What happened after those meetings?
There are a lot of reasons a campaign can underperform.
It could be targeting.
It could be data.
It could be infrastructure.
It could be the offer.
It could be messaging.
It could be the channel.
It could be what happens after someone replies.
The answer isn't always "write better emails."
Sometimes the email is fine.
The strategy isn't.
So when does cold email make sense?
When there's a market we can identify, people we can reach, and a credible reason for those people to have a conversation.
The exact approach depends on the company.
At hello, gatekeepers., we figure out who to target, how to reach them, what to say, and what kind of outbound system makes sense for the market. Then we build it, run it, measure it, and improve it.
That's the difference between buying a cold-email campaign and hiring an outbound team.
You don't need another template.
You need someone who knows how to get through the gate.
Keep reading
Related pages
- Does Cold Email Work for B2B?
Does cold email work for B2B? Yes—when targeting, offer, messaging, and infrastructure are right. When it fails, the channel usually isn’t the problem.
- Improving a Cold Email Campaign
Improve a cold email campaign by diagnosing targeting, positioning, messaging, deliverability, follow-up, and measurement—not by sending more emails.
- How to Get Past the Gatekeeper With Cold Email
How to get past the gatekeeper with cold email-without tricks or scripts. Build outbound that reaches decision-makers with relevance, targeting, and deliverability.
- Cold Email for HR Startups
Cold email for HR startups: reach Chief People Officers, HR leaders, and economic buyers with outbound built around the right company profile and problem.
Next step
Get Through the Gate
Tell us what you're selling and who you need in front of. We'll take it from there.
Get Through the GateContact
If someone's standing between you and the meeting, hello.
Tell us who you sell to and where it's stuck. We'll tell you straight whether we can open that door.
email us