You're probably doing cold email wrong. Not because you're lazy or incompetent - but because you're treating it like a single strategy instead of what it actually is: a system that changes completely depending on where you are in the growth journey.
Most people either spray and pray with generic templates, or they get so stuck perfecting their first email that they never send anything. Both kill your growth. The truth is that the cold email strategy that works when you're sending 20 emails a week doesn't work when you're sending 200. And what works at 200 breaks completely at 2,000.
Here's how to think about cold email growth in actual stages, with what you should actually be doing at each one.
Stage 1: The Validation Phase (0-500 Total Emails Sent)
You're here if you're just starting or restarting. Your goal isn't revenue. It's proof that this works at all.
Most people fail here because they optimize too early. They write one email, tweak it for three weeks, then send it to 30 people and wonder why nothing happens. The sample size is too small to learn anything real.
What to actually do:
- Send to 50-100 people manually. Yes, manually. You need to feel the process.
- Write one email. Just one. Keep it short - under 50 words in the body.
- Target people you actually know something about. Not