Cold Email isn't Marketing
It's distribution without consent.
The premise is seductive: If I just send enough emails, I’ll find the one person who needs this.
A numbers game. A funnel. A pipeline. You interrupt 100 people to find the one who might care. Ninety-nine absorb the filtering cost. You keep the upside.
At scale, that is externalizing your growth onto strangers.
The Rationality of Interruption
Cold email persists for a reason, we rationalize it in a variety of ways:
“If I don’t send it, my competitors will.”
”If I’m not visible, I don’t exist.”
”If I don’t generate pipeline sales, I don’t survive.”
In a system where attention equals survival, interruption becomes rational.
A 1% response rate can be wildly profitable. If 100 emails cost almost nothing and one becomes a meaningful client, the economics work. From that perspective, the “waste” looks trivial.
Humans are very good at ignoring what they don’t care about.
Two seconds to delete may not be catastrophic harm. So this isn’t about evil marketers.
It’s about incentives.
But Incentives Shape Ecosystems
When everyone optimizes for cheap interruption:
Open rates collapse.
Trust erodes.
Filters tighten.
Buyers grow defensive.
The more we rely on interruption, the less interruption works.
Even if each individual email imposes minimal cost, the aggregate effect is noise.
And noise changes behavior.
Recipients become guarded.
Signal must shout louder.
The baseline level of skepticism rises.
The system rewards the tactic in the short term while degrading the environment in the long term.
Interruption vs. Attraction
The clean alternative is often framed as:
“Attract, don’t interrupt.”
Publish. Build reputation. Let people come to you.
But that isn’t morally pure either.
Both models compete for attention.
Both convert attention into economic survival.
One says, “I’ll come to you.”
The other says, “Come to me.”
The real difference is where the friction lives.
Interruption pushes friction outward.
Attraction internalizes it.
Cold email asks strangers to filter you.
Reputation forces you to earn being filtered in.
The Case For Cold Outreach
There’s another uncomfortable truth.
Cold email lowers barriers to entry.
It allows a small firm with no media budget to reach decision-makers directly.
It allows experimentation at low cost.
It creates optionality.
Without it, access concentrates in:
Established brands
Paid distribution
Existing networks
In that sense, cold outreach can be anti-elitist. It can surface latent demand. Sometimes the unexpected message is precisely the signal one person needed.
The difference between spam and opportunity isn’t the channel.
It’s relevance.
So What’s the Problem?
The problem isn’t asymmetry. All persuasion is asymmetric.
The problem is laziness.
Mass-blasted, generic automation treats attention as free which degrades trust.
The numbers game itself isn’t inherently immoral. Markets run on probabilistic bets all the time.
But when your growth model depends on imposing small costs on large numbers of people, you should at least be honest about what you’re doing.
You’re not “adding value.”
You’re placing bets.
A Higher Standard
If you believe what you offer is valuable:
Be precise about who it’s for.
Make your outreach specific and earned.
Reduce volume as relevance increases.
Build signal strong enough that interruption becomes unnecessary over time.
Cold email isn’t marketing.
It’s a rational tactic inside a system that rewards visibility and tolerates noise.
The real question isn’t whether it works.
It’s whether your strategy improves the ecosystem you depend on; or quietly degrades it.