What is the Best Cold Email Marketing Agency? 3 of our Top Picks

In today’s cutthroat digital landscape, cold email marketing has sparked intense debates among marketers and business owners alike.

Some argue that it’s an intrusive and ineffective approach, while others swear by its potential to drive meaningful engagement and conversions.

Regardless of where you stand on the matter, one thing is clear: people still do it, and cold email marketing agencies have emerged as key players in the industry, offering specialized expertise and tailored strategies.

A cold email marketing agency can save you a whole lot of time and effort that could be better spent elsewhere and skyrocket your lead generation, thus resulting in higher profits.

In this article, I want to inform you about the “best” cold email marketing agency (at least in my eyes) and give some runner-ups to the crown.

First things first, however, I want to clarify…

What is a cold email marketing agency?

A cold email marketing agency is a company that specializes in providing cold email marketing services, e.g. sending unsolicited emails to potential clients or customers with the goal of generating leads, promoting products or services, or building brand awareness.

When you hire a cold email marketing agency, they help you come up with an actionable plan for your email campaigns. They figure out who your target audience is, what you want to achieve with your emails, and how to make your outreach as effective as possible.

To achieve this, a cold email marketing agency does quite a few things for you, which I’ll list below:

• Strategy and Planning: The agency works with the client (you, in this case) to develop a strategic approach to cold email marketing, defining target audiences, setting campaign goals, and creating a plan for effective outreach.
• Email List Building: The agency assists in building targeted email lists by researching and identifying potential prospects or customers based on specific criteria such as industry, demographics, or interests.
• Email Content Creation: They help in crafting compelling email content, including subject lines, body text, and call-to-action elements, to maximize open rates, engagement, and conversions.
• Email Automation and Tools: The agency may provide or recommend email automation tools or platforms that streamline the process of sending and tracking cold emails. These tools help in managing email lists, scheduling email sequences, and monitoring campaign performance.
• Personalization and Segmentation: The agency helps in personalizing cold email campaigns by segmenting the target audience and tailoring email content based on specific characteristics or interests of individual recipients.
• Testing and Optimization: They conduct A/B testing to determine the most effective email strategies, such as different subject lines or email formats. Based on the results, they optimize campaigns for better performance and higher conversion rates.
• Compliance and Best Practices: A reputable cold email marketing agency ensures that all campaigns adhere to relevant laws and regulations, such as CAN-SPAM Act (in the United States) or General Data Protection Regulation (in the European Union), to maintain ethical and legal practices.

By engaging a cold email marketing agency, businesses can leverage their expertise and experience to improve the effectiveness of their outreach efforts. These agencies stay updated with the latest industry trends and best practices, enabling them to deliver targeted and impactful cold email campaigns on behalf of their clients.

Why should you use a cold email marketing agency?

Using a cold email marketing agency can bring many benefits to your business, the least of which is time.

Considering how experienced these agencies are in cold email strategy and current practices, it’s not surprising that you’ll be saving yourself and your team time that would otherwise be spent on learning and using cold email.

After all, a cold email marketing agency is bound to be more experienced in the practice than someone who is doing all of their marketing tasks themselves, thus spreading themselves thin.

As I eluded to above, another obvious benefit of using a code email marketing agency is expertise. They only do cold email, and likely have advanced tactics and tools specifically for that task to enhance targeting, personalization, and tracking.

Overall, having a cold email marketing agency behind your business can vastly enhance your outreach efforts, drive engagement, and achieve measurable results more efficiently than tackling cold email lead generation alone.

Now that all of that’s clarified…

What is the best cold email marketing agency?

Here is our shortlist for the top cold email marketing agency:

• Cleverly – best overall
• Saleshive – best for B2B
• Growth Rhino

Cleverly is primarily a Linkedin lead generation platform, but they also offer some of the best cold email outreach services available on the web. From hyper-personalization to A/B testing, Cleverly puts its all into getting you meeting-ready leads.

Trusted by companies like Uber, PayPal, Lego, Sony, and more, Cleverly has generated 150,000+ leads for their clients and ~$38M in client revenue on top of that.

Features:

List-Building

All email marketing starts with an email list, and Cleverly makes sure the list they build is hand-picked for your use case.

As Cleverly is focused on B2B cold email marketing, they scan LinkedIn for prospects that match your requirements and start sending out email campaigns immediately. LinkedIn is a gold mine for B2B marketers because the platform is business-focused, thus people on LinkedIn are more likely to reply to meeting requests and partnerships.

Cold Email Outreach

Cleverly uses data from thousands of outbound B2B campaigns to send hyper-personalized cold emails to your ideal clients with the goal of generating high-quality meeting-ready leads.

As per their plan, they can create unlimited email campaigns with thousands of monthly emails for you, with ongoing campaign optimization through A/B testing and AI-powered personalization. Plus, if your goals change, you can always schedule a strategy call at any point in your campaign’s journey and talk with the Cleverly team about your new goals.

Another great thing about Cleverly is that they don’t only generate leads for you through cold email campaigns, they also teach you their best practices for closing deals using email. Thus, not only are you paying for a service, you’re paying for knowledge that you could use later to start doing cold email lead generation for yourself or, even further, for other people.

White Labeling

With the information that Cleverly gives you, as mentioned above, if you ever get to the point where you want to start doing lead generation for other people, then Cleverly has your back.

For $397/mo, you can white-label Cleverly’s lead generation and cold email services with unlimited outreach campaigns, thousands of monthly messages, and every feature you get with a standard Cleverly campaign.

LinkedIn is an incredibly profitable source for B2B leads, and if you either have too many concurrent lead generation operations running at once or see a business opportunity in the lead generation niche, then Cleverly’s services are available to you upon approval.

Pricing: Cleverly doesn’t showcase its pricing on its website, but they charge based on how many meeting-ready leads it can get you with no contracts involved. You can get a free consultation call as well, so you can talk to the Cleverly staff and get an idea of what your campaign might look like.

Saleshive is a B2B sales agency designed to scale outbound lead generation and SDR (sales development representative) teams for high-growth companies to book more sales meetings.

Specifically with regard to cold emails, SalesHive utilizes a team of professional sales strategists and email deliverability engineers to make sure any campaigns they run have great returns.

Features:

AI-Driven Platform

SalesHive takes the next logical step in sales, that being the use of AI. In SalesHive’s case, they use AI to automate multi-variate testing of your email campaigns, making sure that the best possible combination of value prop, call-to-action, copy, and more are used to reach out to potential leads.

All SalesHive needs to do is create as many categories as you want (e.g., value prop, copy, call-to-action, etc.), create as many variations in each category as you want, insert the variables into your email campaigns, and let SalesHive AI turn off low-performing variables automatically.

Email Tracking & Deliverability

SalesHive has found a way to track a specific percentage of emails without the use of a tracking pixel, and they’ve done this to get a baseline of what their open rates are without impacting your email deliverability.

To further maximize the impact of your emails, SalesHive thoroughly tracks deliverability and interaction metrics which they then use to A/B test their campaigns with the help of AI. This means that SalesHive can A/B test thousands of emails automatically, drastically cutting down the time testing would take otherwise.

Email Sending Domain

SalesHive typically sends 200 – 500 emails per day from three of what they call “lookalike domains,” which are set up with all of the correct specs (DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc.) and then redirect all traffic directly to your primary domain.

They use three (or more) domains because using fewer might result in an overloaded domain, which looks like spam to some ESPs. In other words, too much volume on any one domain might trigger spam filters, and you don’t want that.

Also, to avoid spam filters, SalesHive warms these new domains through a process they call SHWARMING (probably short for SalesHive Warming). This means you can send more emails from each domain per day, and there’s a much lesser chance that your email will go to spam.

Pricing: You may want to book a call to get pricing for your specific use case, but their Starter plan starts at $5,000/mo, including 20 – 30 meetings quarterly, email & LinkedIn campaigns, risk-free onboarding, and a custom sales playbook.

Growth Rhino is a cold email outreach platform with a heavy focus on hypotheses, experiments, and speed, according to reviews. They build scalable cold email engines targeted at specific audiences and take care of outbound strategy, prospect list building, copywriting, campaign management, and responding to prospects, all without you needing to lift a finger.

Growth Rhino also offers B2B lead generation, lead nurturing and qualification, B2B appointment-setting, and more; in short, they’re an end-to-end outbound agency for SaaS companies, as they describe themselves.

Features:

Step-by-Step Process

Growth Rhino breaks down each campaign into four steps, each driven by data.

First is the “Ideate” step, where they help you clearly define your target audience and break it up into specific personas, which can then start the brainstorming of relevant messaging for those personas. As they are doing this, they are setting up your email infrastructure; things like IP warm-up and domain records.

Next is the “Experiment” step, which is fairly intuitive. Growth Rhino starts experimenting with its cold email strategy by launching micro-campaigns to identify cold email conversion rates and messaging that resonates best with the audience personas from the previous step. They will also identify which marketing channels will complement your email campaigns (e.g. social, ads, landing pages, etc.).

From there, once Growth Rhino has established the best way to run your email campaigns, they start the “Scale” step. Once the right cadence and messaging have been identified, they focus on the winning campaign(s) and amplify their cold email-sending service.

The last step is the “Optimize” step, which is optimizing for one metric – interested prospects. This entails frequently reviewing a campaign’s performance and understanding why it got specific results, from which they can extrapolate valuable insights.

Scalability

On top of the third step of their campaign plan, Growth Rhino makes a concerted effort to scale your business. They do this through a multi-channel salves approach and outbound sales and marketing strategies that deliver personalized messages accurately.

Legal Compliance

Growth Rhino makes sure their cold emails don’t appear spammy or violate spam-related policies such as CASL (Canada), GDPR (Europe), and CCPA (California). They don’t list the CAN-SPAM Act in this list, but it’s fair to assume that they follow CAN-SPAM’s requirements as well.

To stay compliant, Growth Rhino properly sets up domain records and warms your domain up, ensures your prospect data list is clean, up-to-date, and relevant, and makes sure your messaging is relevant to your prospects. On top of this, they always place opt-out links in their cold emails and honor any opt-out requests they get.

Pricing: One thing Growth Rhino does say about its pricing is that, financially, if the average annual contract value of the product or service you’re offering is under $5,000, then it wouldn’t make sense to hire them. This makes sense, as Growth Rhino’s agency fees start at $2,500/mo and it is recommended to work with them for at least 3 months to see better results.