When your cold email is just spam

I would also add several other criteria. It's definitely spam if:

• you keep sending me questions or emails that I already ignored (so called follow-ups)

• you ask questions that are important for you but not for me (like "I want to know how we are doing").

My take on this using the analogy of a physical marketplace where you're wanting to sell to stall owners (vendors)

• The warm outreach is walking up to the stall, buying a product, starting a conversation, coming back a few days later, being asked what you do/sell, letting them know, they ask for a sample or your business card = they're interested

• The cold outreach is walking past stalls and dropping off a flyer about your business. Some are interested, some bin it but there isn't too much tension or annoyance on either side.

• The spam is setting up your speaker system next to the market and blasting ads all days. You're in their space, you're taking time away from them selling, you're selling something that only 5 vendors want (out of 100) and of those 5 vendors, only 2 need it in the next few months. You've got yourself a 2% conversion rate, a shiny spreadsheet and a low-cost speaker (note: the plug to the speaker is the unsubscribe button).

What do you choose?

In my (limited) experience, beyond just being annoying, mass cold emails have a worse ROI than personalized emails. I did a campaign to physicians a few years back and tested mass emails vs personal.

Was able to send maybe 150 emails an hour with mass approach (most physicians don't have emails publicly available, so had to use linked in + hunter.io). Response rate was like 2-3% with no calls scheduled I think.

For personalized emails, I could maybe do 5-10 good ones per hour, response rate was north of 50% I think, and maybe 10% spoke to me for an hour

I think emails are equal to spam when they are poorly targeted and poorly written no matter whether they’re cold or opt-in marketing messages.

I also got the same (third one now), despite politely responding to the first email and explaining that a) I don't want this product and b)he needs to work on his cold emailing skills (I gave suggestions which obviously weren't used).

That said, @shawn_maplegum I don't agree with your definition of a cold email (vs spam) at all really.

My suggestion, if you're worried about whether you've crossed the line into spam, is to ask yourself the following question:

Do you think it's likely that you can genuinely improve something in the life of the recipient by contacting them with your offer, such that in 6 months they'd be grateful for you emailing them?

Obviously you can never be 100% certain, but asking yourself this question forces you to research the recipient and put yourself in their shoes.

If you can get away with a minimally (or not at all) personalised message and still demonstrate how you're going to help the recipient, then go for it!

--

PS Needless to say there are exceptions where the email is very poorly written or you should be able to expect that the recipient didn't want any contact at all.

Yea, I got the same, again :)

At the end of the day we shouldn't list our emails publicly if we don't want this to happen.

Only give out your email to those you want to be contact by.

That said...

...his pitch is off. I just got almost the exact (if not exactly) the same email copy/pasted that I didn't respond to the first time around :)

It's easy enough for me to simply filter away this person's email if I don't want to be bothered. I feel that the benefit of publicly listing my email outweighs the negative (occasional emails I don't want).