Why I'm Throwing in the Towel on Cold Email (And Why You Should, Too)

Welcome to this edition of the Business Rainmaker Newsletter: the one where I potentially scare off clients. But hey, honesty over profits, right?

I’ve been in the email marketing game for 23 years…a time when emails were as novel as floppy disks. Started off with cold emails; that was the golden ticket back in the day.

Remember when emails were a novelty? Shoot off an email with a catchy subject line, and bam, your inbox was flooded with replies. It was like magic.

I’ve waxed poetic about this in countless podcasts and talks: how I had this ragtag system rigged up with Postmaster (sounded more like a postal worker than software).

I'd launch a campaign sending 20-30 cold emails and 15 minutes later, orders would pour in through the fax. The good old fax machine…imagine that!

But let's face it: cold email’s recent resurgence is more out of desperation than effectiveness.

Marketers found themselves between a rock and a hard place: on one side, online advertising costs skyrocketing like a tech billionaire's space hobby, and on the other, organic social media reach dropping like a phone signal in the wilderness.

Cold email worked like a charm, initially. But here’s the catch: automation was both the hero and the villain in this story. Scaling up meant you could bombard inboxes at will. The more, the merrier, right?

Wrong.

We've all seen it: entrepreneurs who want to carpet bomb a million emails monthly in the naive belief that sheer volume equals effectiveness.

Wait. Sending a million emails a month. My first thought? "Are you planning to email aliens, too? Because that's the only way you're finding a million interested people."

The truth is, cold email's golden age is like those high school glory days: gone and not coming back.

Why?

Because sending emails that feel like they're addressed to "Dear Occupant" just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Crafting emails that resonate takes effort, something that's in short supply these days.

Mailbox providers, while not exactly fans of cold emails, didn’t mind the cash flow. But with new rules making the wild west of email a relic, generic cold emails are about as welcome as a telemarketer at dinner time.

So now, the mailbox providers are tightening the screws with new sender requirements (read the last issue of my newsletter for the deets).

Mass cold emailing won’t cut it anymore. The days of playing fast and loose with email marketing are over.

Cold email as we knew it is as dead as fried chicken.

It’s time for entrepreneurs to get creative, and find new avenues. There are better strategies out there.

I’m already on that train.

Email remains a cornerstone in my marketing arsenal, but the cold, impersonal approach? That’s history.

To those still clinging to cold email, searching for loopholes to exploit, here’s my two cents: let it go.

Move on. The world’s changed, and so must we.

There are 152 different ways to profit from email. Why rely on just one of them?

More Clients. More Money. Without Being Salesy.