Does Cold Email Work for Agencies?

Cold email keeps eating the budget without booking anything. One agency ran eighty thousand dollars through it and never landed a meeting. Cold email puts whatever you already say about yourself in front of a lot more strangers, so a clear description and a list chosen for a reason matter more than volume.

To decide whether to start cold email, or what to do after a campaign that booked nothing, check five things: the list, the message, the offer, the inbox, and who answers the replies.

Key Takeaways

• Fix how you describe your agency and who is on your list before you add cold email volume.
• In SparkToro's 2025 agency survey, 59% of agencies had tried outbound sales, and only 9% of those called the results very effective.
• Before you spend more, check the list, the message, the offer, the inbox, and who will answer replies within a day.
• If a campaign already failed, find out why before you pay for another one.

What does the data say about agency cold email?

Outbound gets some results for many agencies that try it and strong results for few. In SparkToro's 2025 survey, two-thirds of the agencies that tried outbound called it at least moderately effective, and fewer than one in ten called it very effective.

Cold email is a message sent to someone who has never heard of you, because they fit a description on a list. SparkToro's survey asked about outbound sales as a whole, which includes cold email.

SparkToro's 2025 State of Digital Agencies survey drew 376 responses. In the 2025 sales results, Paddy Moogan reported that 59% of agencies had tried outbound sales. Of those, 9% called the results very effective and 58% moderately effective. The remaining 33% said their outbound efforts were not effective at all.

Few agencies rely on outbound as their main source of work. In the 2024 survey of 612 agency owners and consultants, just over 6% named outbound sales as their number one source of new business.

SparkToro's 2025 survey also found that 70% of agencies have no staff dedicated to sales full time.

Why does agency cold email fail?

When agency cold email books nothing, look in four places: the message, the list, the offer and the inbox. A fifth mistake comes after the campaign, when the owner pays to fix a problem the agency doesn't have.

The message

If someone who's never heard of you can't tell from two lines what you do and who it's for, more volume just spreads that confusion further.

A referral arrives with someone who has already told the buyer what you do. Cold email arrives with your name and a couple of sentences. A line like "We help ambitious brands grow through strategic creativity" can survive on a homepage, where the visitor came looking for you. In a stranger's inbox it could have come from any agency.

If you can't write those two lines yet, start with your agency positioning. Positioning statements that hold up on sales calls covers what a prospect needs to hear in them.

The list

A list bought by job title is a list of people who share a job title. Nothing on it says they need an agency this quarter.

In a Reddit r/agency thread titled "Do you guys do outbound for leads", a commenter named justSomeSalesDude described the list problem this way: "The big issue with outbound is poor event based targeting. You need to figure out what your clients do before they call you and look for prospects who are in that particular situation."

Those situations are often called trigger events. Another r/agency commenter, TFDangerzone2017, said they'd spent "a mountain of time finding trigger events (i.e. funding rounds, executives changing jobs) that signal a brand is interested in working with a CRO agency."

Go back through your last five clients and find what changed at each one right before they called you. Maybe they hired a new marketing leader, raised money or launched a product that didn't sell. Companies in that situation now belong on your list.

The offer

Asking a stranger for a sales call is a big ask.

Ask for a reply instead. Point out one thing you noticed about their business and ask whether they're working on it. The call can wait until they've written back.

The inbox

Before you judge the message, check whether the emails even reached an inbox. A campaign that landed in spam folders never got read, so it can't tell you anything about your positioning.

Ask whoever ran the campaign to show you where the emails landed and how they know.

The wrong fix

Owners who've been burned by outbound often close well once they're in a meeting with a good buyer. What they're short on is meetings.

An owner who posted on r/agency under the title "No new Clients" said their team closes well once they're on a video call, and that getting prospects onto that call is where they struggle. A sales program that promises to help you close more deals is aimed at a problem that owner doesn't have. Before you buy any sales training, check how many first meetings with good-fit buyers you had last quarter. When to hire an agency consultant covers when outside help makes sense.

When does cold email work for agencies?

Practitioners who make cold email work for their agencies describe the same conditions: a smaller list where every name was chosen for a reason, and a first line about something in the reader's business.

In an r/agency thread titled "Best ways to get clients for agency in 2026?", tjlodato wrote: "Cold email is boring but still works if the list is tight and the message is specific." Under a post asking whether cold outreach is worth it, NinjaGraphics wrote: "The only cold outreach that ever worked for me was when I had a specific reason to reach out to that specific person." Another commenter's example of a good first line was noticing that a company's ads send traffic to its homepage instead of a landing page. Under a post about eleven months without a new client, Curious-Pear-1269 wrote: "I'd take a smaller list and prioritize companies showing some actual trigger first, then write around that."

In one of Schmidt Consulting Group's client results, a creative production company had grown for years on referrals and reputation, and then the growth stopped. We started by interviewing five of the people who hire firms like theirs. All five were unaware that the firm already offered one of its services, so we rebuilt the service lineup and renamed each service in the buyers' own words. That happened before a single outreach message went out.

Then we built a list of nearly 700 companies inside the tools the firm already used, and part of it wasn't cold at all. Some were companies showing signs they were ready to buy, and the rest were companies where a warm relationship already existed. The founders worked the list themselves. Weeks later the firm booked a meeting with one of the largest technology companies in the world. The founder told us where it came from: "the list that you provided."

What should you check before you spend more on cold email?

Check five things before you send another email: the list, the message, the offer, the inbox, and who answers the replies. If one of them fails, fix it before you add volume.

1. The list. Every company on it has a trigger event or an existing relationship with you.
2. The message. Someone who has never heard of you can tell from the first two lines what you do and who it's for.
3. The offer. The first email gives the reader something useful about their own business and asks for a reply.
4. The inbox. Whoever sends the campaign can show you that the emails reach inboxes.
5. The follow-up. A named person answers every reply within a day.

The FTC's compliance guide for the CAN-SPAM Act says the law "doesn’t apply just to bulk email" and "makes no exception for business-to-business email." The same guide says you must honor an opt-out request "within 10 business days." Rules differ outside the US, for example the GDPR in the EU, and the UK GDPR and PECR in the UK. For a specific campaign, ask a lawyer.

Is cold email better than content, referrals or partners?

Cold email does a different job from content, referrals and partners. The order I give founders is warm first, referral second, cold last, and only once the first two are running weekly.

Compared with a stranger, a past client already knows your work. In another of Schmidt Consulting Group's client results, we made a list of the two dozen past clients most likely to hire a boutique branding agency again soon. The first person contacted from that list replied within the hour and had already been thinking about reaching out.

Referrals and partner introductions reach buyers through someone they already trust. If referrals have slowed, growing an agency beyond referrals starts with the people who sent your last twenty clients. Businesses that already sell to your buyers can make those introductions on purpose, and partnership marketing for agencies covers how to set that up.

Content and cold email reach buyers at different times. Articles and LinkedIn posts build familiarity with people who aren't shopping yet, and they take longer to pay off. Cold email reaches strangers this month and shows every one of them your current description. Attraction versus chasing clients covers that trade. For LinkedIn, LinkedIn lead generation that works covers commenting, a target list and staying in touch with referral partners.

Already spent money on outbound? What should you do next?

Find out why the campaign failed before you buy another one. If the first thing a vendor or consultant pitches is another campaign, you're about to pay for the same lesson twice.

Gather the list, every version of the email, and every reply the campaign got, including the annoyed ones. The replies show you how strangers read your description. Then check the list, the message, the offer and the inbox one at a time.

If you're talking to a lead generation agency, ask what they would look at in your last campaign before they send anything new. A good answer covers who was on your list, what the emails said and where they landed.

How does Kurt Schmidt help agencies with outbound?

When an agency brings me a campaign that booked nothing, we start with what it sent and who it went to, then work back to how the firm describes itself. That's where my business development work with founder-led agencies starts.

I'm Kurt Schmidt. I was President and Partner at Foundry and grew it from 3 people to about 50, and Foundry made the Inc. 5000 in 2020 and 2021. I've advised more than 150 agencies. My book The Attraction Agency is about becoming the firm clients come looking for.

Book a Call and bring your last outbound campaign: the list, the emails and the results. We'll talk through what happened before you spend more. If you'd like to start with the message, score your firm's positioning.