Sanjan Sharma · Founder & Director
Sanjan Sharma is an entrepreneur and technology and digital growth professional with 8+ years of experience across digital marketing, technology, SaaS, education, BFSI, banking, B2B sales and business growth.
A cold email agency can produce pipeline cheaply or burn your company’s email reputation permanently, and the proposal document looks much the same either way. The difference is in infrastructure decisions that are never discussed at the pitch.
Ask these five questions before signing. Each one has a right answer, and the wrong answer to the first is the most expensive mistake available in this category.
1. Which domain will the email come from?
This is the question that matters most, and the one a cold email agency should raise before you do. Sending cold outbound from your primary domain risks the deliverability of your invoices, your support replies and your sales conversations, and recovering a damaged sending reputation takes months.
The correct answer is separate, similar-looking domains bought and warmed for the purpose, with your main domain never used for cold volume. Consequently, if a cold email agency proposes sending from your company domain because it improves open rates, that is a complete answer about how they work.
2. How long is the warm-up, and what does it look like?
New domains and new mailboxes cannot send meaningful volume immediately. A serious cold email agency will spend three to six weeks warming each mailbox, starting at a handful of messages a day and building slowly, before your campaign sends anything.
Therefore be suspicious of anyone promising volume in week one. Moreover, ask how many mailboxes they plan to run and at what daily rate each; roughly thirty to fifty messages per mailbox per day is sustainable, and anything far above it is borrowed against your future deliverability.
3. Who writes the copy, and how many variants?
Most of the result sits here, and most proposals are vague about it. Ask to see three sequences written for current clients and ask who wrote each. A cold email agency generating copy from a template library will produce something your prospects have received several times this month.
Similarly, ask how much of your team’s time they need. An honest answer is an hour or two a month for positioning and review; anyone claiming they need nothing from you is not writing in your voice or about your actual offer.
4. Where does the list come from, and on what lawful basis?
Data provenance is where this category gets uncomfortable. Ask which provider the contacts come from, what the verified bounce rate is on your specific market, and what happens to contacts who do not respond.
Furthermore, establish the legal footing in each country you target. US rules are set out in the FTC’s CAN-SPAM compliance guide, and European and UK requirements are considerably stricter. An agency that treats this as your problem alone is telling you something.
5. What is reported, and what happens in a bad month?
Every cold email agency reports open rates, and they have become close to meaningless since mail privacy protection began inflating them, so a report leading with opens is a report designed to look good. The numbers worth seeing are reply rate, positive reply rate, meetings held and opportunities created.
Ask for a redacted example from another client, with the previous months beside it. In short, an agency that has survived a bad month with a client will answer this easily, and that is a better signal than any case study.
When a cold email agency is not the answer
If your market is a few hundred named accounts, cold email is the wrong instrument; those people deserve individual attention and will notice the difference. If your positioning is unclear, outbound simply shows the lack of clarity to thousands of people at once.
If you want a comparison with the LinkedIn side of outbound, our four LinkedIn accounts produced 1,086 replies and 370 booked calls over the same kind of programme.
And if you cannot answer calls within the hour, the replies you do get will go cold before anyone reaches them. Our B2B lead generation service covers the sequencing, and how to spot a real lead generation company applies directly to this decision.