The difference between a cold email and 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.Cold email isn’t spam by default— and it’s very easy to avoid
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:- It takes ~half a second to delete an email you don’t want to read.
- You can set a filter for any email with the word ‘unsubscribe’, so you never get a single cold email.
- You can use software (like Hey or Superhuman) that is ultra-protective of your inbox.