Cold Email is Dead As It Ever Was

And other lies people tell to juice the Linkedin algorithm

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My LinkedIn feed has been dominated by a strange and somber theme over the past couple of weeks. Everything in B2B Marketing, it would seem, is dead. “SDRs are dead.” “SEO is dead.” “Cold email is dead.” I understand the need for dramatic lead-ins to juice engagement and the algorithm, but man, is this shit getting old.

Maybe we can tackle SDRs and SEO another day. This edition is about why cold email isn’t dead. It has evolved. Like everything has forever. If you’re buying massive lists with poor targeting, not validating them, and sending tons of generic messages from poorly setup inboxes — the ole “spray and pray” - then, yes, you will fail faster and harder now than ever before.

But cold email still has a unique advantage over almost any other marketing channel - sending email is extremely cheap. Not paying $50 per click or $30,000 per trade show frees up oodles of cash to spend on great data, domains, and the tech stack necessary to do cold email right. Here’s a short primer on just that topic. There are far more exhaustive resources from excellent sources, if you’re interested.¹

Nail the Technical Basics

Getting the technical aspects of cold emailing right is crucial. Here are some key points to consider:

Use Dedicated and Rotating Domains for Sending Cold Email
Using your primary domain, the one your company uses for sending emails to customers, investors, partners, etc… for cold email is insane. Don’t do it. Even the best run cold email programs will not have the engagement level of your primary domain and will, therefore, put its domain reputation and your most important communications’ inboxing at risk.

But creating just one dedicated cold email domain isn’t going to cut it either. Luckily, figuring out just how many you need is pretty simple math problem:

• Email Addresses per Domain: Most experts recommend using just 1-3 email addresses per domain (with 1 being most conservative and requiring more domains to be setup to achieve desired volume). This reduces the total cold email volume per domain and the risk that an entire domain is blacklisted as a spammer.

• Sends per Account: Keep it to 50 emails per day or less per account. Again, Gmail and company view volume as a strong signal for spam.

• The Equation: To determine how many cold email domains you need, take your max send volume per day, and divide by 50, 100, or 150 depending on whether you want to be really conservative (1 email per domain) or more aggressive (3). Honestly, even at $50/year, your extra domains are only about 10% of the cost of the data you’ll be pushing through them - 1 email per domain is probably the way to go.

• Service Providers: Use the highest quality email service providers, even if they cost marginally more. Google accounts generally have the best inboxing.

Ensure Proper Technical Setup (e.g., DKIM, SPF, DMARC, MX Records)
This stuff is so boring, but configuring MX (Mail Exchange), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) correctly for your sending domains is essential. These protocols help verify the authenticity of your emails and improve deliverability. Ensure each domain has these records set up in its DNS settings to authenticate your emails properly.

Warm Up Accounts
Once you’ve got your new cold email accounts and all the technical setup done, resist the urge to release the hounds. Before you start sending cold emails, “warm up” your new email accounts by gradually sending emails to verified addresses to build a good sending reputation.

• Email Warming Services: Tools like Smartlead can automate the warming-up process. These services typically send a small number of emails to their network of verified addresses, gradually increasing the volume over time to establish a good reputation. For instance, you may start sending 5 emails per account, scaling to 50 per day over three weeks and getting 30% “replies” to those sends to mimic normal sending and engagement.

• Continuous Warming: Lots of senders make the mistake of viewing “warming” as a one-off process. But since engagement is a huge part of how Google and other email providers view your domain, allowing that engagement to drop from 30% to something like 5% running only cold email will send bad signals to Google and eventually land you in spam hell. Continue to run some warming as part of your ongoing sending domain health.

Keep Sends Per Account Low
Avoid sending too many emails from a single account. Traditionally, cold email has been viewed as a “volume game.” I think that’s the wrong framing in the new world. Of course, both quantity and quality matter, but the pendulum has definitely swung towards quality, both in terms of putting max effort into messaging (more below) and in GMail’s increasing scrutiny of send volume.

• Per Email Address: The accepted wisdom on email volume per day used to be 100-250 per address, but is now no more than 50 emails per day from each email address.

• Per Domain: As noted above, with only 3 emails per domain, that means you’d want to be sending no more than 150 emails per day.

Validate Your List
Do not trust your data provider. Even though you paid what you think is highway robbery for those records, always validate the email addresses on your list before sending out emails. Emailing to invalid email addresses, or worse, designated spam traps, will crush your domains inboxing. Use services like NeverBounce or ZeroBounce to clean your email list on a regular basis (and playing it safe and removing “catch-alls") will maximize your cold email program’s long-term ROAS.

Clear Value in Messaging

Everything above is about ensuring as many of your target list as possible get your message. None of it matters if your message sucks. The core of your cold email campaign is messaging that clearly and concisely explains what you can do for the recipient.

that If your email doesn’t clearly convey the value you’re offering, you have no chance. Be direct and specific about what the recipient will gain from engaging with you. Vague value props like “Increase pipeline at an affordable cost” or “Improve conversion rates” are too worthless. When I was a marketing exec, I got a dozen of those every week and replied to exactly zero.

You need to explain the what and how, and ideally “why us” in a few sentences. On the spectrum of too board to too specific, err toward the specific. So, instead of “We help marketing executives create more qualified pipeline from their paid search budget,” use “Our product allows advertisers with long sales cycles to feed very accurate revenue projections to ad platforms at the time of form fill. That allows our customers to move from TCPA bidding to near ecommerce-level ROAS bidding, which dramatically improves ROAS.”

Unique Messaging

For much of cold email’s history, thousands of records received the exact same email save a few fields like name, company name or location. More recently, AI-driven products like Clay have made it possible to insert entire custom sentences drawn from a target’s LinkedIn profile, homepage or other source material. And these custom but templatized emails are a huge step up from generic emails. Having custom copy that addresses the recipient’s specific use cases and pain points is crucial for persuasion and helps your message stand out in their inbox. It also makes the best use of the very short time the recipient will give your message.

But GMail and email security systems are getting smarter with AI that detects these personalized form emails and pushes them to spam folders. To beat those defenses at scale, probably means training your own AI to write truly unique text for each recipient (and depending on the value of the records, maybe having a human tweak it prior to send). This will be the next phase of an AI-assisted war over what gets into B2B inboxes and what does not - training AI authors to write entire emails that very few sentences in common across thousands of drafts.

It Was Ever Thus - Keep Evolving

Making level-headed observations about the constantly evolving nature of marketing is probably a less effective engagement strategy for LinkedIn creators than frantic declarations of binary outcomes. People love an apocalypse. But you, dear RoboCMO reader, should grab your popcorn and enjoy that show for what it is. Cold email has been evolving for decades, and will continue to. Those who evolve best will probably print even more money than in decades past, as the higher bar for success leaves their messages with fewer competitors for buyers’ attention (and gives them, by extension, an inherent sense of legitimacy).

1. Clay has an excellent guide on cold email deliverability. And Mystrika has a great guide that also covers email content.