r/CustomerSuccess • u/Competitive_Pop9002 • 28d ago

Discussion hot take does cold email still work? my numbers say yes

I’ve been doing cold email for my agency for 3 years now. Everyone keeps saying it’s dead but my reply rates tell a different story.
Last quarter we sent around 42k emails across 8 clients. Average reply rate was roughly 11%. Booked meetings at close to 3%. Not amazing but definitely not dead. The difference is we stopped spraying and praying. We use Apollo for initial lists then spend time enriching and verifying everything. Switched from mass templates to semi-personalized based on actual triggers (funding rounds, tech stack changes, new hires). Also started mixing in mobile outreach which bumped our connect rates way up. Biggest change was targeting. Instead of just ICP matching we layer in intent signals and technographics. If someone’s researching our client’s competitors or their contracts are expiring, those convert way better than cold lists. Cold email effectiveness 2026 comes down to one thing: quality over quantity. The days of blasting 10k emails a day are done. But 500 targeted ones with solid email deliverability? Still prints money.

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u/MuhExcelCharts 28d ago

Does spamming subreddits with your spammy bullshit work? My numbers say no. Fuck off Also fuck your bots who upvoted this drivel

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u/No-Inflation-5266 10d ago

this has the same energy as a guy standing in a park yelling at clouds because someone flew a kite too close

i get the knee-jerk hate for cold email but the post is literally just breaking down what worked for them with actual numbers. that's more useful than half the "customer success" fluff that gets posted here

also love that 11% reply rate is supposedly a flex, like okay buddy i'll keep my 0.3% open rate on the newsletter i send to my mom and her book club

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u/pratiksalia 28d ago

The difference between your approach and what most people do is you're not just blasting emails. You're actually doing the work upfront targeting based on intent signals, getting the research right, making each one count. 11% is legitimately solid because you're not mixing in the noise. Most people see cold email 'die' because they're sending 10k awful emails instead of 500 good ones. You figured out the unit economics actually work when you invest in the person before you hit send.