What is Cold Outreach? (Types, Strategies, Tips & Templates)

If you are waiting for your customers to come to you, you will just have to keep waiting forever.

But don’t great products (or services) sell themselves?

Well, yes… but that’s only if people know you exist.

No matter how great your offer or value is, if you’re not actively reaching out, you’re leaving a lot of opportunities (revenue) on the table.

This is where cold outreach comes in.

Cold outreach will help you take your offer to your ideal customers instead of waiting for them to magically find you.

Interested in knowing more about cold outreach? Then you’re in the best spot.

In this blog, I’ll share with you all the insights, information, and know-how I have gained in my decade of being in the cold outreach space.

You will get everything you need to make cold outreach you’re primary revenue driver!

So dive in, and let’s explore cold outreach together!

Cold Outreach – TOC

What is Cold Outreach?

Does Cold Outreach Work in 2025?

What’s the Difference Between Cold Outreach vs. Warm Outreach?

What Are the Channels You Can Use for Cold Outreach?

How to Get Started With Cold Outreach in 2025

Tips and Best Practices to Get the Most Out of Cold Outreach

What Are the Best Cold Outreach Tools in 2025?

Master Cold Outreach?

Cold Outreach: FAQs

What is Cold Outreach?

Cold outreach is a lead generation strategy where you proactively reach out to potential customers with whom your brand has had no prior engagement.

The goal: Reach out and show that you are a potential problem solver for their challenges and eventually convert prospects to paying customers.

Does Cold Outreach Work in 2025?

One word – Yes! 

As for the long answer – cold outreach is still a very effective strategy that you can use to generate high-quality leads. 

Moreover, AI and automation have made cold outreach more effective and efficient than you think. 

These are the reasons why I still suggest cold outreach in 2025:

• You can easily target and reach out to a highly segmented group of prospects.
• It’s scalable
• Cost-effective when compared to other approaches.
• Allows you to build relationships proactively.
• AI and Automation have made it easier and give you an edge to personalize at scale.
• Complements your warm strategies.

All the above points should be compelling enough to show you that cold outreach is very much alive and working in 2025.

Since I have mentioned warm outreach, you might have some questions about what it is and how different it is from cold outreach.

I’ve answered them here 👇

What’s the Difference Between Cold Outreach vs. Warm Outreach?

Since both of them are outreach processes, one can easily get confused with the other.

“Cold outreach is used to create new opportunities, while warm outreach relies on existing connections.”

The differences are mainly based on prior interaction, trust, and strategy. 

Let me make it easy for you with this table:

You can choose any approach based on your goals, resources, and requirements. 

But if you ask me, I would any day suggest going with a Hybrid approach. 

You can use cold outreach to proactively generate new leads and fresh opportunities, while warm outreach can help nurture and convert existing relationships into loyal customers.

What Are the Channels You Can Use for Cold Outreach?

Your cold outreach strategy is only as effective as the channel you use to engage with your audience.

Here are some of my favorites:

• Cold Emailing
• Cold Calling
• LinkedIn Cold Outreach
• Multichannel Outreach

I’ll explain how each channel works, along with their pros and cons👇

1. Cold Emailing

If I had to choose one cold outreach strategy for the best ROI, I’d pick cold emailing any day.

When done right, you will get an insane 4400% ROI!

You can achieve this by using cold email tools that help you personalize at scale, maintain good email deliverability, and many others.

There are some software that even use AI to further increase your cold email campaign’s efficiency.

To help you make an easy decision, I have mentioned the pros and cons of cold emailing:

Pros:

• Cost-Effective & Scalable: It’s easy to scale your email outreach campaign without much investment.
• Cost-Effective: It’s a great budget-friendly outreach option when compared to others.    
• Integration with Multichannel Strategies: Cold emails can seamlessly work with other outreach methods.

Cons:

• Email Deliverability: Without a proper email sending tool, you’ll find it difficult to scale, personalize, avoid spam filters, meet ESP regulations, etc.
• Considered as spam: It’s easy to be seen as a spammer if you’re not following the right sending practices.
• Time-Consuming Setup: Manually sending emails will take quite a lot of time and resources.

In short, cold emailing is a good solution for almost every type of business.

However, it’s best to go with a cold emailing software that makes the best use of AI and automation.

2. Cold Calling

Cold calling is one of the few strategies where you get the chance to interact directly with your potential customers.  

However, to pull off a successful cold-calling campaign, you need to do proper research and make sure you are actively listening to the prospects.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of cold calling ⬇️

Pros:

• Immediate Feedback: Whether it’s an acceptance or an objection, you will get an instant response.
• Direct Human Connection: You will be able to establish trust faster than other cold outreach methods.
• Improved Lead Qualification: Based on their response, you can easily qualify leads in real-time.

Cons:

• Scaling issues: Cold calling requires a lot of resources to scale when compared to other outreach processes.
• Unpredictability: Prospects may be unresponsive, annoyed, or unavailable, leading to inconsistent results.
• Time-Consuming: Requires high effort for low yield compared to channels that can be automated, like cold email.
• Negative Perception: Cold calling is often seen as intrusive.

So, to make it simple, cold calling is best for businesses that want to get high-ticket clients that can justify the ROI.

This includes startups seeking rapid market validation and industries like real estate or insurance, where personal relationships drive conversions.

3. LinkedIn Cold Outreach

LinkedIn is a great platform for B2B cold outreach.

It has over 930 million members worldwide, and professionals actively use it to build personal brands and connections.

So, using LinkedIn for your cold outreach is actually a smart idea.

But before you decide to choose it as your go-to option, you need to know its pros and cons.

Pros:

• Professional Connection: Connect with decision-makers and industry professionals.
• Personalization Opportunity: Based on the details available on LinkedIn, you will be able to personalize your outreach easily.
• Natural Relationship-Building: You will be able to build relationships with prospects over time by engaging through comments and messages.

Cons:

• Time-Consuming: Researching profiles, crafting personalized messages, and engaging with content… all this takes a lot of time and effort.
• Account Restrictions: If you are aggressively doing outreach, you might get banned from the platform. Which will also affect the brand image.
• Algorithm Limitations: If your credibility is low, there is a chance that some profiles won’t be interested in connecting with you.

In short, LinkedIn outreach is great for businesses with resources to spare. 

If you already have a strong personal brand built on LinkedIn, then I would strongly suggest you use it for your cold outreach purposes.

4. Multichannel Outreach

A common problem in cold outreach is not getting noticed or being ignored.

This is where the multichannel approach comes in.

With this approach, you combine cold emailing, cold calling, and LinkedIn outreach to create multiple touchpoints to maximize your chances of connecting with prospects.

Before you move forward, let me share with you some of the pros and cons of this approach.

Pros:

• Better Reach & Exposure: By combining multiple strategies at the same time, you will be able to ensure your message isn’t missed by the prospect.
• Higher Engagement Rates: Since you are creating multiple touch points to convey your message, there’s a higher chance of converting prospects.
• Adaptability to Prospect Preferences: You will be able to continue your outreach efforts based on the preferences of your prospects.

Cons:

• Resource Intensive: You are combining multiple strategies together. Hence, you need to invest a lot of time and resources to manage these strategies with the help of tools and coordination.
• Risk of Overwhelming: If you don’t have a proper team and strategy, multi-channel outreach can quickly become overwhelming.
• Data Fragmentation: Without a proper tool, tracking and interacting across multiple channels will be a complicated task.Message Inconsistency

I can confidently say a multichannel approach is the best approach for almost all kinds of businesses.

However, in order to make it work, you need a proper team, strategy, and resources. Otherwise, you will be reaping the cons of all these channels rather than enjoying the pros.

How to Get Started With Cold Outreach in 2025

I have shown you the best channels for cold outreach. 

However, if you want to get the most results out of it, you need to have a solid strategy.

Below, I’ve shared a detailed step-by-step process of what you need to do to have an effective and successful strategy.

Here’s how you can get started with cold outreach:

1. Know Your Audience
2. Create Buyer Personas
3. Build Your Prospect List
4. Craft Your Messages
5. Follow Up From Time to Time
6. Track Your Key Metric and Optimize

1. Know Your Audience

Knowing your prospects and their requirements will make it easy to choose the right outreach channel to approach them.

Some might be more active in email, while others are active in LinkedIn or calls.

Thus, you will be able to strategize your cold outreach campaigns better.

2. Create Buyer Personas

After you have got a good idea about your audience, start creating your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona.

ICP is basically a fictional profile of the ideal customer you want for your business. These ICPs will be able to make the best out of your product and will be loyal customers.

Meanwhile, the buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile based on the decision-makers in these ICPs.

Knowing both of them makes it easy to choose your outreach channel and strategy. All of it will result in you finding your potential customers.

3. Build Your Prospect List

Now that you know whom to target, it’s time to find the right prospects.

Where can you find them?

Let me show you some of the best sources to make prospects:

• Database Tools: Use platforms that offer prospect data. Some email ending tools like Saleshandy come with a built-in lead finder.
• LinkedIn: Use LinkedIn’s advanced search and networking capabilities to find and establish connections. You also use LinkedIn to find emails, phone numbers, etc., of your prospects.
• Events & Conferences: Not only are these the best options to meet your prospects in person, but they also give you the option to present your solution.
• Competitor Communities: Join forums and communities where your competitors’ clients hang out. If you want to go one step further, join their communities and start making the lead list.

4. Craft Your Messages

Now, you know your ICP and Buyer persona. You also know how to build your sales prospect list.

All that’s left now is to craft your message and start reaching out.

While crafting your messages, there are certain things to consider:

• Keep your messages on point.

• If you have any credible sources to back your claims, then use them!
• Make sure to add a clear call to action.

I have shared some templates below that you can tailor to your requirements.

Some tools offer the ability to create multiple variants of your initial pitch with the help of AI, thus making each pitch unique.

5. Follow Up From Time to Time

Following up on your prospects is very crucial–reaching out once and expecting a response from your prospect won’t get you any results!

You should be persistent (not a pest) in your cold outreach efforts. So, make sure to follow up regularly to show your commitment to helping your prospects.

Unless your prospects have outright rejected or asked you to stop contacting them in the first interaction, don’t be afraid to reach out a few more times. 

A well-crafted follow-up can remind your prospect of the value you’re offering and keep the conversation going.

Just make sure your follow-ups are spaced out and respectful.

A great addition would be if you bring something new and valuable, like a case study to showcase how you have helped previous clients.  

Next, you should follow a proper cycle. I usually follow this cycle ⬇️

• Initial Email (Day 1): Personalized email offering how your solution can be helpful to them.
• First Follow-Up (Day 3–4): Reference your initial email and share again how it helps to address their requirements. Ask them if they would have the chance to review your message.
• Second Follow-Up (Day 7–8): Offer additional value (e.g., a case study or testimonial) and re-emphasize how your solution addresses their pain points.
• Final Follow-Up (Day 10–12): Acknowledge their busy schedule and ask if they’d like to connect or need further information. 
• Sales Breakup Email (Day 14): Respect their decision and politely state that you won’t continue to follow up. Leave the door open for future contact.

You can either follow this or create your own. 

Only stop your cycle if you get a reply or when you have completed the follow-up cycle.

6. Track Your Key Metric and Optimize

Once you create the perfect cold outreach strategy, you need to keep monitoring your cold outreach metrics and data to make necessary optimizations.

Yeah, there’s no rest day in sales or marketing.

The metrics usually see a big change when there’s a change in trend. Based on that, you adapt and stay ahead of the competition.

If you are using any software for cold outreach, you’ll get easy access to the analytics, and you can thus make optimizations to your process.

You can track metrics like open rates, response rates, and conversion rates to get a better understanding of your cold outreach campaigns.

What do manual users do?

Well… get a cold outreach software, please.

Manual tracking will not give you correct results, and if you decide to take that data for optimization, you will get the free opportunity to see your competitors taking everything for themselves.

Tips and Best Practices to Get the Most Out of Cold Outreach

Now, you know what cold outreach is and how to create an effective strategy with cold outreach, and I have even provided you with templates that you can try.

However, there are still some tips and tricks which I would like to share:

• Understand Your Audiences’ Needs
• Personalize Your Approach
• Clean Your Prospect List
• Craft Engaging Subject Lines (For Cold Email)
• Keep Your Message Concise and Valuable
• Focus on Building Relationships Than Selling
• Back-Up Your Claims
• Include a Clear Call-to-Action
• Follow Up Strategically
• Automate Your Cold Outreach

1. Understand Your Audiences’ Needs

You are doing cold outreach to sell your solutions. However, you need to understand your target audience’s requirements and needs in order to place your offering as the right solution for them.

ICP and Buyer persona will help you a lot in this.

2. Personalize Your Approach

Personalization is a big trend in cold outreach. Make sure to make the best use of it.

With ICP, Buyer persona, and proper customer research, you will be able to offer some great deals for your potential customers.

Apart from better open, reply, and conversion rates, personalization also helps you stand out from the crowd.

3. Clean Your Prospect List

Regularly update your lead list so that you will have a clearer picture of whom to approach.

Many cold outreach software comes with a built-in lead finder. 

However, many of these tools don’t offer verified data. So make sure to check before you decide to use them in your approach.

So make sure the data collected is correct.

Removing unwanted leads will make it easy to manage your resource allocation. And thus, it will also improve the conversion rates.

4. Craft Engaging Subject Lines (For Cold Email)

The First impression is the best impression. 

And for emails, the first impression is through the subject lines. 

So you try keeping it on point while also generating curiosity or interest in the user’s mind, making them check out your email.

If you are looking for some inspiration, check out our guide on cold email subject lines.

5. Keep Your Message Concise and Valuable

Once you interest your prospects to open up the mail, make sure to keep their interest only going up.

To do so, keep your content short, crisp, and on point.

Make it easily readable, and highlight points on how your product or service can help them in tackling their problems.

Remember, your prospects are busy people, your mail should be helping them save time, or getting them more value – not wasting their time.

6. Focus on Building Relationships Than Selling

Your relationship with your customer shouldn’t end after your first sale. 

Continue to nurture it. Grow trust and trust me… it will help you a lot in the long run.

Once in a while, ask them for their feedback about your solutions. This can help you further improve your offering.

Invite them to test out upcoming products or services, or even offer them coupons or special offers for being your loyal customers.

Their word of mouth can improve your brand’s organic image as well as bring in more users.

7. Back-Up Your Claims

Don’t make claims that you can’t back up.

It will affect the trust and image of your brand. 

People want someone to trust. Not to feel cheated.

Use data, testimonials, or case studies to back up your claims about the product or service. 

You can interest your customer base to write reviews and shout out if they are happy with your solution.

8. Include a Clear Call-to-Action

Whenever you do your cold outreach, make sure to include CTAs. You can ask them to schedule a call or offer them some resources to download.

But, it should be relevant to your outreach that you just did, and also should interest them to do so.

9. Follow Up Strategically

Don’t be afraid to send follow-ups. I have shared a sequence as well as templates that you can follow.

But always feel free to make changes to the templates and sequence.

Also, every time you do a follow-up, make sure to offer them a fresh value. 

Lastly – Respect their boundaries.

10. Automate Your Cold Outreach

Now, if you are thinking of doing manual outreach in 2025, first of all, good luck, and second of all… you are joking, right?

Manual outreach is hard to do, can cause a lot of human errors (no matter how expert you are), and it’s really a hard task to keep track of your leads.

I’m not even gonna mention the metrics because that will be all messed up thanks to the human error that you did earlier.

Meanwhile, when you use an automated tool, it handles all of the boring, repetitive tasks, which will save you a ton of time and resources. 

Use that to close deals or to scale your process.

Automation software like Saleshandy even integrates AI, thus easing your workflow.

Not to mention the detailed analytics and reports that you will get based on all the campaigns you carry out.

Give Automation a chance. If you are not sure where to start, I have mentioned some of my favorite tools below 🔽

What Are the Best Cold Outreach Tools in 2025?

Right cold outreach tool + Right strategy = Successful cold outreach campaign

But finding the right outreach tool that suits your needs is a hard task. 

No one’s got the time to find and test all the tools in the market!

Over the years, I have tried and tested many tools in the market. Among them, these are the ones I would suggest checking out:

• Saleshandy – Cold Emailing
• Dialpad – Cold Calling
• Dripify – LinkedIn Outreach
• Apollo.io – Multichannel Outreach

1. Saleshandy – Cold Emailing

Best for: AI-assisted cold email automation platform with a complete deliverability suite and detailed analytics.

User ratings: 

G2: 4.7/5 ⭐ (650+ reviews)

Capterra: 4.5/5 ⭐ (100+ reviews)  

If you’re preferred cold outreach channel is cold emails, then Saleshandy is the all-in-one solution you’ll need.

With Saleshandy, you can:

• Create your own dedicated cold email infrastructure.
• Find relevant prospects to reach out to and engage with
• Create personalized emails at scale.
• Automate the entire sending process.
• Finally, monitor and optimize your campaigns.

(You can also warm up your email accounts in Saleshandy.)

I guess it should be clear that you actually get all you need to streamline and improve your cold email outreach with Saleshandy.

Here are some of my favorite features of Salehandy:

• Lead Finder: Find leads from over 700M+ B2B leads from over 60M+ Businesses. Use the filters and tags to narrow down your potential customers.
• Unlimited Email Sequences: Create unlimited email sequences to reach out to all your segmented list of prospects.
• Integrations: Saleshandy offers integrations with multiple tech stacks, including Hubspot CRM, Zoho, Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, etc.
• AI features: Create multiple variants of your emails with the help of AI Variants. It can even add personalization features like Variable tags, Merge tags, and others, while keeping each email unique to one another.

These are only a few among the many. If I start sharing the feature, this space won’t be enough.

This is why you should check out our Saleshandy review to know more.

2. Dialpad – Cold Calling

Best for: Efficient cold calling with CRM and analytics integration

User reviews:

G2 – 4.4/5 ⭐ (1.8K+ Reviews)

Capterra – 4.3/5 ⭐ (520+ Reviews)

While cold calling mainly requires manual interference, with a tool like Dialpad, you will be able to use AI and Automation in your cold call campaigns.

Here are some of the features that caught my attention:

• Live speech-to-text: Dialpad uses AI to do live transcription of your calls, this makes it easy to go back and check your conversation.
• AI Coaching: Makes it easy to do onboarding and training team members faster.
• Integrations: Dialpad has integrations with multiple platforms, including Salesforce, Okta, and Google Workspace.

3. Dripify – LinkedIn Outreach

Best for: Scaling network in LinkedIn through outreach.

User reviews:

G2 – 4.5/5 ⭐ (270+ Reviews)

Capterra – 4.7/5 ⭐ (440+ Reviews)

While you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for outreach, if you want more features, you can consider Dripify.

You can gather leads and send them personalized messages with its automation feature.

These are some features that made me consider Dripify:

• A/B test messages: Test different versions of your messages and connection requests to see which one works the best.
• Find email quickly: Easily find verified emails from LinkedIn.
• Create drip campaigns: You can easily make multi-channel drip campaigns without many constraints.

4. Apollo.io – Multichannel Outreach

Best for: Finding leads and launching multi-channel campaigns

User reviews:

G2: 4.8/5 ⭐ (6,800+ reviews)

Capterra: 4.6/5 ⭐(340+ reviews)

Apollo offers multiple features that make it a great tool for multichannel outreach. 

I would call Jack of all trades… 

But is it a master of none? 

I wouldn’t say so.

Because Apollo has a very credible lead database, which can be used to get verified leads.

You can then use this information for your multichannel outreach campaign.

These are my favorite features of Apollo:

• AI Personalization: The built-in AI makes it easy to write emails. You will get suggestions for personalization, rephrasing, and many more. 
• Sequence Automation: You can either create custom multichannel sequences, or use the existing templates for your cold outreach campaigns. 
• Detailed Analytics: Since everything is done from one place, you will get detailed analytics of the process.

Also read: Best Apollo.io Alternatives

Master Cold Outreach?

Wish it was so easy to just master everything about cold outreach in a snap. But it’s basically based on a lot of trials and experiments.

What I shared is based on my experience as a marketer and how cold outreach is changing based on the latest trends.

But to make things easier, understand your target audience and see how your solution will help them.

After that, you need to find these potential customers with the help of ICP and Buyer Persona.

Next, proceed with your personalized message through the channel of your choice with the strategy and tools you have decided upon.

Always make sure to polish your strategies based on the latest trends. Don’t lose your game when you reach the top.

Cold Outreach: FAQs

1. Is Cold Outreach Legal?

Yes, cold outreach is legal when you adhere to the laws and regulations of the specific country or region. 

2. What Exactly Differentiates Cold Outreach From Spam?

The main difference between both of them is intent. While cold outreach sends personalized, targeted messages to individuals, spam messages are just mass-sent content with little to no relevance to the recipient.

Cold outreach aims to provide value and thus initiate a connection with the recipient, while spams just want to make a sale.

3. What ROI Can I Expect From Cold Outreach?

Usually, the ROI of any cold outreach depends on factors like targeting, messaging, and follow-ups. But to give you an idea, cold emails see a reply rate of 1-10%, while LinkedIn outreach can get a 10-30% response rate. Again, these rates can change based on how optimized your strategy is.

4. How Often Should I Follow Up With a Prospect?

Follow-up cycles usually depend on the channel and the customer you approach. However, a general concept is that follow-up can be done up to 6 times within a two-week period after initial contact. Each follow-up should be done after a good interval.

5. How Can I Effectively Personalize My Outreach Without Spending Too Much Time?

To personalize your outreach, you need to know your audience. Create an ICP and Buyer Persona, which will give deep insights into the user’s pain points.

You can even check their communities and social media to get a better understanding of the potential customers.

6. What Should I Do if a Prospect Never Responds Despite Several Attempts?

You can either send a breakup email and try again after a long while or start putting efforts for another client.