Cold Marketing refers to the practice of reaching out to individuals or businesses who have had no prior interaction with you.

Unlike warm leads (who’ve interacted with you or your brand in some way), cold leads require an introduction—and a compelling reason to pay attention.

Here are some immediate examples to get your imagination started:

• A SaaS company emailing a list of mid-sized HR firms to introduce a brand-new recruiting tool.
• A local HVAC service cold-calling homeowners in a new development to offer seasonal check-ups.
• A real estate agent connecting with prospective homebuyers on LinkedIn and sending them a friendly introduction.

How do I do it?

A Step-by-Step Guide

1. Define Your Buyer Persona

• Break down your best existing customers by industry, job title, location, or specific pain points.
• Look for patterns: Are they small businesses in retail? B2B manufacturers needing lead generation? Potential personal training clients?

2. Find or Build Your List

• Use reputable list providers, like Listkit, Salesshady, or Apollo, or create your own in-house data manually.
• Verify contact info with services like NeverBounce or Hunter to avoid high bounce rates.

3. Create a Tracking Method

• Whether you use a spreadsheet or a CRM, ensure you can track opens, replies, calls, and deals.
• With Personify: Create a dedicated pipeline stage for “Cold Leads” to keep them separate from other contacts.

Step 2: Craft Your Outreach Assets

Cold Email Templates

• Short & Direct: Aim for 2–4 short paragraphs. Get to the point quickly—no one reads a novel in a cold email.
• Pain-Point Focused: Tackle a single core problem or opportunity your target faces.
• Strong CTA: End with a clear next step: “Reply if you’d like me to send you that guide,” or “Grab 15 minutes on my calendar?”

Voicemail Scripts & Calling Sequences

• When to Call: Best times often mid-morning (10-11 AM) or mid-afternoon (2-4 PM). Avoid Mondays (busy meeting days) and late Fridays.
• Script: Keep it natural—introduce yourself, reference a problem they might have, and offer to help.
• Voicemail Drops: Record one message and automatically leave it for multiple contacts—saving hours of manual dialing.

Social Outreach Messages

• Use platforms relevant to your audience: LinkedIn for B2B, Instagram/Facebook for local businesses or consumers.
• Personalize your connection requests (Ex: “I noticed you’re scaling a sales team…”, “Congrats on your new role at…”).
• Once connected, send a short introduction focusing on their needs, not your product. Provide value first—like a mini tip or relevant industry insight—before asking for anything.

Step 3: Build and Launch Your Outreach Campaign

Set Up a Multi-Touch Cadence

• Example: Send email #1, wait 2–3 days, drop a second email or a voicemail, wait another 2–3 days, and connect on social.
• Typically, 4–5 total touches over a 2-week span is enough to gauge interest.

Personalize Where Possible

• Insert first names, company references, or relevant data.
• Mention a recent event, their company news, or industry challenges.
• Note: While many email apps allow you to use a smart tag for someone’s first name automatically, more advanced personalization usually requires a more hands-on approach.

Anticipate Objections

Prepare quick, polite responses to common pushbacks like “Not interested right now,” “We already have a vendor,” etc.

Stay Compliant and Ensure Deliverability

Research email regulations like CAN-SPAM in the U.S. and GDPR in Europe. Provide an opt-out link and accurate sender information to avoid spam complaints. Additionally, we recommend leaning towards text-only formatting, including your physical business address, and avoiding lots of links.

Step 4: Monitor, Measure, & Optimize

Track Key Metrics:

• Email Metrics: Open rates, reply rates, bounce rates.
• Call Metrics: Pickup rates, average talk time, callback rates from voicemails.
• Social Metrics: Connection acceptance, response rates, actual conversions to leads.

Analyze & Pivot:

If open rates are low, change subject lines. If response rates are low, test different CTAs or value props.

Refine Your List:

Remove non-responders after multiple attempts or move them to a less frequent nurture campaign.

How do I know it’s working?

Success Metrics

Cold outreach is all about numbers: the more you send out, the more you can bring in. Here’s a few stats to keep in mind:

Open/Connection Rates:

• For emails, a 20–30% open rate is a strong baseline.
• For social outreach, measure how many accept your connection request. For social outreach (LinkedIn invites, for example), a 30–50% acceptance is typical if well-targeted.

Response Rate:

• The percentage of prospects who reply, whether positively or negatively.
• A good cold email sequence can see 5–10% reply rate; potentially higher with personalization.
• For cold calls, measure talk time or successful calls vs. dials.

Conversion Rate:

• How many of these prospects ultimately sign up for a demo, book a call, or make a purchase?
• This is where your CRM (like Personify) can help tie outreach efforts to actual revenue, by tracking lead performance and automating follow-up.

ROI

Compare the cost (time + tools) against new revenue or value added. Automated systems often yield higher ROI by freeing up staff for high-value tasks.

Big Brand Example

Uber for Business

Uber for Business is a specialized offering from Uber that allows companies to manage and streamline their employees’ rides and related expenses under one centralized account. Essentially, it converts Uber’s consumer-focused platform into a B2B service with additional administrative controls, reporting features, and billing integrations that help businesses oversee corporate travel.

When Uber first rolled out Uber for Business, they recognized that HR and People Operations teams are often the gatekeepers for employee-related programs—especially anything impacting day-to-day work or employee perks.

Uber for Business positions itself as an employee perk: an easy, comfortable way for employees to travel to work events, client meetings, or home from late-night shifts.

Being able to see ride details, ensure cost controls, and have pre-set travel budgets or guidelines became a strong selling point for HR departments, features that were highlighted in Uber’s cold outreach campaign.

How They Did It

Uber ran strategic cold outreach campaigns to partner with corporate clients for employee travel. They used targeted email lists of HR managers, offering them a convenient travel dashboard and cost savings. By personalizing emails and quickly addressing HR pain points (expenses, receipts), they locked in big B2B deals.

Personify Pacesetters

Worldwide Auctioneers

Worldwide Auctioneers is a boutique automative auctioneer, hosting high-end auctions while treating their clients with a respect that is rare to find in their industry.

Their challenge? They needed to contact 40,000+ collector-car buyers and keep them engaged with upcoming events and rare vehicle listings. Doing it manually by phone was tedious, time-consuming, and limited their reach.

By implementing Personify’s Voicemail Drop feature, Worldwide Auctioneers transformed what used to be a labor-intensive process into an automated, scalable solution—without sacrificing the personal touch that their clientele expects.

Instead of staff members placing thousands of individual calls, they recorded highly relational voicemails and used Personify to deliver it to all 40,000 potential buyers.

The results were remarkable:

• Higher Engagement: They saw a 45% jump in callbacks and follow-up conversations compared to previous outreach efforts, where many calls went unanswered or ended up in voicemail anyway.
• Reduced Team Investment: Automating the calls saved an estimated 70+ staff hours each week during peak sales season—hours that could be redirected toward closing deals, finalizing auction logistics, and providing white-glove service to top buyers.

In short, Personify’s automated voicemail drops allowed Worldwide Auctioneers to retain the warmth and personalization of a direct call, but at a scale that was previously impossible. This combination of personal touch and high-volume efficiency serves as a prime example of how small businesses can leverage cold marketing tactics—and the right technology—to achieve big wins.

Start with One Channel: If you’re new to cold outreach, pick email or phone—whichever best suits your audience.

One or Two Touches: Don’t worry about a huge sequence right away. Write a short email, and if there’s no reply, send a follow-up 3 days later.

Manual Tracking: A spreadsheet or simple notebook can suffice at first. Add notes on replies, bounces, or call results.

This MVP approach ensures you can test quickly, gather data, and refine.

Advanced Segmentation

Tag contacts based on purchase frequency, total spend, or product category and craft separate messages for each segment.

Multi-Channel Approach

Add voicemail drops, LinkedIn outreach, and retargeting ads for a more robust approach.

Advanced Automation & Personalization

Use dynamic fields in email and call scripts to reference the prospect’s industry, location, or a recent milestone.

A/B Testing

Compare different subject lines, from short/snappy to more detailed, and measure open rates to find which style resonates best.

AI Tools

Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Google Gemini can help write personalized intros, subject lines, or social messages at scale (just be mindful to keep them human-sounding).

You can also use these tools as research assistants, allowing you to better understand the pain points of your audience, what problems people are searching for most, and how to best communicate solutions to those unique needs.

Check out our example prompts and the results from ChatGPT below!

The name of the game with cold outreach is consistency. Can it be a lot of work? Sure. But no one ever said hard work is a bad thing… especially with the proper tools in place to streamline and automate as much as possible, leading to a much higher ROI.

When you’re ready to scale, using an all-in-one marketing tool like Personify can simplify and automate a lot of this work for you.

Option A

The Grind

Get a Solid List

Quality beats quantity. Gather accurate contact information from credible sources, such as professional directories or networking groups. A smaller, targeted list generally outperforms a massive, unfocused one.

If you are interested in larger lists, you can buy large lists from online services like Listkit, Salesshady, or Apollo and sync them with your CRM like Salesforce or Personify, or track them manually in a linked spreadsheet.

Start Emailing

For larger lists, some of the apps named above will allow you to sync domains and email directly from the platform. Otherwise, you can use any email provider or sender (from MailChimp to Constant Contact or Gmail and Outlook). Plain-text emails come across more relational than highly branded ones with lots of graphics.

Track leads as you go, and try offering your lead magnet or a 15-minute conversation. Then, track if they access the lead magnet or schedule a conversation.

Text and Call

Salespeople who have worked in their industry for a long time typically prefer to use their own phone number out of convenience (“It’s what I’ve always done.“), but we highly recommend using a professional business line like Google Voice or Vonage.

That way, you can track your calls (number of outgoing/ingoing calls, time on call, etc.), and your leads aren’t 100% dependent on a single salesperson. Plus, the best services have a mobile app that can send and recieve calls like a normal phone call.

Use a Calendar Scheduler

Avoid the back-and-forth emails and texts (“What days are you typically available?“) and save time with an automated booking system like Calendly or Zoom Scheduler.

Tools like this can sync with your calendar so your meetings are automatically added to your schedule.