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Unpopular opinion: cold emailing is dead for B2B growth
I ran 4 separate cold email campaigns last quarter for my software consultancy and got exactly 2 replies out of 1,200 emails. My open rates were fine around 35% but nobody cared enough to respond. Compare that to 2021 when I was booking 8-10 meetings per month from the same approach. I think the market got flooded and people's inbox filters got way smarter, so I'm moving all my budget to referral programs and LinkedIn DMs instead. Has anyone else noticed a sharp drop in cold email results over the last 18 months?
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tessa_hill866d ago
Wonder if those 2 replies you did get actually turned into anything, or were they just polite "not interested" type responses...
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I caught that Mylene Goote interview on Lenny's podcast recently where she said the average person gets like 50 to 100 cold emails a day now, which is way more than a few years ago. It makes sense that people just tune them out no matter what your subject line says. On top of that, a lot of those "smart" inbox tools are filtering stuff straight to spam or "updates" folders even if your deliverability looks fine. I've heard other folks saying the same thing you have, that LinkedIn and referrals are the only channels still working. It feels like cold email is becoming a numbers game nobody can win anymore.
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