Ask HN: Do cold emails still work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do cold emails still work?

9 points_xnmw9 comments

Do people still do cold emails for B2B enterprise SaaS sales, or does it come off as too spammy? I'm not in the mood for dry content-marketing and don't have the budget for ads. Cold emails seem like the only way to start promoting the product I built.

Anybody doing cold emails right now and can give me some benchmarks for open rates / response rates I should expect (to get an idea if I'm doing it right)?

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If I receive an email from someone I don't know, I assume it's not just spam but a scam and delete it without opening it. However, you might still have success with a more gullible or less paranoid audience -- particularly if your product is not intended for techies.

Mass emails are cheap, so a 0.1% open rate is enough to float your business if you live off ramen & clip coupons.

Any unsolicited email I receive from someone i didn't requested is sent to spam + block sender in 99% of cases.

Unsolicited non-personal emails or emails that originate from bulk mailing services sent to spam + block sender in 100% of cases.

Cold emails or calls for that matter certainly not working with me.

I think if sender would do some extra thinking to come up with win-win ideas or propositions - it may work better.

Depends on what your audience is. I have almost reached the conclusion that cold emails don't work for developer products. I have hand written 100+ emails to super relevant people with a few different messaging/subject line etc. While the open rate is high (~70%), the response rate is in single digit percentage. These stats are great for automated system but I expect much better for individually curated emails for a curated list of recipients. It's a big time & energy sink.

Maybe I need to start following up on emails a little more. But I typically don't feel like spamming people if they haven't responded to my initial email.

On the other hand blogs seem to provide most bang for your buck.

If you search the HN archives, I think you'll see the success rate is low but the general feeling is that it's enough to justify the effort people are putting in.

Personally, I don't mind the occasional cold email and will reply politely if I'm not interested.

What bothers me A LOT is the automated emails and automated retries every few days with templated emails trying to appear like they were written by some CEO pretending to be my friend. When that happens, the company is leaving a long lasting bad impression.

I get dozens of them a day.

I've never bought anything from one, but I assume that if they didn't still work, I'd stop getting them.

As someone who's done some email marketing and sales, I would avoid cold emails as a starter tactic. I'd start off by leveraging platforms like LinkedIn Groups, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, etc. Rather than start with email, start by engaging people in low-investment places where they're actively looking for the type of SaaS you're offering. It's a little more time-consuming, but it doesn't get you blacklisted by email servers.

Yes, they do.

I'm on the other side of B2B cold emails. I receive them. I also receive stuff on linked in.

I very rarely reply as a lot of them are generic and they don't have my interests at heart.

Sometimes someone comes through with a service or offering that would benefit me.

They get a reply.

Your subject line will largely determine if your email gets oppened or not.

Here is some of the content for an email I did reply to.

- I would appreciate the opportunity of discussing this with somebody, as due to our confidence in securing you many more users, we would happily set you up for free on our platform.

The guy can get me more users. So he got a reply.

Yes it works. The message must be short and helpful. You must spend time on each case to find something meaningful to say. Don't copy/paste text. Don't use a signature. Text-only with one or two links. The first mail shouldn't contain any link.

Spam - yeah they do work but mostly been trained to click the spam button

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