9 Myths About Cold Email

Cold email is a viable way to grow nearly any business, from a multi-billion enterprise to a local photography studio.

But at the same time, some business leaders hesitate to use cold email for growth.

I have personal experience with companies that didn't think cold email could help them grow because their sales process was (supposedly) so different that it was impossible to make it work.

One other major reason for neglecting email outreach is that many cold emails are… bad. Take a look at your own inbox. Whether you don’t mind receiving cold emails or you hate them, you’ll find many irrelevant or even obnoxious emails.

This is a cold fact that the sales industry should acknowledge for our own good.

But just because others are sending bad emails doesn’t mean you should overlook email outreach entirely. There’s a better world out there where sending great email outreach at scale is possible, and it’s possible today.

Let’s discuss some of the myths surrounding cold emails, some legitimate reasons why they don’t always work, and how to overcome both.

Myth 1: Cold email is illegal

It’s simply not true that cold email is illegal. As long as you adhere to a set of best practices, cold email is legal under GDPR, CCPA, CAN-SPAM, and various other privacy regulations.

However, if you’re not careful, you can easily violate your recipients’ privacy or break privacy laws outright. 

Here’s a list of best practices to help you stay compliant:

• Clear sender identification: Always use a truthful and clear sender name and email address in the "From" field.
• Honest subject lines: Ensure your email subject lines accurately reflect the content of the email to avoid misleading recipients.
• Opt-out mechanism: Always include a clear and easy-to-find unsubscribe link or a way for recipients to opt out of further emails. You also need to promptly honor opt-out requests.
• Data transparency and security: Be transparent about how you obtained recipients' email addresses and the purpose of the email. And store recipients' personal data securely.
• Regular list cleaning: Keep your email list up to date by removing invalid or bounced email addresses and ensuring unsubscribed recipients are not emailed again.
• Respect recipient privacy: Always ensure that your emails are relevant to the recipient's business or professional needs and do not infringe upon their privacy.

For more, read our deep dive on how to send cold emails and stay compliant.

Myth 2: Cold email is spam

If you look in your spam folder, you’ll likely find some cold emails there that may have just as well landed in your primary inbox. 

However, there is a fine line between cold email and spam, which isn’t always obvious when automated spam filters are used. From a human perspective, the difference lies in consent and relevance. 

Cold emails are unsolicited but targeted. They’re sent with a legitimate business interest, wanting to reach people who may benefit from a product or service. They have a clear and harmless purpose and an option to opt out. 

Spam, on the other hand, involves unsolicited, irrelevant emails sent in bulk, often without an opt-out mechanism or personalized content. 

Here is how you ensure your cold emails are not spam (and don’t land in spam):

• Personalize and contextualize your emails. Based on what you know about your recipients, make a business case for why you decided to reach out.
• Check your message for spam-related words with an automated spam checker.
• Make your cold email look like an organic message you would send to someone you know. Use unstructured text; avoid images and unnecessary formatting.
• Keep the length of your message appropriate to the context.
• Keep your content professional.
• Use follow-up emails respectfully, and don’t follow up too often.
• Provide an unsubscribe link to make the recipients unsubscribe instead of reporting spam.

For more, review our article on how to avoid landing in spam.

Myth 3: Cold email is a sales tool

This myth can be easily debunked by looking at the Hunter userbase, for example, by reviewing our customer stories.

We have countless users who successfully leverage cold email for anything but sales:

• Link-building for SEO,
• Validating startup ideas,
• Recruitment,
• User research (e.g., surveys),
• Influencer marketing, and more.

In fact, these different use cases often see greater success than sales-related emails.

While email outreach, together with cold calling and LinkedIn, is a sales staple, it has its place in almost every business.

Any time you want to reach a group of people you haven’t interacted with before—whatever the purpose—cold email is your best bet.

Myth 4: Cold email is just for outbound leads

Cold email can be leveraged with your inbound leads, too. 

Needless to say, if someone contacts your business and you reply, that’s not a cold email.

But think about the lost opportunities or former customers who haven’t heard from you in years. These leads aren’t hot, yet contacting them with an email campaign can work wonders for your sales pipeline.

Myth 5: Cold email is a numbers game

The term “numbers game” is often thrown around when talking about cold emails. And the idea behind it is that you need to send lots of emails to get results.

But while cold email is a highly scalable channel, it’s not a numbers game—especially if you’re just starting out. 

My experience suggests that successful campaigns start small and only scale after gaining traction.

There are two reasons why:

• Sending volume: If you start sending hundreds of emails per day all of a sudden, email service providers (like Gmail or Outlook) may assume you’re a spammer. Your emails will start landing in spam and bouncing, and you might even get your email account suspended by your own ESP. This is why you need to start slow and scale after you generate lots of positive engagement, validating yourself as a legitimate sender.
• Segmentation: Cold emails are most successful if they can accurately talk to an urgent, unavoidable, unworkable, and underserved problem. This means that even if you’re able to solve various problems for various people, you should enrich your leads and segment them so that you can reach out with smaller campaigns that speak directly to the needs of those smaller segments.

Myth 6: The more personal, the better

Personalization is important because it can be used to demonstrate you understand your recipient’s needs.

“Can be,” because personalization is actually often used without a clear purpose. 

Using your recipient’s first name won’t impress anyone. At this point, most recipients understand how easy it is to automate basic personalization using cold email tools. 

More importantly, knowing someone’s name doesn’t prove you know their problems and priorities, so it doesn’t get you closer to getting a positive reply.

I believe that great personalization means adjusting each email you send to the specific needs of your recipient and their company.

With this mindset, you don’t need to know intimate details about your recipient to get their attention. What you need is relevant data about their business situation. This is where lead enrichment enables contextualized emails at scale.

Using a tool like Hunter to source and enrich your B2B leads, you can learn enough about your leads to divide them into manageable segments, and then reach out with very specific messaging. That will move the needle far more than looking up where your lead went to school and injecting that into your email.

To avoid errors when personalizing your cold emails, use a cold email tool to automate injecting recipient-specific data into your messages.

Myth 7: Nobody even opens cold emails

This is not true. If your cold emails are targeted and relevant and you’re not struggling with email deliverability, you can get very high open rates.

Poorly executed cold email campaigns can have abysmal open rates (think 5-10%, which means most of your emails will land in spam.)

But if your data is solid and you’re segmenting your audience, you can quite easily reach open rates similar to opt-in email marketing.

The chart above visualizes the open rates for one of our accounts over the last six months: the average is just above 41%. And with very narrow targeting and a deep understanding of your customer’s pains, you can definitely get an even higher open rate. 

This goes to show that well-executed cold email campaigns get solid open rates and put your solution in front of the right people. Just like with other growth channels, it’s the execution that determines your success.

Myth 8: Short emails are better than long emails

There's probably a fall-off point after 300+ words, and I'm sure it's very tricky to compose a legitimate cold email with 10 words or less.

Other than that, I've seen emails of all lengths perform very well and very poorly.

That's because your recipients don't count words when deciding to reply.

What they care about is how quickly you can demonstrate that you have a relevant offer, not how many words your email contains in total.

So, instead of looking at email word count, I suggest using a metric we might call "Time To Value." Optimize for how long it takes to show that you understand your recipient's needs and that you have an appropriate solution.

Myth 9: Cold email takes too long to see results

Cold email is a very scalable channel. When you realize its potential, it’s natural to want to reach out to your entire Total Addressable Market.

However, just like no truly successful company can serve its entire market within a year, you shouldn’t try to reach your entire TAM within a year.

Cold email takes time. You should plan for it to be an ongoing process, not a one-off activity.