Learn why thoughtful cold email isn't spam and how to do it right. Understand the crucial difference between mass generic outreach and targeted, personalized cold emails that create real value.
Dec 21
·
5
min read
One of the unfortunate realities of growing a company is that you are going to annoy people.
On its own, a good product does nothing. If the world’s best piece of software were sitting on the personal computer of a hobbyist engineer, nobody would ever know about it, and it would be useless. And so, if you have created a great product, you need to tell people. You need to market your product.
Today there are hundreds of ways to grow a company: you could advertise on social media, or on Google. You could pay influencers. You could cold call, or knock on doors. You could send cold emails. You could post valuable content online and have people organically reach out (which is how we started marketing).
Every single one of these tactics is going to annoy some people. It is going to inconvenience them. It is, for a small moment, going to make their experience just a little bit worse. It is fun to fantasize about a world where people only hear about products that they are guaranteed to love—where every marketing campaign has a one hundred percent conversion rate. But that is, at least today, impossible.
People are going to be interrupted scrolling Instagram by an ad they didn’t want to see. Their sports game is going to take a break so they can be sold to. They might wake up to an email from a stranger trying to sell them something. It is true that one of the unfortunate facts about marketing—and thus growing companies, and creating value, and creating jobs, and improving society, and so on—is that you are going to minorly inconvenience some people to deliver lots of value to others. This is the reality of marketing.
The trick to separating sleazy and good marketing, then, is figuring out how to 1. minimize the inconvenience that you deliver to people and 2. maximize the value. At Za-zu we believe that cold email is one of the absolute best ways to do this—but only if you are taking the right steps to avoid sending spam.
There are two schools of thought on spam. Some people believe that any kind of unsolicited outreach constitutes spam. Others think that whether or not the outreach is spam depends on what the outreach actually is. Even dictionaries do not agree: the Oxford Languages definition on Google implies that the content of the message matters, while the Merriam-Webster definition takes the stance that any kind of mass commercial messaging is spam by default. There is no broad consensus.
At Za-zu, our thesis about cold email and spam is simple.
If you send irrelevant copy-pasted emails to mass groups of people, that is spam. If you send a relevant email to a specific person, that is not spam. If you send many relevant emails to many specific people, that is not spam either.
It’s the outcome that matters. It does not matter if you send one email from a personal inbox or a thousand emails from an email sequencer. All that matters are the contents of your email and who you send it to.
Say you sell a hiking backpack. You want to run a cold outbound campaign. You have two options:
Spam: You import a generic email list of millions of people, with very little criteria, and then blast all of them with your sales email template.
Not spam: You carefully build a targeted list of hiking influencers online, then send individual and personal emails to each of them asking for feedback on your product.
For cold emails not to be spam, you have to think hard about who would actually find your product—or request—useful. Then you have to figure out what relevant things you could say to them, not as a broad group but as individual people with individual desires. Once you have done these things, you can write those emails manually or leverage technology to help you write those emails at scale.
The vast majority of cold email campaigns that have ever been launched have been spam. Sending personal emails manually is a lot of work, so in the past companies tried to reach huge scale by sending generic templates to huge audiences. That is spam.
The world is changing, though. Tools like Apollo and Clay and Za-zu have finally built the infrastructure for people to personalize emails at scale. They are not, contrary to popular opinion, enabling spam en masse. Their goal is instead to help you replicate personal, valuable, 1:1 messaging. To avoid spam.
There are some people who believe that most unsolicited outreach is spam by default. When we published our cold outbound handbook, for example, we got a broad range of reactions. People on X and LinkedIn generally loved it, but people on HackerNews hated it. The belief of the latter group is that all cold email is spam, and so any tool that enables more cold email is a net negative.
It is not our place to police opinions. We can say what is true, however, which is that the downside and upside of outbound are asymmetrical. It is very easy to avoid cold email:
If you are vehemently opposed to receiving unsolicited outreach, you can design a world that does not include it. Just 2 minutes of work can make sure you never have to see another cold email. This means that cold email is not nearly as inconvenient as a cold call, or someone knocking on your door, or having to watch ads in the middle of a sporting event.
The upside of cold outbound, meanwhile, is huge. Take my cold outbound agency, Aurora. Not only was outbound the way we acquired customers in the first place (and were able to provide jobs and generous salaries), but our work helped many of our clients grow revenue by thousands or millions of dollars. Clients had to hire new people just to keep up with the demand that outbound was driving for them. And, of course, all of our clients’ new customers were seeing value from our clients’ products, and on it went.
So, yes. When a cold email reaches you and is not valuable, it can be a small annoyance. But when it is firing on all cylinders, it ends up generating value—and jobs, and growth—across the board. If we are to compare cold email to other tactics, the asymmetry between the downside and the upside is striking.
For decades, cold email has been mostly synonymous with spam. We keep a close eye out for behaviors that align with spam patterns—customes sending generic templates to mass, unqualified audiences. When we see this kind of behavior, we shut it down.
Our product is built so that you can scale personal, thoughtful, 1:1 messages. Relevant emails for the right people. Emails that people want to read, and want to reply to. If you’d like to learn more, go here.
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