Hacked BD is an AI focused cold email agency and we send tens of thousands of emails on a daily basis on behalf of our clients. We have tons of data, and have tested all of the tools that are used for cold email sales intelligence, sequencing, AI, warming, etc. There are a couple of big trends in our industry that are changing things a bit for the better and a bit for the worse. Those things are artificial intelligence tools and Apollo.io.
Apollo.io is a sales intelligence and sequencing tool. What that means is that they have a large database of leads you can access, and software that allows you to automatically send email marketing cadences to your prospects. They
Apollo has made it easy for anyone to create an account and start automating cold email outreach for their business. Before Apollo you would have to build a list somewhere and then upload it to a completely different marketing platform. Now you can do it all in the same place. Connect your email account, buy a plan, build a list, and start sending. It can take less than an hour to set up, and you can start generating leads right away.
This is a good thing in a vacuum. Who doesn’t want business development to get easier.
On a larger scale it’s making business development via cold email harder for everyone because of how easy it is and how many people are doing it.
The massive volume of cold email that’s getting sent is forcing email service providers to make email deliverability harder. They don’t want their users inboxes flooded with email from people they don’t know.
Google recently made some big changes to how high volume emailers have to operate to continue to get into inboxes, but there are constant changes happening that aren’t so public that make it more challenging for smaller cold emailers to maintain deliverability. Cold emailers already have to closely watch their deliverability, sending volumes, and response rates, but we only expect this to continue to get more challenging.
The barrier to entry for cold email lead generation became substantially lower with Apollo, but that’s only going to last for so long.
AI is making it easy to create cold email copy. You type in what you do, who you’re targeting, and poof - you have an entire sequence ready to go. Tools like Apollo even have these AI email generators built into their platform. You can have good sounding copy generated in seconds.
The problem is that catchy copy isn’t going to work in the long run when everyone is using the same AI to generate it. Prospects quickly get bored of the same style of hook when they see 50 of them a week. Cold emailers are going to have to adapt.
Email reputation is hard to build and easy to ruin. Try too many things unsuccessfully and you’ll ruin your domain reputation.
So far this article has explained why AI cold email is only becoming more challenging, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. There is a way to get good email deliverability, but you’ll have to work hard to do it. That way is to send things that people engage with.
There are three key components to sending cold email that prospects engage with, and you have to nail each of them to get results.
Unfortunately, Apollo, AI, and cold email will not be the silver bullet many people are hoping for. There was a gold rush, but you missed it. Everyone can do this now and it’s only getting harder.
Fortunately, lead generation has always been hard and the people that are good at it will still succeed.
Apollo is by far the best platform to use to find leads and sequence cold email from (in our opinion), but you’ll have to configure it the right way and manage it closely. Unless you’re sending a really low volume it doesn’t work great out of the box anymore.
AI is making email personalization much better, and it’s making list building much better, but you’ll have to be smart how you approach both of these things. Your prospects are intelligent. They can smell through weak, robotic AI generated email copy.
The thing that has always worked and will continue to work is an extremely targeted approach that shows the people you are reaching out to that you understand them and your problems. We wrote about how to approach list building with AI if you want to check it out.
We consider the state of lead generation and cold email to be similar to paid search marketing (PPC advertising). When it came out it was easy, but it quickly got more and more competitive.
These days most companies work with professional marketing firms to manage their PPC campaigns for them. These marketing companies manages lots of accounts and they have tonnes of data on what works.
We believe that b2b cold email marketing will follow the same path. It’s possible for companies with a really strong value proposition to get it right, but it takes lots of time. You’re probably not going to stumble on the perfect email deliverability setup right away, it will take lots of testing. You could nail a few campaigns and make some really good copy, but usually it requires testing as well.
We feel that Hacked BD is perfectly positioned to capitalize on this changing environment, and would love to speak with you about how we work if you’re considering a cold email outbound strategy for your business. Our team has rigorously tested all of the major tools and tactics so you don't have to. This information gives you a head start if you want to start using cold email to generate more opportunities for your business.
