Email outreach

What is email outreach?

Email outreach (also called cold email or outbound email) is the targeted approach of potential customers who do not know you yet. You approach companies and decision makers that fit your target audience perfectly with a short, personal email containing a concrete proposal. You do not need to supply that list yourself: based on your ideal customer, we build it for you, with verified email addresses. No reply? Then a well-timed follow-up goes out automatically.

The difference with a newsletter is significant. With a newsletter you email people who signed up. With outreach, you decide who you approach. That makes it one of the most direct ways to generate B2B leads, especially when your audience is specific and you know exactly who you are looking for.

Why email outreach?

With SEO and Google Ads you wait until someone searches for you. Outreach turns that around: you decide who enters your pipeline. That is interesting if you have a clearly defined audience (for example logistics providers with 50 to 250 employees), if you want to enter a new market, or if search volume is simply too small to generate leads at scale through advertising.

Outreach is also highly measurable. Per campaign you see how many emails were sent, how many replies came in and how many of those were positive. We steer on that, so the campaign gets better week after week.

Ideally suited for B2B

Email outreach is meant for companies that sell to other companies. We only approach legal entities, such as Dutch BVs. Sole proprietorships, general partnerships and consumers are excluded. It works especially well when a single new customer is worth a lot, for example in business services, software or technical products. That is when it pays to approach the right decision makers directly.

Why are we only offering this now?

To be honest: we were hesitant for a long time. Cold email has a bad reputation because of mass-sent, impersonal emails nobody asked for. We did not want to attach our name to that.

But we also see how well it can work when you approach it carefully: a well-chosen audience, short emails that are about the recipient and a technical setup that keeps your own domain out of harm’s way. Then an email does not feel like spam, but like a relevant proposal. That is why we are offering it after all.

What does outsourcing email outreach cost?

The costs consist of a one-off setup (sending domains, mailboxes, warm-up, lead list and copy) and a monthly fee for running, testing and fine-tuning the campaigns. We start with a three-month pilot, focused on one audience with one message. After three months you know whether this channel works for your business, without committing for longer.

How do we make an outreach campaign successful?

Step 1: audience and lead list

We start with an intake about your audience and your offer: who is your ideal customer and who makes the decision there? Based on that we build a lead list with verified email addresses. No purchased lists, but a selection that fits your proposition. Every address is checked before it goes into the campaign, so bounces stay minimal.

Step 2: the technical foundation

This is where the difference between the inbox and the spam folder is made. We set up separate sending domains so your main domain is never at risk, configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC correctly and spread the volume across multiple mailboxes. We warm those mailboxes up gradually before any campaign runs through them. After that, we keep monitoring reputation continuously.

Step 3: copy and personalisation

A good outreach email is short, relevant and about the recipient, not about you. We write a sequence of three emails in two variants, which you approve in advance, with personalisation that goes beyond a first name: industry, role, a current trigger or a concrete insight about their website. Where possible we use AI to create that personalisation at scale, without it reading like a robot. You approve the emails before they go live.

Step 4: sending and testing

We start in a controlled way and scale up when the numbers are good. Subject lines, opening lines and calls to action are tested against each other. What works we keep, what does not we replace. That way the campaign gets a little better every week.

Step 5: replies and reporting

Replies arrive directly in your own inbox. That way you or your sales team start the conversation yourselves, in your own words and at your own pace. Every month you get a short report with the numbers that matter: emails sent, replies and positive replies. Based on that we expand the list and fine-tune the messages. After the pilot we decide together whether you continue, scale up or stop.

Why email outreach with dofollow?

We are an online marketing agency with a technical edge. You notice that in outreach: we know how deliverability works and we combine outreach with what we already do in SEO, advertising and conversion optimisation. So an interested recipient does not land on a random page, but on a landing page that converts.

And because we set everything up for measurability, you see exactly what a reply costs and what it delivers. That is the basis for growing together.