Does Cold Emailing Work?

Eh...

What do you think about the junk mail in your mail box? What about cold calls? What about door knockers? What about annoying ads at the beginning of a youtube video? What about those billboards that distract people on the highway?

This is marketing... If you focus on the people NOT interested, you're not doing your job.

Is cold email the least effective? If you look at the per send response rate, yes... it probably converts worse than others. It also is the easiest to scale, so while it may be statistically less effective, it is also more effective in practical use than cold calling.

Not everyone responds to the same medium of advertising / marketing.

If you really want to do cold email, good luck. It takes serious numbers to make it worth while, and you need to know how to get your email delivered... it's not as simple as hitting the send button. It's also not free, or cheap if you're wanting to do it right.

Anyway...

There's not one, single method that is going to be a life changer for you. When you run a business, you need to have multiple sources of leads, not just one.

I started mass emailing with a tiny list of 2,000....then 10,000...then 20..30...50.. and so on until I got into the millions.

I still talk to one of the first people that bought from me, 5-6 years ago from a mass email.

Saying mass email rarely works, ignores the fact that mass email results in the highest ROI of nearly any form of marketing.

Yes... they're unlikely to be interested in you, and you're right, they don't know you, but that's why you continue to email, sending information, helpful tips, nurturing the lead.

Saying it doesn't work is incredibly wrong. If it didn't work for you, you were just doing it wrong.

Now if you're referring to bulk spam... sure... it takes millions if not billions of emails to solicit boner meds. B2B services though, no, doesn't take much at all for it to work. In fact, it's more likely to work in mass than it is manually due to technical issues people will face.

Spam:

irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of recipients.

unwanted or intrusive advertising on the Internet.

send the same message indiscriminately

Telemarketing, email marketing, direct mail, billboards, radio ads, television ads, video ads, banner ads on WF, newspaper ads, magazine ads..

All of that must be spam according to you.

Nobody that advocates telemarketing, email marketing, direct mail or any form of marketing, suggests that you should send massively irrelevant offers to an unqualified group of recipients.

I know, being against everything is kind of your thing... but this thread is asking if cold emailing works for selling SEO services... the answer is yes. If you think otherwise, then I would raise the question if your opinion should ever be taken into consideration.

We're talking about email marketing, to business owners... not mass spam trying to sell fake viagra.

So people that advertise to millions are spamming? I guess we view advertising in different ways.

I never claimed to be a Seth Godin "Permission Marketing" evangelist... I only care about what works and what actually generates money.

A "FEW" is never enough, no matter how targeted. That's called being a victim of mediocrity.

If a business publishes their email, then chances are high someone will read the email. The trick is to get their attention so they respond or move it up the chain. Mass emails rarely achieve this. And more than likely end up in the spam box.

By contrast, a personalised email that gets attention and invites a response can be very effective... At least at starting a conversation...