Someone asked me at a workshop last week: “What’s your cold outreach strategy?”

I said, “I don’t do cold outreach.”

You should’ve seen their face. Like I’d just admitted I sacrifice small animals under a full moon or something equally unhinged.

The truth is, cold outreach feels spammy to me, and I’m not doing it.

You know what I hate? People showing up at my door trying to sell me things. So much so, I recently bought a “No Soliciting” sticker for my doorbell because I’m done with strangers asking if I want my lawn mowed, my house painted, or my soul saved.

I don’t want it in real life, and I don’t want it in my inbox.

How the “Bros” Ruined Cold Outreach

The ‘bros’ ruined it. They turned cold outreach into a numbers game: scrape 10,000 emails, send the same generic pitch, and hope 2% respond.

Now my inbox is full of: “Hey Erica, I noticed you write about marketing. I’d love to contribute a guest post / offer my SEO services / insert generic pitch here.” Zero value for me, zero explanation of why this helps my audience, just what they want. I report them as spam and block them.

Why Cold Outreach Doesn’t Work

• “Personalized” templates. Adding someone’s name doesn’t make it personal.
• “I loved your post about X.” No you didn’t. You scraped my site and picked a random headline.
• “Quick question.” That’s not a question, it’s a sales pitch disguised as curiosity.
• “Just following up.” You can’t follow up on something I never agreed to in the first place.

All of these fail because they’re about you, not the person you’re emailing.

What I’d Do Instead

If I absolutely had to do cold outreach, here’s what I’d do: I wouldn’t. I’d run an ad instead. I’d offer something genuinely useful, get them on my email list, then build trust through real connection before I ever asked for anything. It’s slower, but not gross.

The goal isn’t to trick someone into a conversation, it’s to get them to raise their hand and say, “Yeah, I want to hear from you.”

Cold outreach might work for some people. But for me, it’s the fastest way to damage trust before you’ve even built it.