Why Sending More Cold Emails Won’t Fix Your Agency’s Sales Problem

If your agency has sent 500 cold emails and got f*ck all back, it’s tempting to assume you simply haven’t sent enough.

Perhaps the copy is fine. Perhaps the offer is fine. Perhaps cold email really is just a numbers game and, if you keep feeding prospects into the machine, something will eventually fall out the other end.

So you buy another bit of software, upload 1,000 more contacts and turn up the volume.

The problem is that more activity doesn’t automatically create better results. In fact, what it often results in is simply making the same mistake much faster.

When I started working in sales more than 10 years ago, volume played a much bigger role. You could hammer the phones, fire out emails and, to some extent, rely on the numbers eventually working in your favour.

Things have changed. Prospects now receive an unbelievable amount of crap outreach. Their inboxes are rammed, LinkedIn is full of automated messages pretending not to be automated, and people have become very good at spotting something generic.

My good friend, and email ninja Scot Barlow, from Fox Red Outbound says that if your first 500 emails aren’t working, sending another 1000 without understanding why probably won’t rescue the campaign. It’s a bit like flogging a dead horse, except now you’ve bought software that allows you to flog it 1,000 times a week.

Let me get something out of the way: cold email absolutely works.

So do cold calls, LinkedIn messages and direct mail. I use all of them, usually as part of the same campaign.

What rarely works is trying one of those channels half-heartedly for a few weeks, getting no immediate results and declaring that the entire thing is dead.

I see agencies fall into one of two camps. The first sends a few emails, gets no replies and concludes that cold email doesn’t work for their business. The second decides that the only problem is volume and starts chucking thousands more people into the sequence.

Neither reaction tackles what may actually be going wrong.

The problem could be the people you’re contacting, the problem you’re talking about, the offer you’re making, the way you’re explaining it or the fact that your email isn’t reaching the inbox in the first place.

Before you start worrying about volume, you need to understand what you’re planning to scale.

Someone I know who works specifically in cold email once reviewed an agency campaign that wasn’t producing much of anything.

Another so-called email guru had already diagnosed the problem: the agency simply wasn’t sending enough. Their advice was to increase the volume and let the numbers take care of the rest.

Except volume wasn’t the real issue.

The agency’s technical setup was poor and it already had deliverability problems. Increasing the volume meant sending more emails through a setup that wasn’t working properly, potentially doing further damage to its sender reputation.

Worse still, it was using its primary business domain.

If you’re planning high-volume cold email, I don’t think putting the same domain you rely on for client communication, proposals and day-to-day business on the firing line is particularly sensible. And Scot agrees, that the infrastructure is very important. He talks about this regularly in his LinkedIn Newsletter.

This stuff matters. Google’s Postmaster Tools monitors factors including spam rates, sender reputation, authentication and delivery errors, while Yahoo’s bulk-sender guidance sets out requirements around SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

In other words, the technical setup isn’t a little admin job to worry about once the copy has been written, it’s actually fundamentally the first part of any campaign.

The wider lesson is simple maths really: volume multiplies whatever is already there. If you have a relevant, well-targeted campaign, increasing the volume may help you reach more of the right people. If the campaign’s badly built, you’ll simply produce a larger quantity of sh*t.

A good outreach campaign has several moving parts. You don’t need every detail to be perfect before sending anything, because that quickly becomes another excuse never to start, but the main parts do need to work together.

Before increasing the volume, I’d look at:

1. Targeting: Are you contacting a clearly defined group of businesses and the right people inside them?
2. The problem: Are you talking about something they genuinely care about, or have you invented a vague pain point because it sounds suitably businessy?
3. The offer: Is it clear what you can help with and why it might be useful now?
4. The message: Does the email sound like it was written for them, or could it have gone to anybody?
5. The follow-up: Are you building on the original message, or sending increasingly desperate versions of “just bumping this up”?
6. The setup: Are the emails authenticated, reaching inboxes and being sent from domains you’re comfortable protecting?
7. The wider campaign: Is email being supported by calls, LinkedIn, content, networking or direct mail?

If one of those is badly wrong, it can drag down everything else. Sending more emails won’t fix it; it may just make it harder to work out which part was broken.

That being said, Scot Barlow (my email ninja friend, remember?) says that the biggest issue in 80% of the audits he runs is the setup.

One of my favourite quick tests for agency outreach is to count how many times the message says “we”.

“We help businesses with…”
“We specialise in…”
“We’ve worked with…”
“We can help you…”

Before long, you’ve pissed “we” all over the email.

You might be genuinely brilliant at what you do, but the prospect doesn’t know that yet. As far as they’re concerned, they’ve opened an unsolicited message from someone they have probably never heard of.

The first email is not the place to squeeze an entire credentials deck into their inbox. Its job is to get a positive response, and start a conversation.

That means you’ve got to focus less on everything your agency does and more on one problem that may be relevant to that particular prospect.

One prospect. One problem. One reason to respond.

The message can still include proof, but it should support the point rather than taking over the email. A relevant sentence about helping a similar company is usually more useful than three paragraphs about your agency’s history, values, services and collection of slightly questionable industry awards.

You don’t need to sell the whole bloody project in email number one.

The obvious question is: how do you know which problem to talk about?

This is where a lot of agencies start guessing. They settle on something vague such as “increasing conversions”, “driving growth” or “scaling efficiently”.

That may be technically true, but it sounds exactly like everything else in the prospect’s inbox. We all get those LI messages and emails…

A more useful starting point is to reverse engineer your existing case studies.

Look at a piece of work your agency delivered particularly well and ask what was happening before the client hired you. What was going wrong? Why had it become important? What had they already tried? What did you change, and what happened as a result?

That gives you a real commercial problem to build a campaign around. You know a genuine business experienced it, cared enough to fix it and was prepared to pay for help.

You can then look for other companies that might be experiencing something similar.

That’s a much stronger hook than inventing a generic pain point because somebody on LinkedIn told you that all CMOs are currently worried about “unlocking scalable growth”.

Targeting is another area where agencies often stay too broad.

Let’s say your main target sector is e-commerce. That might be a perfectly sensible market for the agency, but it’s far too large to make an individual campaign feel specific. Instead, you could run a campaign aimed at women’s fashion e-commerce brands.

That gives you a much more manageable group to research. You can understand the common commercial pressures, identify patterns across their websites and marketing, look for useful trigger points and work out who is most likely to care about the problem you solve.

Your messaging will naturally become more relevant because you’re no longer trying to write something that works for every e-commerce company from a jewellery brand to an industrial parts supplier.

This doesn’t mean repositioning the entire agency or refusing to work with anyone outside women’s fashion. Your overall market can remain broad, but your outbound campaign doesn’t have to be.

Run one focused campaign, learn from it and then build another for a different group. That will teach you far more than throwing several unrelated sectors into one enormous list.

Another problem with “just send more emails” is that it treats cold email as an isolated activity.

The strongest outreach campaigns don’t work like that. Email, LinkedIn, calls, content, networking and direct mail should reinforce one another.

A prospect might see one of your LinkedIn posts, then a week later, they receive something interesting from you through the post. You then follow up with an email and make a call.
By that point, the email is no longer arriving completely out of the blue. They may recognise your name, remember what you sent or already have a rough idea of what you talk about.

That creates a very different starting point from appearing in their inbox with: “Hi Sarah, we are a leading full-service digital agency offering bespoke solutions…”
This doesn’t mean hammering someone on six channels in the same afternoon. The aim isn’t to make them feel hunted.

What it’s all about is building familiarity over time and giving the campaign more than one opportunity to land. Different people notice different things, and timing plays a huge part in whether somebody responds.

Agencies understandably want quick wins from outbound. You’ve got revenue targets, salaries and possibly a suspiciously quiet month approaching, so of course you’d like somebody to reply tomorrow and sign a £30,000 project next Tuesday.

That can happen. I’ve had short-term wins from outreach, and you should absolutely make the most of them when they appear.

But anyone selling outbound as a reliable vending machine for immediate agency projects is pulling the wool over your eyes. The bigger value comes from building a pipeline.

One person may be interested now, and another may say the problem is relevant, but the timing isn’t right until the next quarter. Someone else might come back six months later, and I’ve even had prospects reappear after 12 months plus when something changed internally.

Now it would have been easy to write them off at the start as failed leads. But, actually that’s outbound doing its job. Building a pipeline of leads!

If you bin everybody who says “not right now” and go hunting for another 1,000 email addresses, you throw away much of the value you have already created. You’re paying for the introduction but abandoning the relationship before it has a chance to become commercially useful.

Sustainable agency growth comes from steadily building a pool of conversations, contacts and future opportunities. It doesn’t come from repeatedly returning to zero.

The honest answer is that either number can work. It depends on the size of your genuine market, how targeted the campaign is and which channels you plan to use.

Fifty prospects can be plenty for a tightly focused campaign, particularly when they have been chosen because there’s a strong reason to approach each one. With a list that small, though, I wouldn’t rely on cold email alone. I’d support it with LinkedIn, calls, content and potentially direct mail, giving each prospect several relevant opportunities to notice you and respond.

A campaign of 1,000 cold emails can work too. You just need a market large enough to support that number without loosening your targeting criteria to fill the spreadsheet.

Those 1,000 people don’t necessarily need 1,000 individually handcrafted emails, but they should have enough in common for you to speak credibly about a specific problem. If you’ve identified a clear group of businesses that are likely to experience the same challenge, a relevant message can still work at scale. In the words of Scot “Relevance over personalisation every single day”

For example, “ecommerce businesses that want more sales” is far too broad. A specific type of ecommerce brand experiencing a particular issue with customer acquisition, conversion or retention gives you something much more useful to build a larger campaign around.

The danger comes when agencies decide they want to send 1,000 emails first and only then work out who should receive them. The targeting gets stretched, the problem becomes vaguer and the message gradually turns into the same generic garbage everyone else is sending.

Even if the potential market supports 1,000 prospects, warmup is very important, by sending out smaller, then increasing batch sizes. Check the deliverability, look at the responses and work out whether the message is creating the right kinds of conversations before rolling it out more widely. In the words of the expert, Scot “1000 emails is a good number to start with to get a real feel for things, anything less won’t give a reliable sample. At the 1% Human reply rate bench mark it gives 10 replies.”

Were the first prospects genuinely a good fit? Did the problem feel relevant to them? Were you hearing the same objections? Did your follow-ups add anything useful? Was there enough interest to suggest that the campaign deserved a wider audience?

Use those answers to improve the next batch, changing one or two things deliberately rather than rewriting everything based on a hunch.

The point isn’t that less emails are sensible and more are automatically spammy, it’s that the volume should be shaped by the market and the strategy, not by how many contacts your software allows you to upload.

Sending 500 relevant emails can be a perfectly reasonable tactic, but sending 1,000 emails because the first 500 didn’t work is not a sales strategy.

If your agency’s outreach feels scattered, generic or too reliant on referrals, my sales strategy and consulting work can help you tighten the targeting, message and overall campaign before you start turning up the volume.