How to Start and Scale Your Cold Email Agency in 2024? (No BS Guide)

If you’re ready to start your own cold email agency in 2024 but aren’t sure where to begin, you have come to the right place!

This comprehensive guide has everything you need to kickstart and scale your cold email agency venture, from step-by-step processes to expert tips for reaching six-figure success.

So, keep reading without skipping any part!

Start and Scale Your Cold Email Agency: Table of Content

• Why Is Starting a Cold Email Agency a Lucrative Idea in 2024
• A Step-by-Step Guide to Start Your Cold Email Agency?
• 5 Expert Tips to Scale Your Cold Email Agency To 6 Figures
• Start Your 6-Figure Cold Email Agency in 2024
• FAQs

Why Is Starting a Cold Email Agency a Lucrative Idea in 2024

Here are some reasons why starting a cold email agency can be profitable in 2024.

1. Low Startup Costs

Starting a cold email agency does not require any significant upfront investment. This makes it an accessible venture to most entrepreneurs.

Here’s all that you would need to start your cold email agency:

• A dedicated team of cold email experts, copywriters, and client relationship managers to effectively handle and maintain all aspects of client interactions.
• A professional website showcasing your team and the services you provide.
• Subscription of tools – Invest in scalable cold email software that can manage all your clients’ campaigns, a CRM tool for leads and client management, and a communication and collaboration tool.

Tip: To further reduce overhead costs, hire a remote team. This will help you avoid the costs associated with leasing office space.

In fact, many agencies run from home offices or shared workspaces, reducing overhead costs significantly.

2. Continuous Demand for Lead Generation

Businesses need quality leads in their pipeline to grow and survive, but few have the expertise or internal resources to generate leads.

This is where you can leverage your knowledge in cold emailing to provide a cost-efficient way for businesses to grow.

3. Highly Scalable and Flexible Model

Another excellent aspect of cold emailing is its scalability and flexibility.

Depending on your client’s needs, you can easily scale your campaigns up or down, offering personalized services that precisely match and meet their current demands.

Additionally, cold email campaigns offer the advantage of being highly measurable. You can track metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, allowing you to demonstrate tangible results to your clients.

This transparency and accountability help build trust and strengthen long-term relationships with clients.

Features like these make cold emailing highly attractive to businesses.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Start Your Cold Email Agency?

We have divided this section into 3 parts, namely:

• Initial Setup
• Launching Your Agency and Preparing for Growth
• Scaling Your Agency

Each part will cover more in-depth processes to help you easily build and scale your cold email agency business.

Initial Setup

We’ll walk you through the prerequisites before launching your cold emailing business.

These foundational steps are crucial for the smooth launch of your agency.

Here are the steps that we’ll be covering in this section:

1. Discover and Set Your Target Industry
2. Learn and Research Your Ideal Customers
3. Finalize the List of Services You Will Provide
4. Choose a Pricing Model for Your Services
5. Establish Contract and Terms
6. Build Your Toolkit

1. Discover and Set Your Target Industry

The first and most important part is deciding which industry or niche to cater to. This will set the stage for all other processes.

You should choose an industry with a strong demand for cold emailing and where you have relevant expertise.

This will allow you to offer expert insights and develop strategies tailored to specific challenges and opportunities in that sector, improving prospects’ trust and credibility.

Tip: Check how the industry is set to grow in the future to make sure there’s a sustainable market for your services.

2. Learn and Research Your Ideal Customers

Once you have finalized the industry, it’s time to start sketching your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas.

The ICPS contains detailed information about the companies that would most likely benefit from your services.

You will ideally have details such as company size, industry sector, budget, pain points, etc, that will help you create target marketing and sales campaigns.

On the other hand, buyer personas are fictional profiles based on your ICPS. They represent the key decision makers in your target companies, such as the CEO, Sales Head, CRO, etc. 

Buyer personas contain demographic information, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals, allowing you to craft tailored messages that resonate with their needs.

3. Finalize the List of Services You Will Provide

As the saying goes, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” you shouldn’t completely depend on only offering cold emailing as a service.

To thrive in a competitive market, you must offer various services catering to businesses’ needs. This will potentially broaden your potential client base.

Here are some of the most important services that you can offer as a cold email agency:

1. Cold Email Copywriting: In this service, you will create cold email copies for your customers’ campaigns.
   Based on their needs, this can be basic generic emails or custom, personalized emails requiring you to research their prospects.
2. Campaign Setup & Deployment: Here, you will extend your expertise in setting up email campaigns for your clients. Your agency will be responsible for setting up all the backend work, configuring automation, and integrating with other tools in the clients’ toolkit.
3. Email List Building & Management: You can extend this service to businesses looking to buy an email list for their sales and marketing purposes.
   You and your team need to research your clients’ ICPs and build a targeted list of emails.
   Further, depending on your client’s requirements, you can validate the email list to remove potentially wrong emails and even segment and organize the prospects into groups.
4. Cold Email Strategy & Consulting: In this service, your agency will develop a customized strategy for your clients.
   You can also audit their existing campaigns and provide guidance on optimizing them for better results.
5. Full-Service Cold Email Management: This comprehensive service includes all the above services. This is most suitable for clients who want to outsource their cold email outreach completely.
   Here, your agency will manage ongoing campaigns, optimize them for better results, and report back to the clients on the progress.

Additional services you can offer along with the above services:

• Email warm-up and deliverability services
• CRM and sales automation tool setup and integration 
• Sales team training and onboarding

4. Choose a Pricing Model for Your Services

Pricing plays a key role in convincing your clients to choose your services. Having the right pricing models and being transparent can help you attract more clients.

Consider what will work best for your business’s sustainability and meet your client’s expectations. Here are some effective pricing strategies to consider:

• Pay-Per-Lead: This model is suitable when you charge your clients per lead you bring (meetings or demos scheduled).
• Monthly Retainer: This is a fixed monthly price your client must pay. Most agencies have a monthly retainer and then add a pay-per-lead model on top of it.
• Project-Based Pricing: This would be ideal for clients who are looking for one-off services where projects have a defined duration.

Pro Tip: You can take a look at other cold email agencies to get an idea of how to position and price your services.

5. Establish Contract and Terms

You must create clear contracts and terms of service that define the scope, responsibilities, and expectations between your agency and its clients.

Your agreements should outline the services provided, pricing models, payment terms, and cancellation policies.

Most importantly, you should follow local laws, such as GDPR in Europe or the CAN-SPAM Act in the US, to guarantee that your cold email practices are ethical and legal.

Include these compliance clauses in your contracts to protect your agency legally and show your clients your commitment to responsible marketing practices.

Tip: Always have legal counsel review your contracts to make sure it is thorough and enforceable.

6. Build Your Toolkit

The next vital part of your agency is the toolkit.

It influences your service’s pricing and how flexible and responsive you can be to client needs.

These tools will be necessary to manage operations, communications, and client relationships.

The most important tools you’ll need for your agency are

• A cold email automation platform
• A CRM tool
• A workspace tool

Let’s look at them one by one!

Cold Email Tools

The most important tool for your cold email agency is a cold emailing platform specifically designed for agencies.

Here’s what an ideal cold email tool should look like:

• It should be affordable and fit your budget.
• It has basic and advanced features such as email sequence automation, scheduling, tracking, A/B testing, team management, reliable email deliverability options, and more.
• It should be scalable, allowing you to send more emails without significantly increasing costs.
• It offers comprehensive customer support and has a vast knowledge and resource hub to help you troubleshoot.
• It should seamlessly integrate with other tools, such as CRMs, analytics, and communication tools, to provide a unified workflow.
• Easy to use and learn, minimizing the training time required for you and your team.

Here are a few of our recommended tools that are best suited for agencies:

1. Saleshandy

If you’re looking for the ideal agency tool that has a dedicated agency portal, provides high email-sending volume, and offers high scalability, look no further than Saleshandy

With Saleshandy, you can manage all your clients’ campaigns from a central location.

Moreover, you can onboard as many clients and team members as you want without any additional fee.

To help you scale your clients’ campaigns, Saleshandy allows you to connect unlimited email accounts at no extra cost.

It also comes with Sender Rotation feature to maximize email deliverability even at high email sending volume.

You also get an inbuilt email verification tool and an email warm-up tool powered by Trulyinbox.

Saleshandy also seamlessly integrates with Pipedrive, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, and Zapier, which can streamline the workflows for you and your clients.

Check out how Saleshandy can help you scale and manage lead generation for your clients.

2. Instantly

Instantly is the next best scalable solution for agencies. It has all the features to automate and personalize your clients’ emails.

But, Instantly does not have a dedicated agency portal where you can add and manage multiple clients.

You have to create individual accounts to manage each of your clients, which is one of the reasons why few of its users are searching for other Instantly alternatives.

3. Smartlead

Smartlead is another popular cold email solution that allows you to add unlimited email accounts to scale your outreach efficiently.

Although it is a relatively new tool in the market, it has greatly impacted its users.

That said, Smartlead does not have a dedicated agency portal. Instead, it offers an agency feature within its platform. You’ll also be charged $29 for every client you onboard. 

It also has limited integrations with other platforms, so agency users are looking for other Smartlead alternatives.

If you want to see how these tools compare, check out Smartlead vs. Instantly. This will help you find the best tool for your agency’s needs.

CRM Tools

After your cold email tool, you’ll need a CRM tool to manage your clients and interactions with leads.

Here are our recommended tools:

1. HubSpot: HubSpot is an ideal tool for streamlining and tracking all your interactions with clients and leads. It offers a wide range of integrations with other tools, making it easy to integrate it into your marketing and sales activities. 
2. ZohoCRM: Zoho is another popular tool. This tool has a highly customizable environment that allows you to tailor your workflows, making it easier for you to focus on building relationships with leads and closing deals. 
3. Pipedrive: Pipeline is another good CRM tool for managing your clients. Its visual pipeline management allows you to organize and prioritize leads and deals so you can clearly see your agency’s progress and focus on important opportunities.

Workspace Tools

The final tool in your toolkit will be your workspace, which you will use to manage your projects, communicate with your team, and collaborate with clients.

 Our recommendations for these are:

1. Google Workspace is the most popular tool for virtual workspaces. It offers a suite of interconnected tools, including Gmail, Docs, Drive, etc., to streamline communication and collaboration across your agency.
2. Microsoft 365  is the next popular alternative to Google Workspace. It also offers well-known applications like Outlook, Word, Excel, and Teams for your agency’s project management and collaboration needs. 
3. Zoho Workplace is a popular workspace management tool for small and medium-sized businesses. It offers email, file management, chat, and task management applications. 

Another aspect of these 3 workspace management tools is that they are also an Email Service Provider (ESP).

So, you can buy email accounts to scale your clients’ (or your) cold email campaigns.

Here is what an ideal toolkit would look like.

You can use Google Workspace to manage your projects and communicate with your team and clients.

HubSpot to manage your interactions with leads and clients.

Finally, Saleshandy integrates with all these tools to manage your client’s cold email campaigns.

Launching Your Agency and Preparing for Growth

With the foundation of your cold email agency established, it’s time to launch and prepare for growth.

In this phase, you’ll focus on setting up your online presence, initiating the lead-generation process, and acquiring your first clients.

So, let’s jump right in!

7. Create a Website

The website will be the first point of contact between you and many prospects, so make sure it is appealing and clearly shows the value you will be providing your customers.

Here are a few must-have pages on your website:

• Homepage: Your home page is the grand entrance to your website. Although not every potential client will walk in through the homepage, for most, it will be the first page they come across. This is the page that should be carrying all your USPs and value propositions relevant to your prospects.
• About Page: This is where you will introduce your company, brand, and team. You can add images of your team members, company values, etc., to create a human connection with your prospects.
• Contact Page: Website visitors can use this page to contact you. Add information such as mailing addresses, telephone numbers, chat links, business hours, etc., to help your future customers reach you.
• Services Page: You can add all the services you will provide in detail.
• Pricing Page: On this page, you can list the pricing model for your services and any bundled services. Try to be as transparent as possible.

8. Create a Lead Generation Strategy To Acquire Your First Few Clients

Ironically, even a cold email agency needs a solid lead-generation strategy to attract clients.

While cold emailing is your bread and butter, diversifying your lead generation methods can improve your reach and effectiveness.

Here’s how you can cleverly integrate both inbound and outbound tactics:

Outbound Lead Generation: You’re no amateur in this game! Put your skills to promote and demonstrate your expertise directly to potential clients.

Besides, cold emails, consider other outbound strategies, such as social media outreach, attending virtual industry conferences, and participating in business networking events where you can ‘warm up’ cold leads in person.

Inbound Lead Generation: To generate leads via the inbound channel, optimize your website for SEO to ensure potential clients find you when searching for top-notch cold emailing services.

Regularly publish insightful blogs, white papers, and case studies that demonstrate thought leadership and the tangible results you’ve achieved.

Get active on social media, especially LinkedIn, to build your brand presence and interact directly with potential clients.

By combining both inbound and outbound methods, you’ll be able to improve your sales pipeline with good quality leads.

Remember, the best demonstration of your services’ effectiveness is how you use them to grow your own agency!

9. Hire and Build a Team to Scale Your Agency

While your lead generation campaigns are doing their part, it’s time to get serious about building your dream team.

Think of this as assembling your agency’s Avengers—each member bringing a unique skill set that supercharges your operations.

Start by finding the critical roles for your team. You’ll likely need creative mids to create compelling email copies and industry experts with cold email experience to strategize and develop campaigns.

You’ll also need a few customer service champions to handle client communications and maintain satisfaction.

Hire the right mix of talent and prioritize people who share your vision and goals. This will strengthen your agency’s goals.

Scaling Your Agency

Now that your cold email agency is running, the next step is to focus on scaling your operations to meet growing demand.

In this section, you’ll explore key tactics for sustainable agency expansion in a competitive market.

10. Develop Processes and Systems for Efficiency

As your agency slowly grows, developing and standardizing your processes and systems becomes increasingly important.

You can start by creating Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for client onboarding, scheduled follow-ups, reporting, and even offboarding.

You can use better project and task management tools to ensure that your team members and the clients they are handling are on the same page.

These will help ensure that you can take on and manage more clients without compromising on the quality of service.

11. Expand Your Service Offerings and Expertise

There are two ways to scale your cold email agency. One is to do it horizontally, taking on more clients for the same service you provide.

The other way is vertically. Here, you expand your services to attract a broader range of clients.

You can branch out to multichannel outreach by adding social media touch points to your cold email service or offering paid ads services.

Tip + Caution: Make sure you scale and diversify into other services after you have standardized your processes for the existing services you provide.

12. Establish a Referral Program

Word of mouth can be a powerful tool to expand your customer base.

After you have a few clients onboard, you can develop a referral program where your existing clients can introduce another new prospect for incentives like service discounts or upgrades.

14. Continuously Monitor and Optimize Your Agency’s Performance

Congratulations! You made it to the last part of starting and scaling your agency.

The last part is ensuring the long-term success of your cold email agency. How can you do this?

You regularly measure and assess your agency’s operations, procedures, and strategies, which will give you insights into areas for improvement.

You can get regular client feedback and adjust your services or processes accordingly.

Tip: Stay proactive in getting client feedback and optimizing your business processes. This will create a good impression of your agency

5 Expert Tips to Scale Your Cold Email Agency To 6 Figures

You must now know how to start and scale your cold email agency, but making it into a 6-figure revenue-generating machine is a completely different ball game!

You need to build a sustainable business model based on strong customer relationships.

Here are a few expert tips that can help you:

1. Strengthen Your Relationship With Customers

Customer loyalty and satisfaction are vital in taking your business to 6 figures.

One effective way to ensure this is by strengthening your bond with clients through regular communication.

You can connect with them to get feedback and opinions to gain vital insights into possible improvements for your service and processes.

By showing clients that you value their input and are genuinely committed to their business well-being, you cultivate a sense of trust and loyalty among them.

These are essential components for a business’s long-term success.

2. Focus on Client Retention

“It’s cheaper to make them stay rather than find someone new.”

~ Some Guru who said the right thing.

This saying applies to your cold email agency as well!

If you want to improve your revenue and reach the six-figure mark, you must work to retain your clients.

By investing in retention strategies, you reduce turnover and improve the lifetime value of a customer.

One such strategy is customer support, which is crucial. It plays a key role in customer loyalty and satisfaction. So, without great customer support, retention would not be possible. 

You should make sure your team is trained and are ready to respond to any questions or queries the clients may have.

You can also recognize and celebrate your clients’ success and loyalty with discounts on services or exclusive offers. 

This will ultimately improve customer satisfaction and lead to repeat business.

3. Use Testimonials to Your Advantage

Think of this: if you have to choose between two restaurants, one with many reviews across multiple platforms and the other one that doesn’t have any,

Which one would you go to? The obvious answer is the one with more reviews!

Similarly, if your business has more positive reviews (testimonials), new prospects are more likely to trust and contact you.

So, get testimonials from all your clients. If there are negatives, work on them to improve your processes, and use the positive ones to attract new clients.

4. Networking and Partnerships

Networking is a great way to meet and interact with potential clients. You can attend events related to your industry where you can meet and form genuine relationships with prospects.

You can also network online by joining webinars or groups on social media platforms like X (Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Networking can be a great way for your agency to get high-ticket clients, so make sure to put some good effort into your interactions.

Partnerships and collaboration with other businesses can also help you scale greatly. For example, you can partner with another agency that only generates inbound leads.

This will benefit both your businesses. You can now cross-sell their services to your clients for a small commission and vice versa.

Another great example is the partnership between Snov.io – a sales automation platform, and Brightest Minds – an outbound lead generation agency.

5. Be Updated on Industry Trends and Changes

If you want to be a premiere in the cold emailing service industry, you and your team must always be up-to-date on the latest changes and trends.

Why?

This will position you as a leader in the industry who can adapt to any changes.

For example, Google and Yahoo announced in Oct 2023 that they would be bringing changes to their email-sending policies in Feb 2024.

Those who knew this already had strategies to adjust their practices accordingly.

Those who took the proactive approach were able to ensure compliance, maintain high deliverability rates, and continue achieving strong results for their clients without interruption.

Start Your 6-Figure Cold Email Agency in 2024

By following the detailed steps and tips in this guide, you can establish a solid foundation for your agency and position it on a clear path to achieving six-figure revenues.

The key to success begins with selecting the right tools for your agency – this is half the battle won.

Plan carefully and always aim to deliver outstanding service to your clients.

Stay proactive in adapting to industry changes and continuously refine your strategies to meet your clients’ needs.

And finally, take the leap of faith and build your high-performing cold email agency this year!

FAQs

1. How much does it cost to run a cold email agency?

Running a cold email agency can vary in cost based on the scale of your operations. You’ll need to budget for essential tools like CRM software, cold emailing platforms, and possibly team salaries. Initially, you might spend a few hundred dollars monthly, but this can increase as you scale your services and expand your team.

2. How do I stay organized and effectively manage multiple cold email campaigns?

Use a robust solution like Saleshandy to stay organized and effectively manage multiple cold email campaigns. It allows you to manage as many clients as possible and add unlimited team members.

3. What are some ethical considerations when running a cold email agency?

You must be aware of ethical considerations, such as adhering to and following laws like GDPR or CAN-SPAM. Also, make sure you reach out to relevant people to your business and give them an easy way to unsubscribe from your emails.

4. What are some of the challenges I may face when starting my cold email agency?

Some challenges you might face include building a reliable client base, ensuring email deliverability, hiring the right talent, and staying compliant with ever-changing regulations.