Our $38.4K Cold Email Experiment Failed. Here's What Actually Worked

Insights from today’s 4-min read:

• 📊 Cold email is dying - see what top SaaS companies are doing instead 

• 🍕 How $15K in pizzas generated $1M in pipeline

• 🔍 We Spent $30K+ on Email. Why did it fail?

• 🧠 The "social engineering" secret to enterprise sales

What is happening with Cold Emails?

Many of you may have noticed you’re getting more cold emails every day. You’re not alone. 

The rise in cold outbound has exploded over the last 3 years. 

First it was tools like Instantly, Lemlist and Porkbun that made cold email campaigns super easy to set up and run. 

They would help you buy multiple email inboxes, warm your inboxes up, and do basic personalisation for you. 

This meant that anyone with $200/month could send 30,000 emails. 

But then came AI. This unleashed an absolute tidal wave in the last 18 months. 

Instead of having to manually add in details about each lead (name, interests, job title etc) AI could write personalised emails for each individual. 

Now tools like ChatGPT, along with web scrapers like Clay mean that it costs a few hundred dollars per month to scrape thousands of emails, and get personal information about them from their LinkedIn, company website, Twitter profiles etc. 

The email providers, Microsoft Outlook and Gmail have not been blind to this. They have seen their user’s emails getting filled with this spam and have taken aggressive measures to filter out cold emails. 

All this meant that cold email is now struggling to land in the inbox, with a lot going to spam. 

Because of all of this cold outbound campaigns are becoming less effective. Less emails in prospects inboxes, and even less likely to reply = rising CAC and lower leads. 

How are companies solving this?

The best SaaS companies in the world are still growing. 

But they are using different approaches, ones with more of a personal touch. Things that can’t be automated by AI. 

Sam Blond, former CRO of Brex, shared an awesome Twitter thread with one of his most effective campaigns: sending a bottle of champagne to companies that just raised venture funding with a handwritten congrats. 

Other Examples of Physical Gift Campaigns 

Gong do this now with high value targets, sending a mini Gong and a handwritten note. 

Similarly Antimetal personally delivered pizzas to startups in their ICP. They spent $15K and got $1M in pipeline. 

Our Experience at Pricepoint

For a little context, Pricepoint is the consulting firm I work at. We work with select SaaS companies to help them with growth. 

This weekend I wrote some SQL and found that over the last year we’ve had 112 companies reach out to us and ask if we can help build their outbound campaigns. 

We said yes to only 2 of them. 

Why? 

To be 100% transparent with readers, we experimented with cold email for our own customer acquisition. There were a group of companies that we really wanted to work with and decided to try it out. 

Cold email failed miserably for us. 

We offered a strong lead magnet and still only got 1 client whilst our regular inbound grew 50% in the same 4 month period. 

We consulted with experts at some top companies, paid tens of thousands in consulting fees, and ran more than 15 different variations, to no avail. This led us to a pretty clear conclusion — we aren’t experts and outbound is getting harder to generate results so let’s not do this work. 

The only time we worked on outbound with clients is when we found creative ways to break through the noise, and we had to layer on advertorials, highly specific emails and a bunch of social engineering. 

Unlike our own cold email attempts these 2 campaigns delivered great ROI which led us to our approach going forward.

Either:

✅ Stand out with creative campaigns (e.g. creative gifts) 

✅ Increase your conversion rate or monetisation to improve revenue per site visit 

We won’t work with many companies on outbound campaigns, it’s much easier for us to increase the conversion rate & monetisation of your site. 

But it is still possible if you put in the work. 

Hell, even we’ll be sending out gifts to a select few companies we want to work with. 

But traditional outbound is just getting more expensive.