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Cold Emails Are Worth It

This surprises me. I get a bunch per day following the same script as the post.

* 1 email every week for 2 weeks.

* 1 email every other week for 4 weeks.

* 1 follow-up email every month for 3 months.

They never sound personal, even if they use some "Hey [name], hope [company] is doing well" script or AI to write them. It's worse when they beg "I know you're probably sick of hearing from me, but I'll give it one last try" until they follow up again (1 every other week for 4 weeks).

I'm not sure what strategy would work for me, I'm generally of the idea that if I want something I'll go look for it, and if someone pushes something to me I don't trust it.

It'd certainly be interesting to know how many people out there do reply to cold emails.



They need to work less than 1% of the time to be effective.


I used to be in the spam game and then moved to "email marketing". It's really just a numbers game and timing. If you spam out 50k bullshit cold emails, you will always get a few bites regardless of how shitty your messaging is.

Add in the drip email technique you mention above and you will attract way more bites.

They may ignore 99% of your emails but all it takes is that one time when your dripped email is right at the top of their inbox when they wake up in the morning and are checking emails or stuck in traffic and looking at their emails on their phone and etc.

tl;dr = its a numbers game. spew shit out, get a few hits.


I have the opposite view. The numbers game might have worked 10-15 years ago but it is a horrible strategy that will send your email deliverability rate to near zero.

Rather than spray and pray, I prefer to only contact companies that have shown they have the problem my product is trying to solve at the time they have that problem (or actively looking for solutions). I send a handful of cold DMs/emails a day and aim for at least a 20% response rate.


totally agree. This was around 2010 when I stopped doing anything like this as I was just smtp spamming off botnets. I didnt care about about inboxing 100% or deliverbability rates much. You could still make money hitting straight spam folders back then.

everyone moved to contact mailing and then SMS spam and then I lost track of the game after that.


That's exactly why those go immediately in spam. You don't waste my attention with automation there is enough of that already.


This! I am not going to buy the next AI magic tool because of a cold mail. I don't even know I need it and I won't read a cold mail end to end if it starts like that. If I need something I go looking and if I don't even know I need it, cold mail wouldn't help


But now you have seen the tool name and you might say you are not going to buy from them because they were annoying - you know the name and there is some chance when you will be looking for a tool like that you will at least check them out. Instead of not even having them on radar.


This makes me want to hook up my email to AI to reply to all spammers and waste their time in super long email chains. If enough AI fakes were replying to these spams, it would be almost impossible for spam to work, right?


Nice startup idea here. Lenny 2.0 to string alone salespeople who cold call/email for as long as possible. Doesn’t work for B2C spam emails unfortunately.


A bit risky if their AI makes your AI promise legally binding purchases in your human name.


A long tume ago when the Amazon affiliate program was less stringent, I would always email recruiter spam back with a link to my “resume” which was just an amazon affiliate link. Made a bit of $$$ from people who clicked on it and made an amazon purchase incidentally later on




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