Does Cold Emailing Work To Find Freelance Clients?
By: Daniel Rosehill
Tags: Freelance Writing, Freelance, Sales, Freelancing

Does Cold Emailing Work To Find Freelance Clients?

Somebody on the freelance writers’ subreddit asked (paraphrased):

“I’m a beginner freelance writer in the SaaS niche. I’ve emailed 430 content marketing agencies and 70 marketing SaaS companies including hosting companies and email marketing firms. 9 have asked me for my rate, 1 of them has offered me work at ridiculously low pay and 1 offered me work that was out of my niche. What’s going on? I feel like I’m doing everything right but this isn’t getting me anywhere. What could be holding me back?”

My thoughts:

Several issues pop up at disproportionate frequency in freelance writing communities (the freelance writers’ subreddit is the latest such community I have participated in. So far I like it the best of all! Primarily because I have a public username and Reddit, and its many subreddits, are not behind a login. In other words, my comments and posts are on the record and indexable in Google. I’m not hiding. I like the effect that this has on my writing).

These are:

Rants / vents about bad clients

Questions about pricing

Questions about client acquisition

Why Expecting A High Response Rate Is Unrealistic

When discussing client acquisition, a lot of people report these kind of middling (or poor) results with cold email marketing efforts.

To my mind, this isn’t exactly surprising. Although a few years ago it possibly would have been.

This is both because:

a) I’ve been there and got the t-shirt. Actually, I could have a wardrobe full of those t-shirts by now.

Actually, I could have a wardrobe full of those t-shirts by now. b) Even if you do it well, cold emailing marketing has a relatively low success rate.

You can get various numbers about the latter by plugging this into Google, but I reckon it’s unrealistic to expect more than a 1% reply rate. I’m also writing this while suffering from a mild hangover and am too l

In the original poster’s case, that would already be pegging the result rate at 5. Although if we were more optimistic and expected a 10% reply rate, that number would mushroom to 50.

We’ll see soon why even these somewhat diminutive figures may be over-generous (which is why I believe those that assert that cold email is a numbers game are partially in the right).

Now compound point b) with the fact that freelance writers compete against one another in a now globalized marketplace.

Then consider the fact that most outreach is probably going to be in vain — or which will elicit, if you’re lucky, a “we’ll,ll keep you on file” response.

Let’s look at all the assumptions you might be making that might ultimately prove to be untrue:

If you’re cold pitching a marketing agency or client then you have no idea about their putative need for a freelance writer

You have no idea what their current client load looks like. If they don’t have enough business, they don’t have any need for you

You have no idea whether they use freelancers at all (if you do this for any length of time, you will find marketing agencies that will tell you that they don’t on policy.)

Some would argue — and I would have previously agreed-that agencies and companies always need freelance writing support. But in a world of Upwork and Fiverr they also have may places to turn for it. If they’re cost sensitive and you’re not bottom of market, then these talent sources are also likely to be a lot cheaper than what you’re offering.

The more I read posts like the poster’s here, the more I also understand that the kind of businesses we might target through our cold email outreach are also routinely receiving pitches like the ones I have often sent. Even if you get through to somebody that could hire you, you’re going to be facing stiff competition for mindshare.

Finally — when I have brought my freelance cold outreach woes to my wife — she likes to make a good point in return.

Put yourself in the position of a client receiving your email.

Now ask: how do you perceive of somebody that sends you unsolicited mass email? What kind of value judgments do you automatically arrive at?

I don’t know about you, but I get about 10 of these a week from low budget SEO specialists promising me backlink-building schemes. If I don’t instantly hit the delete button I probably think “this is most likely rubbish.”

Now let’s put that all together:

Even if the agency or company has a need and they hire freelancers and they happen to need one reasonably soon and your email manages to get through they will quite possibly think of you as a low-end provider.

See what I mean by your chances being low. And that’s even if they receive the email.

Technical Factors Compound The Burn

Don’t forget those servers!

But wait — there’s more!

To actually derive an accurate percentage about the likely response rate, you need to first figure out how many of these emails are actually getting through to target.

I’m fond of pointing out the fact that “Contact Us” forms — while almost guaranteed to be intercepted by a gatekeeper — actually enjoy a 100% deliverability rate. That’s something you can’t achieve with cold email.

Finally — oh yes, there’s even more !— you have a bunch of technical nuance to throw into the works.

If you’re sending through a third party system, you must ask whether all DNS records are correctly configured to ensure proper email authentication?

And here’s a tip: if you’re doing cold email at any kind of volume, you should not use your primary domain much less the email address you routinely do business from.

Why? If its reputation is imperiled through your wild use of mail blasts, you don’t want to find yourself in a position in which actual client correspondence goes to spam.

How To Use Cold Email To Find Freelance Clients

But if you want to try anyway, how do you go about cold emailing?

I try to hone in on companies or agencies that are somehow interesting to me and which work in niches that I could credibly write about.

‘Interesting’ can mean many things to me. I might like what they do. I might think that they have a cool clients list. Or perhaps there’s something about their branding that just jives with me.

Then, I use my brain — rather than a specific technology — to figure out who to contact.

Typically, that process might involve:

Using Hunter.io to determine the likely internal email structure

LinkedIn to map out hierarchies

Other sources of open source information to seal the deal.

I would then either write that person an individual email, use a CRM like Hubspot to do so with tracking, or use a cold email tool like Klenty or Woodpecker that supports building out automated cadences.

You’ll also want to pay attention to GDPR compliance if you’re contacting individuals that haven’t opted in to receive your communication. Woodpecker has a good resource on this subject.

My Observations

I’ve used cold emailing in the past to land clients.

Some of them have actually been great to work with.

I think that as a cost-effective form of outbound marketing it should be in every freelancer’s toolkit — at least while it’s needed.

Equally, however, the few times I have experimented with automated cold email at any volume (I engaged in a ‘push’ around this time last year), I’ve ended up speaking with a lot of very low-intention “leads” who — I quickly got the feeling — were just toying with the idea of hiring me.

In other instances, these efforts have dredged up those that were transparently merely attempting to collect pricing intelligence.

In some cases, this led to conversations with startup founders that simply appeared to want to talk about their business with another human.

Finally, some people, it seemed, wanted to use me as a sort of unpaid consultant. They would love to learn more about content marketing — even if it wasn’t they would ever think of doing. Snap responses asking for pricing are particularly common.

I’ve had plenty of all of these types of conversations. Although they might sound like a total waste of time, speaking with a lot of companies has had its perks.

For one, it allowed me to up my sales game quite quickly. Speaking with a lot of founders passionate about their companies and disrupting industries was interesting. But it had its place and time — and I’m much more focused now on running a slick marketing and sales machine (and I don’t envision that I’m anywhere near there … it’s a work in progress, although I’m further along than I was this time last year).

Thus, while the cost of cold email marketing is indeed minimal, one has to keep in mind the cost expenditure of the time wasted talking to low-intention leads when computing the campaign ROI.

During several campaigns I have run-for instance the one I just referenced- this has ended up being considerable.

Here’s What Has Worked For Me

If I can derive any conclusions about my experience with cold email marketing to pitch for freelance work it’s this.

Although it’s easy to understand why it’s a numbers game (in theory) in practice it’s something quite different.

The best successes which I have enjoyed with cold email marketing have come from very selectively targeting a narrow audience and writing individual emails to companies and individuals that were genuinely of very high interest to me.

Stuff that I couldn’t possibly fake.

Ultimately, I believe this comes down to authenticity, which is a value that I am trying hard to cultivate this year (yes, I know that sounds incredibly corny).

Of course, you’re not guaranteed success regardless of what tactic you use. But there’s something inherently powerful about genuinely approaching a target with an email that simply couldn’t have been template-based.

This speaks to, I believe, a contradiction at the root of volume cold emailing marketing. Something which I believe is its ultimate undoing: you can’t genuinely be all that interested in working with a pool of recipients you have targeted programatically.

I mean you can — if you curate that list — but ultimately it communicates that you have less interest than if you individually reached out to them using the method I have described above.

That’s just time economics at work. I doubt this poster had time to hand craft 500 messages. But it might feel like a snub to some recipients.

If I have one regret about freelance writing so far, it’s relying too heavily upon cold emailing as part of my outbound marketing strategy and putting less time into thinking about who I really wanted to go after and how I could use every possible means to communicate that desire. Quality over quantity, in a nutshell.

My focus, these days, is on inbound marketing.

Again — excuse the corniness! — this aligns far more closely with my desire to be more authentic and transparent about who I am this year.

Instead of hoping to win clients through interrupting their day, I will be attempting to draw them closer to sharing things that I care about with the world.

Oh, and finally one very important point. This one speaks to wellness and mental health which — the longer I do this — I realize is an essential concern.

Cold emailing (searching for companies, guessing email addresses, dealing with poor quality leads) is really no fun. Actually, it gets pretty dejecting very quickly.

I would rather write a personal blog than content marketing for my company. But — relative to outbound marketing — it’s in another category of enjoyment.

Both outbound and inbound marketing have their places, I believe.

Cold email can be used to win clients. But even the successes it produces may not be pretty.

My concluding advice: proceed with caution. And consider other options.