Cold Outreach Not Working? Try Warm Outreach Instead.

Cold outreach is hard, no doubt about it.

If you've tried it, you’ve probably run into one of two big problems: either your emails land in the spam folder or people simply aren't responding.

Sure, you can optimize your approach and make cold outreach work to some degree, but there’s an easier solution, one that doesn’t involve chasing people who don't know you.

So, what should you do when cold outreach isn't cutting it?

The answer is simple: warm outreach.

And if you’re wondering what exactly that is and how you can use it, don’t worry. We’re about to break it all down for you.

What Is Warm Outreach?

Warm outreach, like cold outreach, involves reaching out to prospects. The difference? In warm outreach, the prospects are already somewhat familiar with your product or brand.

A perfect example would be emailing someone who’s already subscribed to your newsletter or someone who downloaded a resource from your website.

And if you're sitting there thinking, "Well, I don’t have many newsletter subscribers or website sign ups," don't panic. There’s an easy solution for that too, and we’ll cover it.

Benefits of Warm Outreach

Let’s quickly go over why warm outreach can be a game changer for your business:

• More educated buyers: People already know a bit about you, which makes conversations easier.
• Higher response rates: They’re familiar with your brand, so they’re more likely to reply.
• Faster close rates: You don’t have to spend time educating them from scratch.
• More scalable lead generation process: You can build a reliable, repeatable system to generate leads.

Sounds great, right?

Downsides of Warm Outreach

Of course, no strategy is perfect, and warm outreach has its challenges too:

• Can be expensive to acquire warm leads: Paid ads or content creation might be needed to get people’s attention.
• Requires more complex workflows to set up: You’ll need tools and automation to keep things moving smoothly.
• Smaller deal size sometimes: Since leads might be earlier in the funnel, the initial deal might be smaller.

But let’s be honest, compared to the struggles of cold outreach, these downsides seem pretty manageable.

Where to Get Leads for Warm Outreach?

So, how do you start gathering leads for warm outreach?

You don’t need to overcomplicate this. Here’s a simple list of places where you can collect warm leads:

• Website sign ups: People filling out forms or subscribing.
• Lead magnets: Offering a valuable free resource in exchange for an email address.
• Newsletter subscribers: People who’ve opted in for updates.
• Old leads that went cold: Those who’ve shown interest before but disappeared.

These are all great sources of warm leads, and you’ll likely see much better response rates compared to cold outreach.

But what if you’re thinking, “I don’t have many sign ups or subscribers”?

That’s okay, there’s a solution for that too.

How to Acquire Warm Leads to Contact?

If you’re short on warm leads, you can generate them by running ads. Warm leads are actually pretty affordable when you know how to get them.

What’s the best way to capture warm leads? Use lead magnets.

You can create something valuable (like a free tool, resource, or checklist) and run ads that encourage people to provide their email in exchange for access.

At LeadLoft, we often run ads for our fun lead magnets like the Investor Matcher and AI Sequence Generator. 

People love these tools and are usually happy to provide their email, which makes the cost per lead quite reasonable. Depending on your audience, you can expect to pay anywhere from $3 to $15 per lead.

Keep in mind that costs vary depending on the platform you’re using. For B2B companies, LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads are your best bets, but I personally prefer Google Ads for this type of lead acquisition.

How to Set Up Warm Outreach

This all sounds great, but how do you actually set it up? Let's walk through the steps.

Before You Start, You’ll Need:

• A Zapier account: To automate the process.
• A website and a lead magnet: Here’s a free lead magnet page template.
• LeadLoft Warm Outreach Playbook: You’ll use this to run your outreach sequences.

Now, here’s how to set it up.

Step 1: Create the Zapier Automation

The first thing you’ll need to do is set up your Zapier automation. This is going to connect your lead magnet form on the website to LeadLoft, making it easy to run outreach automatically.

Here’s how your Zapier automation should look:

• Trigger: Website form submission.
• Action: Create a lead in LeadLoft.

Make sure to map the fields correctly and enroll contacts in a LeadLoft playbook. This ensures your leads are automatically engaged as soon as they sign up.

That’s it for this step! Just make sure to publish your zap so everything runs smoothly.

Step 2: Drive Traffic to the Lead Magnet

Now that the automation is in place, you need to point traffic toward your lead magnet.

This could mean driving traffic to a dedicated lead magnet page or using popups on your website to capture emails.

Whether your traffic comes from ads, newsletter sign ups, or organic visitors, the goal is to keep the leads flowing into your outreach sequence.

Pro Tip: Enrich Contact Info Before Outreach

Want to take your outreach up a notch?

You can enrich the leads with extra information like LinkedIn profiles or phone numbers. This lets you reach out to them across multiple channels, email, LinkedIn, and phone.

I highly recommend including LinkedIn outreach in your strategy since most teams aren’t using this yet, and it gives you a competitive edge.

You can easily do this by adding a ReverseContact step into your Zapier automation. This step enriches the contact info based on their email and returns details like their LinkedIn URL, company name, and more.

Wrapping Up

Cold outreach is tough, we all know it. But if it’s not working for you, give warm outreach a try. It’s a solid strategy that fills up your sales calendar with higher quality leads.

At LeadLoft, we still use outbound outreach, but we’ve had tons of success with warm outreach too.

If your sales calendar could use a boost, this is a great way for your marketing and sales teams to work together to fill up empty slots.

Need help setting this up or have any questions? Book a time with my team. We’re always happy to lend a hand and get your warm outreach rolling.