When you hear the term “cold email,” you probably think of one of two things: a magic way to get sales overnight, or annoying spam messages. A few weeks ago, our team was discussing this, and we decided to explore it.

Now, my goal in this post is not to present this as a perfect, ‘miracle’ solution. In fact, I want to be very open and honest about our own experience over the past six months.

My goal is to share what we’ve learned, show you the exact tools we use (and why), and then propose a very simple, low-risk way for you to test if this strategy could be a good fit for your market. What doesn’t work for one sector might work brilliantly for another.

“Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.” — Seth Godin  

Our Honest Experience: A Quick Reality Check

I want to be very direct and manage expectations. We have been actively running cold email campaigns for more than six months now. And, to be completely transparent, we have not managed to sign a new client directly from these efforts. We found that in our particular sector, it is an extremely tough market to ‘crack’ using this method.

So, you are probably thinking, “Why are you writing this if it didn’t work?”

Well, it wasn’t a total failure. The single biggest benefit we gained is a very valuable asset: a massive database of contacts. We have identified and collected details for thousands of potential leads. While they didn’t convert now, they are “on our radar.” We’ve planted a lot of seeds. The value we’ve created is long-term, and we’ve built a foundation for the future.

Our Proposal: A Simple, Low-Risk Test

Because your market is different, we think it’s worth a small experiment, not a big campaign. My proposal is simple: to encourage you to try a small, simple test.

We recommend you use a website called Hunter.io. It’s a tool that helps you find email addresses connected to any company’s website.

Just try it for 10 or 20 companies in your target sector. See what kind of contacts you find. This is a very low-effort way to just “dip your toe in the water” and see if it feels like a good use of time. If it looks promising, you can explore the next steps.

Our Full “Ecosystem” of Tools

If you do run that simple test and find that the potential is good, I want you to be aware of the whole “ecosystem” of other tools we use to make this process work properly.

1. Finding Contacts (Lead Generation)

• Hunter.io: As mentioned, this is our starting point for finding emails based on a company domain.
• Linked Helper: This is a powerful tool for building very specific lists from LinkedIn. We use it to find the right people (e.g., “Marketing Managers in London”) and gather their profile data.

2. Cleaning & Protecting Our List

• Email List Verify: This is a critical step. You must verify your list before sending. This service checks for invalid, fake, or “spam trap” emails. Sending to bad addresses will damage your domain’s reputation and get you blacklisted.
• Warm up Inbox: You cannot send 200 emails from a new account on day one. This tool “warms up” your email address by automatically sending and receiving emails with other safe accounts. This builds your “sender reputation” so your messages land in the inbox, not the spam folder.

3. Sending the Emails (The Campaign)

• Gmail & Google Sheets: This is our home base. All our clean lists are organized in Google Sheets.
• Mail Meteor: This is our “mail merge” tool. It connects to our Google Sheet and sends emails one-by-one from our Gmail account, so each email is personalized with the contact’s name, company, etc.
• Moonlit Platform: To avoid sounding like a robot, we use content creation platforms like Moonlit to help us write more personal and creative email templates.
• AI Models: To generate relevant content for the person, company, or their job title, and to catch their interest with our most relevant services and products..

“Personalization — it is not about first/last name. It’s about relevant content.” — Dan Jak  

4. Handling a “Yes” (Scheduling)

• Appointlet: When a prospect replies “I’m interested,” you must make it easy for them to talk to you. We send our Appointlet link, and they can book a meeting in our calendar in 30 seconds. No back-and-forth emails.

The Final Step: Our n8n Automation Workflow

As you can see, that is a lot of manual work. Copying lists from Linked Helper, uploading to Email List Verify, downloading the results, pasting them into Google Sheets… It’s not sustainable.

This is where n8n.io changes the game. n8n is an automation tool that connects all these different apps.

We built a detailed “workflow” that does this all automatically:

1. A new contact is found (e.g., from Linked Helper).
2. n8n automatically takes that contact’s data.
3. It sends the email address to the Email List Verify API to check it.
4. If the email is “Valid”: n8n automatically adds the contact to our “Ready to Send” list in Google Sheets.
5. If the email is “Invalid” or “Risky”: n8n adds it to a “Bad List” sheet so we never contact them.
6. The workflow can even tell GPT to draft a personalized email text and save it as a draft in Gmail, ready for us to approve.

This automation turns a 10-step manual process into a system that runs itself. For us, this is the only way to manage a cold email strategy for the long term.

Final Thoughts

To recap: cold emailing is a long-term marathon, not a short sprint. For us, the main value has been building a huge, clean database for the future. But your market is different, and it could be a powerful tool for you.

“Remarketing is … targeting users who’ve already shown interest in your site … Your goal is to get them to return to your site and convert the next time around.” — Neil Patel

We also discovered an unexpected benefit. Even when we didn’t get direct replies, our website traffic increased. This wasn’t random traffic; it was the exact audience we were trying to reach visiting our site. This allowed us to build a powerful Google Ads Remarketing audience. Now, even if we are not actively emailing those leads, we can still show our brand to them while they are on our radar.

Our final recommendation is simple: just try that small, 10-minute test on Hunter.io. See what you find. It’s a low-risk first step.

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