Why I'm abandoning cold email

I've always loved cold emailing.

Partially because some of the best things in my life have come from randomly DMing people. But mostly because it was the easiest way to scale B2B businesses to tens of millions in ARR.

Now, I'm abandoning outbound email as a growth channel.

I still think it's viable, even necessary, for many B2B companies. And it can still be done extremely well. Until a month or two ago, it's where 100% of our clients at Startup Cookie came from. Now, they come 100% from content.

I'll dive into that at the end, but first, I want to explain why I'm giving up on my favorite growth channel.

The Problem with Outbound Email

The "best" growth channels are those closest to your product. Word of mouth, for example, is effectively just your product. It's not possible to have this channel without a great product, and it's virtually impossible to control apart from building a great product.

Outbound email is at the very end of the spectrum. It's as far from a product as you can get. Anyone can send cold emails. You don't even need to have a product! Paid ads sit in this world as well, but even then, not as much, because outbound email is much cheaper.

You must understand that the quality coming in through outbound will be substantially lower than other owned marketing channels that have some connection to the product, like a referral program.

This alone isn't enough reason to move away from outbound email. The channel has always been a low-quality numbers game. It remained a great channel because you can get very exact with your targeting and fine-tune your offering immediately. It's an absolutely fantastic strategic channel to learn sales.

But something has changed recently with outbound email. While it's true that anyone could traditionally set up this channel, there was a fairly substantial barrier to entry: it cost money to host the emails on a platform that would allow you to send cold emails. So if you wanted to send out a thousand emails a day, you would have to pay a significant amount to do so. The same is true for scraping the same volume of leads.

Recently, a series of tools have come out that allow anyone to set up unlimited email inboxes to send out. Similarly, it's quite easy to scrape tens of thousands of appropriate leads for relatively cheap.

Initially, this was a great hack for marketers. Pretty soon, everyone figured out how easy this method was. The channel became flooded with spam and low-quality marketers. This is why many people say cold email no longer works. There's just too much noise.

Because there are so many emails being sent to startup leaders, their guard is up. Many of the good founders have had to turn themselves off to the channel completely to save time. Otherwise, just sifting through them becomes a task in and of itself.

There's another group of founders who are in fact looking for what you offer but feel ashamed about responding to an outbound email. I've seen some truly bizarre responses from CEOs who obviously want the offering but feel they got "got".

In my experience, this starts the relationship off very poorly. A healthy working relationship just isn't there because they view you as suspect. This is substantially less problematic if you're selling something like a software product versus a service, but for an agency like us, it became a real problem.

What ultimately is killing this channel is the sheer number of calls that I have to take that are absolute nonsense. Most of the people responding to cold emails these days are what I like to refer to as 'hustle bros'. They don't have any revenue, funding, or usually even a product. Yet, they are deeply convinced that in just a few weeks or months, they will be raking in millions in ARR. So they take all these calls with consultants and agencies and services because it feels like they're doing something to get there. In reality, these are just people who have managed to set up a website.

Who Should Do Cold Email and How?

Cold DMs: Everyone

If you're not taking risks in the DMs of people you admire, what are you even doing?

When I say I'm bailing on cold email, I mean automated outbound. I absolutely still send cold messages to people I'd love to connect with. But that's why it works – it's not a sales pitch, and they know it's personal.

This real personalization cannot be replicated using AI currently. Read that again.

Automated Cold Email: Sales Teams

If I still had a team of people working on sales beneath me (qualifying leads, taking the calls, pushing them down the pipeline, etc.), I'd be running automated outbound at scale constantly. It truly is a numbers game, but one that works.

But I should say that I'd use this to stall while I build a more authentic channel closer to the product, like content.

If you are a small team with limited time, do not do outbound at scale. It will waste your resources, even though it's nearly free to run.

How to Succeed at Cold Email?

I'll be releasing a full breakdown of how I used this channel to scale 10+ companies, but for now, here are some tips:

1. Ignore open rates and click-through rates. They are now meaningless with trackers.

2. Set up your inboxes with a combination of Outlook and Gmail.

3. Send your emails as plain text without any HTML or links.

4. Focus ONLY on replies.

5. There is a 95% chance you are not a good enough copywriter to get this channel to succeed. Find someone who is.

6. Use content to move people to an "owned" list to convert later. It's a long game but less of a hard sell.

What Am I Doing Instead of Outbound?

My strategy with outbound was always to pair it with content. Now, I'm basically only doing content.

I have this newsletter which I restarted and quite enjoy for my own educational purposes. I do some guest posting on other growth and marketing newsletters. Soon, I will be starting a YouTube channel for growth workflows as well.

I should also mention that I still do Twitter and LinkedIn automation, but I now steer these entirely towards my newsletter and use it as the main funnel to get insights to write about.

This works for me because I have an incredibly low-volume business. We're typically either at or near client capacity at all times. This makes content the perfect channel for us. It brings in a low number of incredibly high-quality clients.

That means that I have to spend very little time taking sales calls, and when I do, they're very likely to convert. It also allows me to work with higher-tier founders, almost exclusively from Y Combinator companies.

The transition honestly feels a lot like raising prices. You deal with fewer customers overall, but they are higher quality, more fun to work with, and pay more. So really, there are nothing but upsides.