If you’re running a B2B company and only using email for cold outreach, you’re throwing money away. Your sales team is doing their thing, but there’s a whole other side to email that most companies ignore.
Cold Outreach vs Email Marketing
Cold outreach is what your sales team does. They email people who don’t know them, trying to get meetings. It’s unsolicited, often feels like spam:
Monday: Send the first email
Tuesday: “Hey, did you see my email?”
Wednesday: Another follow-up
Thursday: Phone call
It works, but it’s just one person talking to one person. That’s expensive and slow.
Email marketing is different. It’s one person talking to many people at once. Instead of your sales rep chasing down leads one by one, marketing can filter hundreds of people to find the good ones. Then they hand those good leads to sales.
This is called a Marketing Qualified Lead. It’s someone who’s already shown interest, already engaged with your content, already halfway sold. Your sales team would much rather talk to these people than cold prospects.
Why You Need Both
Here’s the problem, most B2B companies only do cold outreach. They’re missing the whole email marketing side.
Without email marketing, your sales team wastes time on bad leads. They drive to meetings with people who can’t even approve purchases. They call people who were never interested in the first place.
With email marketing, you filter out the time-wasters before your sales team ever talks to them. You find the people who actually want to buy and hand them over.
Building Your Email List
You can’t just buy a list of emails and start blasting. That’s illegal (GDPR, CAN-SPAM laws) and it doesn’t work anyway.
You need people to opt in to actually want your emails. Here’s how:
First, if you have an old list, clean it up:
- Remove bouncing email addresses
- Re-engage people who haven’t heard from you in a while
- Remove anyone who doesn’t respond
- Keep only the engaged people
Starting from scratch? You need lead magnets.
Lead Magnets That Actually Work
A lead magnet is something valuable you give away in exchange for an email address. But it has to be something people actually want. Here are five types that work:
High-value content: Case studies, industry reports, data that’s not available anywhere else. Especially stuff ChatGPT can’t give them. Real data from real companies.
Interactive tools: ROI calculators, assessment tools, anything where they input their data and get personalized results. They enter their info, you send the results to their email.
Free stuff: Templates, plugins, tools they can actually use. Like Notion templates or Excel sheets that save them hours of work.
Educational content: Webinars with actual industry leaders, not just your sales pitch. Seven-day email courses. Workshops where they learn something useful.
Exclusive offers: Free trials, VIP access, special features only available to your email list.
Work With Your Sales Team
Here’s what most companies get wrong: Marketing creates lead magnets without talking to sales.
Your sales team knows what makes a good lead. Sit down with them and figure out:
- Does the prospect have budget?
- Do they have authority to buy?
- Do they need this now?
- When do they need to decide?
There are frameworks for this like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) or CHAMP or MEDPIC. Pick one or make your own.
Once you know what makes a good lead, create content that helps identify those qualities. Every interaction teaches you something about that prospect.
Where to Find Your People
LinkedIn is gold for B2B because people are already in work mode. They’re looking for business connections and solutions.
TikTok? Instagram? People are there to be entertained, not to buy enterprise software. Wrong mindset, wrong audience.
Go where your buyers already are, thinking about work.
Email Marketing Best Practices
Use a real person’s name: Not sales@company.com or info@company.com. Use john@company.com. Make it feel like a real person sending a real email.
Skip the fancy design: Text emails beat pretty HTML emails every time. When someone’s at work checking email, your colorful marketing email screams “distraction!” A simple text email fits right in with their work emails.
Hit these numbers:
- Open rates: 20% or higher
- Click rates: 3% or higher (6% is excellent)
- Frequency: Once a week minimum (once a month is too little)
Test everything: Subject lines, copy, links, content types. See what your audience responds to.
Segment your list: Different industries need different messages. Different roles care about different things. The better you segment, the better your results.
Cold outreach alone is like fishing with one fishing rod. Email marketing is like fishing with a net.
Your sales team is good at closing deals. Let them focus on that. Build an email marketing system that brings them qualified leads who already want to buy.
Stop leaving money on the table. Start building your email marketing engine today.
