Cold Email

LinkedIn is full of screenshots of cold emails pulling crazy reply rates and stories of reps booking 15 meetings a week. It’s tempting, so you start thinking, “This could work for me too.” And it can – but only if you’re a good candidate for it and have a good strategy behind it.

Over time (and after working with many companies across industries), we’ve learned that for some companies, cold emails are a growth engine. Others find better results elsewhere.

So how do you figure out which bucket you’re in?

Let’s break it down.

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The three channels of B2B acquisition

Cold email, LinkedIn outreach or cold calling?

Mix them all together to get the best of three worlds. A multi-channel approach can convert 7–11x better than using just one. 

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However, cold email is usually the cheapest, easiest to automate, and quickest to scale. Plus, it can bring an ROI of up to 4400% more than any other channel, according to Saleshandy research. 

With all that in mind, it’s no surprise so many companies jump in headfirst. 

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Manual vs. automated cold email: Which approach to choose?

Once a company decides to go with cold email, they need to decide between two main "flavors" of it:

• Manual, 1:1 outreach: You research every prospect, personalize your message, and write each email by hand. It's time-consuming, but hyper-targeted.
• Automated, mass outreach: You’re reaching 5,000–10,000 leads per month (or more). You rely on data scraping, templates, sequences, and email automation platforms. It’s efficient, scalable, and cost-effective — if you have the right setup and the right market.

Now the question is: Which one fits your company best?

To answer that, take into account 3 following things.

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1. Figure out your market size

If your total addressable market (TAM) is small, automation can backfire fast. You’ll run out of leads in a few weeks, leaving you with no option but to annoy people that will soon label you as “the company that spams everyone.”

As a rule of thumb: If your market has 30,000+ companies, mass cold email starts to make sense.

Anything less than that, and you risk spamming the same pool over and over again and burning leads that could’ve been qualified another way.

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We’ve seen companies with a TAM of only 5,000 go all-in with high-volume cold outreach, and it backfired. 

One SaaS company was targeting only Fortune 500 companies. 

That’s 500 firms globally. Even if you pull five contacts per company, that’s 2,500 people. That’s not nearly enough to support mass outreach. In those cases, you need a 1:1, hand-crafted approach.

When it comes to market size, there are two common challenges companies often run into:

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Challenge #1 – Assuming your market is bigger than it really is

Some companies think they have a big market, but it’s not as big as it seems once you dig in.

Let’s say your product helps HR teams streamline onboarding. You assume your market is “any company with over 10 employees.”

But what if your product only works well in tech startups? Or requires integration with Slack?

Suddenly, your 100,000-company TAM becomes a 4,000-company real addressable market.

So always pressure-test your assumptions. 

Use filters, check available contact data and try to get a real count before committing to any mass outreach strategy.

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Challenge #2: Not knowing how to size the market at all

Sometimes, companies just don’t know how to figure out the size of their market. And without that, they don’t know where to even start.

If you’re in that spot, here’s the first thing to remember: cold email doesn’t always have to be about booking meetings. It can also be a great way to explore and qualify your market.

Let me explain. 

Imagine you’re a SaaS company that built a financial planning tool. Your ideal customer? Any business still using Excel to manage cash flow.

Your problem? There’s no easy way to tell who’s still using Excel. You can’t find that on LinkedIn, and no database is going to hand it to you.

So what will you do?  Flip the script.

You build a free Excel template for cash flow tracking and offer it through cold email. On the download form, you ask a simple question: “What do you currently use for financial planning?”

You’re not trying to book a demo at this point. You’re trying to figure out who fits your ICP and who doesn’t. From there, you’ve got a segment of leads you can nurture and follow up with in a more targeted way.

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2. Understand who you’re targeting

Not all businesses are equally “cold-email-friendly.” Depending on who you're selling to, you might hit way more walls than you'd expect.

Enterprise? Tough game.

We’ve had enterprise contacts sign up for a newsletter — they wanted to hear from us — and their IT firewall still sent every email straight to spam. 

Enterprises often have strong anti-spam protections, internal review processes, and complex org charts. Mass cold email rarely works here.

SMBs? Way more doable.

Over 90% of companies in every country have fewer than 50 employees. 

That means if you’re targeting small businesses, you’ve got a huge pool to work with. And they’re generally easier to reach, more open to new solutions, and faster to make decisions.

So, if your offer is relevant to SMBs and you have enough volume, automation can work like a charm.

Pro tip:  Don’t let automation kill your personal touch. Pick the right tool to help you scale, and make sure your messaging and subject lines stay relevant and tailored to each prospect.

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3. Make sure you have solid contact data

Cold emails are only useful if you can find the people you want to contact. That sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many companies miss this part.

You need decent data – email addresses, names, roles, company info, etc. And that varies a lot by region and industry.

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US, Australia and EU? Usually no problem.

For the US, Australia and most of Europe, data is widely available. Tools like Apollo, Clay, and ZoomInfo make it relatively easy to find decision-makers.

Africa and Asia (especially China)? Tougher.

In these regions, it’s harder to find verified contact info. Many businesses don’t have a web presence. LinkedIn is barely used. Local email formats are unpredictable. This makes scalable outreach much harder.

Same goes for industries where businesses aren’t online – small family-run retail stores, tradespeople, or small-scale ecommerce operations. 

You might have a list of 20,000 such businesses,  but if none of them have a real online footprint, you’re stuck sending emails to “info@” inboxes and that's not going to get you far.

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TL;DR: should you use mass cold email?

Use mass cold email if:

• Your TAM is at least 30-40k companies
• Your audience is SMB or mid-market
• You have access to good contact data
• You’re offering something relatively easy to explain or test
  
  

Skip mass cold email if:

• You’re targeting enterprise
• Your TAM is below 25k companies
• You don’t have access to accurate contact info
• Your offer is complex and needs context

Before you spin up your first sequence, make sure your market’s big enough, your data’s solid, and your audience is reachable. 

And know what you’re trying to achieve. Sometimes it’s meetings. Sometimes it’s insights. Sometimes it’s just testing demand.

Start small. Run tests. Look at results. Then double down if it makes sense.

That’s how the best outbound teams win.