If you're from Europe and cold email isn't allowed in Germany, would you target American companies as well?
Yes, targeting U.S. companies is a solid tactical move if you want to avoid German restrictions. The idea that cold email is 'not allowed' in Europe is often overstated; it’s really a risk‑reward imbalance, not a hard ban—similar to jaywalking being illegal but still safe when no cars are around. You can also set up a U.S. entity and operate from there to minimize risk. All these tactics avoid the underlying risk‑reward misbalance, but they aren’t legal advice.
How do you handle cold email in the EU? It's really not all that difficult. One, and I'm not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice, but when's the last time you jaywalked? Congratulations, you have essentially contravened a law or a rule or a regulation. Cold email is a lot like jaywalking. If you're good at what you do, if you look left and look right and there's no cars oncoming, nobody's really going to care. These laws are also written in such a vague way that if you take their definitions at their vaguest, you're basically always going to be at the behest or at the whims of the legislators. And so if you send really high-quality customized cold emails that provide value to the people reading them, and they don't come across as spam and don't seem like a big issue, you're almost certainly going to be fine. And what's interesting is Germany, Spain, a lot of these other EU countries are starved for cold email right now. If you take the same campaign you're running in the United States, then localize it a little bit — the language is quite similar, but still respect cultural norms of deference and so on — and then run it in Germany, you'll get like a four to five x reply rate. Same thing in Spain, same thing in the Netherlands. These are all places where people are starved for this sort of outreach, and they want to connect and grow their businesses and network. They just don't currently have a way to, because regulation has a stranglehold on a lot of what previously would have been serendipitous. It's unfortunate that the EU has strangleholded people to that degree, but they definitely have. People now are so afraid to even send an email to somebody that they don't know, because they think SWAT teams are going to break in through their windows and get on the floor — 'this is the guy that sent the cold email, loser, I hate people like you.' Obviously that's ridiculous.
GDPR and similar rules are low risk for small‑scale cold email because you’re not sending tens of millions of emails like spammers; you’re delivering value. Treat compliance like a stop sign—follow it when practical, but don’t let it block you. You can also incorporate in the US or sell to non‑EU clients to avoid the issue.
You have to work within the regulations. If you follow GDPR and telecom rules exactly, you won’t be able to send cold emails, so you need to use alternative, lawful channels. Some people set up shell companies to route communications, but that’s a gray area and I wouldn’t recommend it. In practice, just be reasonable, stick to the letter of the law, and look for other outreach methods that comply with EU rules.
Once upon a time, yes. Now, no. Simply because it is far more scalable to cold email. Cold calling, while nowhere near as efficient, is still far more efficient and productive per unit time than sending physical mail. There are some use cases for physical mail in outreach, but it usually involves a very small total addressable market. If you have an extremely small niche of people you can work with, then yes, sending physical mail or deliveries to their address with marketing material inside can work pretty well. I'm reminded of a good Silicon Valley campaign where guys showed up to prospects' offices with pizzas around lunchtime, dropped them off and said, 'Hey, have a lovely rest of the day, we're a company that really likes you guys, we just wanted to be in touch, here you go,' and inside there's a letter with more information. That works pretty well when there's like 300 potential companies you could work with, because you can work your way through the list and the cost of a pizza might be 30 bucks — 30 times 300 is 9,000, so you can burn through your entire niche for less than $10,000 and every single one will have a positive impression of you. But at big scale it just doesn't make sense — you could send 3,000 cold emails in a day. I understand your points regarding the legality of cold email in Germany, both GDPR and consent and privacy laws, but you've got to understand that most of these people signed up to LinkedIn anyway, and LinkedIn is a business platform where you're scraping most of their information from to begin with. If they really didn't want to be contacted, they probably wouldn't have signed up to LinkedIn. I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.