The newsletterOnce or twice a week. 1 hot take, 2 tool suggestions, 3 best practices.
No. 008
Cold email doesn’t book meetings anymore. But it might not be dead.
I was on a call this week where someone told me email is dead. I partially agree. Everyone’s open rates are down, and the people on LinkedIn selling cold email packages aren’t telling you their own numbers are about half of what they were a few years ago.
But it’s not just cold email. I work with customer success and retention teams too, and they can’t get emails opened by people who already bought and asked to hear from them.
You’re not going to go directly from cold email to let’s have a meeting about you signing up.
So I don’t measure cold email on meetings booked. The best you can expect now is to get a little bit of engagement, enough that someone ends up in your nurture sequence (newsletter, offers, testimonials, etc). The nurture is what eventually gets the meeting.
That changes what you put in the first email. Don’t ask for 15 minutes. All you want is for them to say “hi, this is me” and hand over their info, and right now the only thing that gets people to do that is an offer so loaded up they’d feel dumb saying no.
A white paper or an ebook used to be enough. It isn’t anymore, content is the cheapest thing in the world right now. I’d bundle a few useful things into one free package (some things that work right now are packages of useful data and audits that can be run by AI and delivered semi-instantly). Lead with the result they actually want, like more customers, and make your deliverable one bullet in the package.
I’m testing my own version too. The people I add to this newsletter after a call open it about 45% of the time, so I’m sending it in cold emails as well to see how they do.
I’m going to throw so much value at you that you’d be stupid to just not give me your information.
Two I’d set up this week. One upgrade I’d skip.
Astro
If you’ve been reading since 003 you’ve heard me mention this one, back when I told you to drop WordPress. Every site I build still runs on it. Astro is a free framework you use to organize a site, and Claude Code does the actual building.
My setup is Claude Code making changes in a GitHub repo and the site redeploying on its own. I haven’t logged into anything to update my site in months, I just tell Claude what I want changed. I wrote up exactly what I did so you can copy it.
Coolify, on a cheap VPS
Vercel, Replit and Lovable are easy to start on, but once the thing is live you’re paying for usage. I found that out on Replit with a draft tool I built for my fantasy football leagues. One test draft cost about $30 in server usage because the code was inefficient and I had no way of knowing it was.
Now I rent a server from Hostinger for about $9 a month and run Coolify on it, which is basically an open source Vercel that runs on your own server. I tell Claude to update GitHub and Coolify puts the new version live. That one server hosts the 10 or 15 things I’ve built and have actively running.
I’d stay on this until you actually need real infrastructure, especially if they’re just tools for you or your team. If one of my tools somehow got a ton of traffic, the worst case is the server crashes. I’m not getting a giant usage bill.
Upgrading HubSpot just to get workflows
Free is fine for a while. Move to Starter the first time you hit a feature you actually need, like I did when I wanted to send my newsletter out of HubSpot.
I wouldn’t upgrade past Starter just to get workflows. That’s a big jump in price for something a cheaper tool already does.
Three things I'd do this week
Name the metric before you do anything.
Before you automate something, buy a tool or rebuild a process, write down the one number it’s supposed to move. If no one can name it, don’t build it. Go through whatever’s on your priority list right now, put a metric next to each item, and cut the ones that stay blank. Bonus points, if that metric isn’t something you’re currently tracking or even know how to track, you just figured out what project is at the top of your list!
If you can’t identify what metric you’re trying to improve by doing this stuff, then you shouldn’t be doing it.
Don’t send a paid ad straight to a free trial.
It’s tempting because it’s one step. But someone scrolling Meta doesn’t know your category exists yet, let alone your product. You skipped the part where they get interested. Send the ad to something that teaches them the problem first, then ask for the trial once they’ve come back.
Going direct from a Meta ad to sign up for a free trial is tough, because you’re kind of missing the whole like awareness part of the funnel.
Accept that new process makes you slower first.
When you change how a team works, they’re going to be worse at it for a while before it saves them any time. If you roll it out and keep every quota and goal exactly where it was, people feel that dip right away and go back to the old way. Say it up front, give them a rough idea of how long it’ll take, and ease up on the targets while they learn it.
You’re going to be slower and worse at doing it this way for some number of reps, right? And then out on the other side, you’re going to save this much time.
Thanks for reading. If your customers aren’t opening your emails either, reply and tell me what you’re sending them.
Kevin
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