Pro tip: I told a room of 30 people at a Denver meetup that cold email is dead and 4 of them walked out
Last Thursday I gave a talk at a small marketing meetup in Denver and made the mistake of saying cold email got killed by spam filters back in 2021. Four people stood up and left before I even got to my second slide, which honestly told me more than the room did. My whole point was that reply rates on cold outreach dropped under 1 percent for us after 2020, but I do wonder if I was just doing it wrong. The people who walked out ran small agencies, and two of them emailed me later saying they close deals with it weekly. I don't have hard proof either way, just my own inbox and a lot of unsubscribes. So am I wrong here, or is cold email really done for anyone who isn't spamming 10k sends a day?
But those agency guys who left might be proving your point without knowing it. If it takes a super targeted list and a near-personal email to get any replies, then cold email isn't really working as a channel, it's just manual sales with extra steps. So the folks closing deals weekly are probably sending 20 emails a day they wrote by hand, not the 10k blast stuff the term usually means.