Getting strangers to give a shit

How two cold email campaigns got agency owners and SaaS founders to pay attention 

CONTEXT

After years of writing cold outreach for clients, freelance copywriter Nick Mistretta decided to put his own work to the test. He built two campaigns targeting very different prospects: small agency owners who might need freelance creative support and early-stage SaaS founders who needed help with their marketing.

PROBLEM

Cold email was losing its potency. Or at least that’s what Mistretta had started to believe.

Years of increasingly crowded inboxes, automated pitches, generic templates, and sophisticated spam had made cold outreach harder than ever. Getting a stranger to open an unsolicited email was difficult enough. Getting them to actually click on something or respond was even harder.

The question was whether cold email itself was the problem, or whether most cold messaging had simply become too shitty to work.

The challenge: Could better targeting and messaging still get complete strangers to pay attention?

SOLUTION

Mistretta suspected the problem wasn’t cold email itself. It was how most cold email was being executed: broad lists, weak offers, generic messaging, and little reason for the recipient to care.

So he built two separate campaigns around relevance rather than volume.

Step 1: Build tightly targeted lists of small agency owners and early-stage SaaS founders, with list quality and deliverability prioritized from the start.

Step 2: Find the strongest reason for each audience to care. Agency owners were offered outside creative support when client work stretched their internal capabilities. SaaS founders were challenged to stop spending their own time on misguided marketing and focus on growing their companies.

Step 3: Make the proof as relevant as the pitch. Both audiences received versions of the same underlying case study, but agency owners saw the story through the agency’s creative problem, while founders saw it through the startup’s marketing problem.

OUTCOME

Cold email wasn’t dead.

In the first week alone, Mistretta sent 400 emails to each audience. Both campaigns generated a 46% open rate, while the agency campaign produced an 8% click-through rate and the SaaS founder campaign reached 10%.

Across just 800 cold emails, the campaigns generated 368 opens, 72 clicks, and two direct conversations with prospective clients.

More importantly, the results answered the original question. Cold outreach could still get strangers to pay attention. It just needed better targeting, stronger messaging, and a reason to give a shit.

Need some help with your cold outreach? Reach out!