Try This If Cold Email Isn't Working For You

Read with these in mind

• Why would cold email fail for an offer that sells fine through every other channel?
• What can you ask a cold prospect for when a meeting is too big a first step?
• How does a free giveaway turn into booked meetings?

Takeaways

• Ask for a smaller action. His stated lesson: whether the replies are unqualified or absent entirely, you can move the prospect higher in the funnel and ask for a smaller action while cold email still returns ROI. He adds that this version may not clear the ROI of paying an agency, though it holds up when you send it yourself. 8:44

  → If your reply rate is dead, change what you are asking for before you rewrite the copy again.

• Demos need prior education. A client with large customers had no structural reason for outbound to fail, so the campaign chased demos from prospects who had no education about the category. His example: a 200 person company deep in HubSpot being asked to switch to a CRM it has never heard of. 1:19

  → Match the ask to how much the reader already knows about your category.

• Give the whole list away. The campaign that worked offered a free list of every recently hired person at head seniority or above: head, VP, President and Chief. The email said he runs an outbound agency, noted he had packed in as many attributes as he could so recipients could filter it themselves, then asked one question: do you want the list. 5:40

  → Test a one-question resource offer against your current meeting request.

• The loop that closed two. Everyone who opted in went onto a newsletter. He sent it about six times, then included one of his YouTube videos. Subscribers rose with every send. Meetings came from the link in that video and he closed two of them. 6:39

  → Point the nurture at content that can sell for you, then count meetings from that link.

• First giveaway was too narrow. His first free asset was a list of new hires at SaaS, e-commerce or Fortune 5000 companies. Nobody cared, because the people he emailed did not all sell to those segments. 5:25

  → Check that a free asset fits every segment on your send list before you build it.

How the video runs

1. The problem behind the video

   Some accounts stay a year or 18 months on steady leads while others produce none. The three levers he has covered before, deliverability, list and copywriting, do not always explain the gap.

2. The client that should have worked

   He walks through one account and what he would change about it if he could run it again. See the takeaway on education and the ask.

3. Why his own agency runs on inbound

   Most Growth Engine X leads come from the YouTube channel and the LinkedIn content. He points at how commoditized cold email agencies have become as the reason a cold pitch is hard to believe.

4. The backup campaign that booked calls

   As insurance against a LinkedIn ban he ran outbound: AI-generated campaign ideas for each prospect, then an offer to chat. It booked plenty of calls, then stalled on price because recipients assumed he was another pay for performance agency.

5. Two versions of the free giveaway

   He tries a narrow new-hire list, then a broad seniority list. Both takeaways below cover what separated them.

6. The lesson, generalized

   The last three minutes widen the story past his own case. He works through who else could run the play, how much time it takes and why an agency client usually cannot buy it.

Worth quoting