Is cold email still worth it?
What reply rates to expect from cold email, how it compares with ads, and what the people who never reply are really telling you.
I run KILN., a one-person web studio in Singapore. Before I built Gako, I had never sent a cold email to anyone. I assumed it was spam with better manners, and that nobody I would want as a client ever answered one.
Then I tried it. 1,910 emails over a few weeks, to small firms I thought my work would suit. 21 people wrote back. 14 of them wanted to talk. One of those became a full website project worth S$4,000. The emails cost me about US$52 to send.
That is the whole case for cold email, really. But the numbers around it are worth knowing, because the first time you look at a reply rate it can feel like failure.
What reply rate to expect
My 1,910 emails got a 1.1% reply rate. That sounds tiny. It is normal.
Most people who run cold email for a living will tell you that a healthy campaign gets somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5% positive replies. Positive means the person wants to hear more, as opposed to "please remove me". A campaign that sits under 0.5% has something wrong with it. A campaign over 3% is having a very good week.
The best audience I wrote to was creative agencies, at 2.0%. The worst were firms where my work was a stretch. Who you write to moves the number more than anything you write.
Why 1% is a good number
A 1% reply rate reads like 99% of people said no. They didn't.
When I looked at who went quiet, they were mostly people who:
- read it and meant to reply, then got pulled into their day
- liked it, but didn't know me yet
- liked it, but had no website project this quarter
- weren't interested
Only the last group is a real no, and in my experience it is about half. The rest are people you can write to again in a few months, with something new to show. An audience gets built over a year, not in one send.
It also helps to compare it with what else a small firm can do to find clients:
- Ads get clicks from people who may never read your page, let alone write to you. A reply to a cold email is a decision maker answering you by name.
- Referrals are the best clients you will ever get, and you can't make more of them on demand.
- Directories and marketplaces put you in a list next to fifty others, sorted by price.
- Posting on social works, slowly, and mostly for people who already follow you.
Cold email is the one channel where you pick exactly who hears from you, and it costs cents. That makes it the best fit for a firm on a small budget.
What makes it work, and what breaks it
Three things decide whether cold email works for you.
Who you write to. The firm has to be one your work actually fits. My replies came almost entirely from firms that looked like my past clients. When I widened the list to "any small business", the rate fell off.
What you say. Short, about them first, and one clear ask. Every email that got a reply opened on something true about their firm, in their own words, and then said in two lines what I do and what I would like. Nobody replied to the ones that read like a brochure.
Where it comes from. This is the one I learned the hard way. When I later sent 92 emails from my studio's own address, the address my clients use, it started landing in spam at most of the big email providers within a week. Cold email needs its own mailboxes, warmed up slowly and kept to a few dozen emails a day each. Your main address should send only a handful.
That last lesson is built into Gako. Your own mailbox sends at most 10 a day. The rest go from mailboxes we warm up and look after, so your real address stays clean.
Follow-ups matter more than the first email
About half of all replies come from a follow-up. People see your first email, mean to answer, and forget. A short second note a few days later, with no guilt trip, catches them. Gako sends two short follow-ups when there is no reply, and stops the moment someone answers or says no.
So is it worth it?
For a small firm that sells to other firms, yes. A studio, a consultancy, a software company or a supplier needs very few new clients a year for it to pay, and one decent deal covers years of sending. My first run cost about US$52 and brought in a S$4,000 project.
It is worth it as long as you treat it like a long game: the right firms, short emails about them, separate mailboxes, and patience with the quiet ones.
If you want to see what Gako would write for your firm, give it your website. It costs 4 cents an email sent, and you only pay for emails that go out.