1. Why should you consider an alternative to Cold Email?

Cold emailing is the golden child of lead generation and sales outreach in general. However, many people question its performance as more and more people receive cold emails.

Advantages of cold emailing

Cold emailing has the following advantages:

• it's easy to get started

• you can send many emails per day

• if you have a high-ticket offer, cold email ROI is exceptional

Resume of the main advantages of cold emailing

Disadvantages of cold emailing

Cold emailing has the following disadvantages:

• it takes time to personalize each cold email

• Gen Z is not a fan of making business via email

• cold emails are performing less and less as time goes because people send more of them

• you can go to the spam folder rapidly if you're not using an email warm up tool

• it takes time to have clean prospecting lists with valid B2B email addresses

Resume of the main disadvantages of cold emailing

2. The top 10 alternatives to Cold Email for 2024

Cold email has many alternatives: social selling, LinkedIn prospecting, Twitter Outreach, Reddit Outreach, Answering questions on Quora, Building a Community / Audience and doing physical events.

Cold Email alternative 1: Social Selling

Social Selling is a sales prospecting method that use social media to generate more leads and more sales. Social selling is a mix between outbound sales and inbound sales.

You can do social selling with LinkedIn or Twitter for example.

Breakcold the perfect software for both social selling and cold emailing

Social Selling is more enjoyable than cold emailing: YES.

Social selling perfectly suits the new generation of sales people: the Gen Z. This new wave of sales representatives (SDRs & BDRs) are use to social media and know how to make business with it.

As an alternative to cold email, social selling offers the advantage to reproduce human interactions in a more natural way than corresponding via cold emails.

Social selling is a clear winner versus cold email

Social Selling has a better ROI than cold emailing: YES.

With social selling, you can have a massive reach with content marketing on B2B social media and you can cold outreach warm prospects instead of cold ones.

You can create warmer relationships which leads to reducing the sales cycle time by 50% most of the times. No wonder why 72% of social selling who do social selling outsell their peers and always exceed their sales quota.

Cold Email alternative 2: LinkedIn Prospecting

LinkedIn prospecting or LinkedIn outreach is the fact to drive more business from LinkedIn. It's a sub-part of social selling. People choose LinkedIn for prospecting as 80% of B2B leads are there.

Justin Welsh is very good at LinkedIn prospecting (inbound and outbound)

More enjoyable than cold emailing: YES.

Compare to sending cold emails, doing sales prospecting on LinkedIn is like talking to friends on WhatsApp and scrolling on Facebook.

You can also use LinkedIn to find your buyer persona with their paid sales tool LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn outreach wins versus cold email

Better ROI than cold emailing: YES if you have many connections

As an alternative to cold emailing, LinkedIn prospecting yields a better ROI but only if you have lots of LinkedIn connections.

Indeed, you cannot send LinkedIn messages to people you are not connected with. But if you have let's say 10,000 connections, you have plenty of business to generate.

LinkedIn is great for account-based selling and setting up BOFU, MOFU and TOFU funnel strategies.

Cold Email alternative 3: Twitter Prospecting

Twitter prospecting or Twitter Outreach is a sub-part of social selling which aims to leverage Twitter to drive more business.

Example of someone who reached out to me on Twitter

More enjoyable than cold emailing: YES.

Twitter is one of the most enjoyable social media out there, it's still underrated to do business with though.

I see many entrepreneurs making a career just out of a Twitter account, it's mind-blowing. Compare to cold emailing, Twitter prospecting is also instantaneous.

Cold email wins over Twitter outreach

Better ROI than cold emailing: NO

As an alternative to cold emailing, Twitter prospecting performs poorly as you cannot do sales outreach properly with it.

If your leads don't follow you on Twitter, your sales pitch will go to their message requests which slow down the sales cycle. We can also note that most people don't have their Twitter DMs open.

Cold Email alternative 4: Slack groups outreach

Slack groups are gold for outbound sales. If you are part of an engaged Slack community, you can send message to them to create more business.

Prospecting in Slack groups is a golden alternative to cold email

More enjoyable than cold emailing: YES.

Slack is the place where salespeople spend the most time on. Therefore, it's way more enjoyable for them to use it for sales prospecting than cold emailing.

Some B2B SaaS like Rattle even convert your CRM on Slack and sales reps love it. They really want to do everything in Slack. Crazy to think about when you know it started as a side-feature of a video game.

Cold email will always win vs slack prospecting

Better ROI than cold emailing: NO

If you are too aggressive in a Slack Group, you will get banned. You have this kind of problem with cold emailing so Slack Groups prospecting might not be the best alternative.

Cold Email alternative 5: Facebook Groups Outreach

Like Slack Groups, Facebook Groups are absolute lead tanks and can make an alternative to cold email.

This is the AI Cold Email Mafia group of Breakcold

More enjoyable than cold emailing: NO.

It's pretty daunting to do sales prospecting with facebook groups as you need to be accepted in the groups. Then, when you send a message to potential prospects, your facebook messages go to the message request section.

Facebook groups outreach loose versus cold email

Better ROI than cold emailing: NO

Facebook groups are small communities, you will saturate quickly your pool of potential leads and might get banned from certain groups if you're too aggressive.

Cold Email alternative 6: Reddit Outreach

Reddit outreach is quite uncommon. There are some platforms like Howitzer who allows your to automate this process.

Howitzer allows you to automate your Reddit prospecting

More enjoyable than cold emailing: NO.

Reddit prospecting is less enjoyable than cold emailing as you need to spend hours finding the right sub-reddit and then outreach Reddit users.

Cold email wins versus Reddit outreach

Better ROI than cold emailing: NO

The pool of potential users is pretty low and most Reddit users are not daily or even weekly active users which limits your open rates and reply rates.

Cold Email alternative 7: Answering to Quora questions

Quora is one my favorite lead generation channel. You just need to answer questions from people and you can make sales out of it, it's crazy!

Quora will bring you many inbound leads

More enjoyable than cold emailing: YES.

The process is pretty easy. You find on Quora questions that interest your target customers and answer them.

It's a no-brainer compare to what cold emailing has to offer.

Cold email wins over Quora prospecting

Better ROI than cold emailing: NO

You don't have a better ROI than cold emailing by answering questions of your prospects on Quora. Quora works like SEO so overtime you might get some interesting traffic but it won't be instantaneous.

Cold Email alternative 8: Building a community

Building a community is probably the number 1 growth driver of most successful B2B companies.

Circle is a great platform to build a community

More enjoyable than cold emailing: YES.

Building a community is like talking with friends all the time but you share tips and learnings on how they can use your product or service.

It's also a great asset to collect valuable feedback that can be turned into amazing ideas.

Cold email wins vs building a community

Better ROI than cold emailing: YES

Over time, as an alternative to cold email, building a community is certainly at least 10 times better.

Cold Email alternative 9: Building an audience

An an audience is the smaller version of a community. People follow you on Twitter or LinkedIn but don't regroup themselves under one Slack or Facebook group of yours.

An audience is not a community

More enjoyable than cold emailing: YES.

As an alternative to cold email, building and audience is about building your personal brand to close more sales. It's quite popular on LinkedIn.

Building and growing an audience is better versus cold email

Better ROI than cold emailing: YES

If you have a big audience, the ROI is much better than sending cold emails.

Cold Email alternative 10: Networking in events

Physical networking is the old way of doing sales prospecting.

More enjoyable than cold emailing: YES.

It feels better to network in real life compare to create mere relationships behind a computer.

This point is arguable though as some people prefer online interactions over real life interactions when it comes to B2B sales.

Cold email wins versus networking in events

Better ROI than cold emailing: NO

Unless you do 1 networking event per day with different people each time, you won't make a lot of business out of networking events.

3. How I use my cold email alternatives

As a Social Selling software founder, I use a mix of cold email alternatives.

I use social selling as a primary lead generation channel

Social selling with LinkedIn and Twitter is my main lead generation source. I regroup all my prospects in my sales CRM and then build relationships with them before reaching out.

I then use cold emailing when social selling doesn't work

When prospects are not active on social media, I revert back to traditional sales prospecting by sending a hyper-personalized cold email to them.