#20 Cold Email vs Cold Calling

It's a pipedream to "scale" with just cold emails.

There's no agency or guru out there that can scale a business with just email.

Yet, I see so many people launching just a cold email strategy, only to fail and give up and curse it’s name.

Unless you only need a few customers per month, here's the truth:

If you want to "scale".

You'll need to start picking up the phone.

😭 I know, blasting emails is much easier.

But few people have the patience and expertise to master email.

The best way for you to get results with email is picking up the phone after.

Think of email as your Google Display ads, or billboards.

They are to get your name in front of people.

Certainly you'll get some low hanging fruit, don’t get me wrong.

That is inevitable.

But if you want to scale you'll need more channels, more marketing, more people, etc.

And your cold email strategy will likely fail without another channel.

Let take a look at some realistic conversion metrics for email vs the email + phone:

Standalone Cold Email

Here’s a realistic scenario for cold email alone using 30 net new leads per day and 650 in a month.

Under this scenario you could expect 1 net new customer per month.

Of course you can ‘scale it’.

Keep reading and I’ll tell you why that’s a big mistake.

In reality, you’re most likely better off picking up the phone after your initial cold email sequence.

I call this “stacking”.

We stack a new channel after the last channel is complete.

Cold / Warm Calling

My original agency Lead Engine, started off as a cold calling agency after the CEO of the Franchise company asked me to service the franchisees to help them grow.

We primarily used Cold Calling. But eventually added email (and LinkedIn outreach)

A good call-to-booking ratio was 0.75% to 1.0% for just cold calling.

But when you add email in front of calling you could reasonably expect to double your success.

If we call each of our cold email leads from the above example on average 3 times, it’s very possible you can hit the metrics below.

Of course just like anything it takes doing a few other things right.

But your Call-to-booking ratio could go from 0.75%-1.0% to 1.50%-2.0%.

Ie…it can double.

It will take some fine tuning, but this is about 1.5 meetings per day, which is very doable.

But, instead of just 1 customer from email you’d have an additional 5 customers.

Meaning you could reasonably get 1 customer with just cold email.

Or reasonably get 6 customers with cold email plus calling.

That’s a big difference.

Meaning, most of your conversions will come on the phone not email.

Which makes sense, because the more you nurture prospects and the more elbow grease you put into something the more prospects appreciate it.

Now you might be thinking “Patrick I’ll just send 5x the emails to get the same result”.

But there’s a big problem with that.

It’s called the law of diminishing returns.

More volume, more leads, means more problems.

People get so obsessed about getting more and more leads they start emailing less and less relevant prospects.

And writing less and less relevant sales copy.

Which means you get marked as spam at a higher rate.

Which means you’ll burn domains and inboxes.

Which means you’ll get less and less conversions from cold email.

And it comes like a thief in the night.

You often don’t realize it until months later.

I can tell you from experience you don’t want that.

Instead of focusing on results you start focusing on problems.

It’s an insane distraction.

The moral of the story

Don’t think about ‘scaling’ email until you’ve added another channel first.

Once you’ve added calling into the mix…

You’ll be more successful overall and you’ll be able to invest some time and money into trying the email scaling part of the equation.

Which most people underestimate drastically and cost themselves a lot of money in the making.