22
0
20%
The challenge
An AI startup had a strong product and no relationships with the people who buy it. The goal was simple and hard: get discovery calls on the calendar with senior leaders in a specific target market, people whose inboxes are already full of pitches.
The team wanted a real answer, not an opinion, on which outbound channel earns conversations with that audience. So we ran two channels against the same ideal customer profile at the same time and let the numbers decide.
The approach
Channel one: cold email
We enrolled 390 target contacts in a multi-step email sequence with a clear offer and a single ask. After bounces, 335 emails were delivered. To keep the numbers honest, we filtered bot opens out of the open rate before reading anything into it.
Channel two: LinkedIn DMs
From a company leader's profile, we sent 800 targeted connection requests to the same ideal customer profile. Everyone who accepted got a hyper-personalized, manually written DM, not a template. That is the whole method: earn the connection first, then have a human conversation.
Same audience, same window, same offer
Both channels pitched the same discovery call to the same kind of buyer over the same period, so the comparison is about the channel, not the message.
The results
Cold email
- 390 contacts enrolled, 335 emails delivered.
- 63.6% open rate with bots removed. People saw it.
- 3.3% click rate.
- 5.7% reply rate, and every reply was an auto-responder or a no.
- 12.5% opt-out rate. One in eight recipients asked never to hear from the company again.
- Discovery calls booked: zero.
LinkedIn DMs
- 800 connection requests sent.
- 139 prospects accepted and received a personal DM.
- 28 responses, a 20% reply rate on DMs, and real conversations rather than autoreplies.
- 22 discovery calls booked. Nearly 4 out of 5 people who replied took a meeting.
Why the gap is so large
- Email arrives uninvited. A connection request is a small ask that earns permission before the pitch.
- A DM comes from a real profile with a face, a title, and a history. An email comes from a domain.
- Cold email burned the list: 12.5% of those leaders opted out, and they are gone for good. LinkedIn added 139 new connections the company still has.
Same audience, same offer, same month. Email got opened and then ignored. LinkedIn got 22 leaders on the calendar.
The takeaway
Have a project in mind? Just let us know!
Let’s Start Talk
