In the Trenches: Cold Email Lead Gen (Part 1)

It's a cold, cold world out there (when you're learning cold email the hard way)

Published 2/20/2025

Have you given cold email lead gen a shot? I was highly skeptical until embarking on a recent side quest with my buddy John from Splor.

John has a custom apparel business called Splor. Because he’s a nice guy and a beast at cold calling, he’s been able to get things off the ground pretty quickly. But cold calling gets exhausting, especially when you’re also running the business, coordinating logistics, collaborating with designers, and getting mockups and quotes out to customers.

In one of our bi-weekly business chat sessions, John had the idea of setting up a cold email sales system as an experiment, to see if we could get him an additional source of leads coming in.

Historically, I’ve been a complete cynic when it comes to email marketing – I’ve probably been one of the worst people to market to via email, and it’s been reflected in my overall impression of the medium as nothing but spammy noise.

However, that has changed over the last couple of years as I’ve broadened my professional horizons. I’ve realized that “sales” isn’t bad – sales is good and necessary, actually! The key thing is presenting an offer that is relevant and valuable to the prospect, while being respectful of their time and attention (and in the context of email, compliant with privacy and spam regulations!)

To that end, we carefully curated a list of leads within a very specific niche (plumbing businesses with fewer than 100 total employees), and crafted two email variants focused on elements of the offer that we thought would be most relevant (quality, affordable crew tees).

I built a simple one-pager site, got a few email domains set up, got the various DNS records configured, and got the inboxes warmed up. Then we hit “start”, optimistic that leads would begin to trickle in.

After about a month, I must say the results have not been what we had hoped for in this first round.

Out of ~1200 leads, we’ve contacted about 900, with a 23% average open rate of the first round of emails. Only one response - and it was a polite message saying he’d forward the email to the correct person.

However, the first round of follow ups is showing some interesting trends.

For the leads who didn’t open our first email, we’re seeing a 10% open rate (ouch!) But for those who did open the first email, we’re seeing a 72% open rate on the follow ups! This is giving us some optimism, because we know that ultimately this is a numbers game.

If we can dial this in so that John can close 1-2% of the total lead list, it will be well worth the relatively low cost for setting this all up.

It’s also a very repeatable process. John is working on putting together the next niche of leads (roofing companies), and we will write another couple of emails, and start it all over again.

Anyone who has experience with cold email marketing, please feel free to contribute your wisdom here (email me, text me, LinkedIn me) – this is one area where I am definitely not a veteran or an expert. John was gracious enough to bring me along for the ride, and we’ve been figuring it out together.

Ultimately, I’m still optimistic that we will see a return on this, but I think we have some optimizations to figure out. I also think there is probably a lot of potential to bring in AI and help accelerate the volume, but I want to make sure we thoroughly understand the fundamentals before getting ✨fancy✨ with it.

And thus concludes the first In the Trenches dispatch! If you’ve read this far: I appreciate you! Please let me know what you think of the format and content.

I’ll follow up with a part 2 at the very least, with updates on how the next niche goes, and maybe a recap of total investment. You can check out the Splor site here!