If you think senders suffer most from cold outreach inefficiencies, wait for the recipients' perspective.
Reaching out to strangers is merely fun: it's time-consuming and humiliating. Guess what? The other side of this communication is also not happy.
74% of cold messages are irrelevant
If you have never heard sarcastic complaints about random pitches or ridiculous asks, you don't follow any reporters, VCs, or popular people. Our favorite example is when an M&A venture deal correspondent received three emails asking if she would cover a Barbie movie premiere. Most of the time, it's not even that funny, and recipients get annoyed, irritated, and straight-up angry.
Some senders never stop
Not giving up is often considered an excellent quality for entrepreneurs. We all know these stories, right? Believe in yourself, pursue your dream, and repeat again and again until you win! Unfortunately, stretching this piece of advice to cold outreach, we get spammy follow-ups. We recently saw a tweet with "Here I am, writing my 50th cold email to …". How many follow-ups are too much? We recommend rounding it up to three. But even one polite follow-up doesn't protect you from becoming a Twitter meme: recipients often pour their frustration back to social media with screenshots of senders' pathetic attempts to catch their attention.
Every third cold email has typos, misspells, and name/company name mess-ups
This sin is a blunt consequence of copy-pasting. But the more cold messages people send, the higher the chances are they forget to change the company name or unify the fonts. The numbers game multiplies mistakes, too. The cost of calling the wrong person the wrong name can be drastic if that recipient has a large audience and is in the mood for a sarcastic battle.
Personalization is fake
We all try to make our cold messages personal, well-targeted, relevant, and engaging. But can we truly engage with someone we don't know at all? Mentioning public information is not real personalization. It's easy to slip into the utterly wrong context, trying to converse with a stranger in the same manner you talk to good old friends. Recipients usually feel that you need something from them but feel too awkward to ask directly and mask it with compliments about their recent work and congratulations on achievements.