Just over a week ago we started cold-emailing marketing agencies. The first batches pitched our tool straight up; since Wednesday, every opener leads with a finding we thought was genuinely useful to them: who actually holds page one for their own category term. This is the honest scoreboard so far.
The numbers (all real, all sent from a real person's inbox):
- 99 emails sent — every one checked back against the sent folder
- 0 human replies. Two auto-acknowledgments. Two bounces.
- Across 5 agency verticals (general marketing, law-firm marketing, AI marketing, content studios, B2B) and 3 hook types (SERP finding, free snapshot offer, light follow-up)
- Follow-ups: 28 second touches, sent on schedule, same result
What the two eras looked like (every draft is archived): the first 42 opened personal and pitched the tool — free credits and all. Everything since Wednesday night leads with a specific, checkable SERP finding pulled that week, pitch deferred to a reply. Recipients were real agencies and independent consultants whose contact pages we actually read. Same result either way: silence.
What we can't conclude: we don't know open rates (no tracking pixels — deliberate). We don't know if the offer fell flat or the sender domain did. One week isn't a verdict; it's a data point.
What we're changing next: attaching a small industry report instead of offering one; widening the pool; and keeping the data-first openers, because the one channel where data-first is clearly working — community posts with the same findings — has started real conversations with the exact same audience.
The uncomfortable working theory: cold email may just be the wrong first door for a no-name sender, and publishing the findings where the buyers already are may be the actual channel. We'll know more in two weeks.
No tool pitch here — we build marketing-data tooling and these emails are our own homework. Happy to share the subject lines that got delivered (almost everywhere) and opened (who knows).
If you're doing outreach right now: what's your reply rate, and what changed it?
Top comments (1)
The uncomfortable theory matches what we see running follow-up sequences for clients: the channel that already has the reader's attention wins, and a cold inbox from a new domain starts with none. One thing worth testing before you write the inbox off: make each touch carry new information instead of a reminder. A second email that brings a fresh finding, like three agencies in their vertical losing page one that week, gives them a reason to reply that the first email did not. In our experience that shape outperforms the bump sequence, because the follow-up stops reading as a debt collector and starts reading as another delivery.