I live in a country where cold outreach is fully illegal Austria. So I can't cold email, cold message, cold call, nothing like that. Only legal cold outreach method is in person with the situation. How do you think I should go about getting B2B clients, Seos, my friend?
Cold‑outreach laws are broadly similar across Canada, Australia, and the European Union; the real difference lies in whether people believe and act on those regulations. In the EU, Austria, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Switzerland many are successfully doing cold email despite the rules. It's not legal advice, but ask yourself when you last jaywalked—you're fine breaking a rule in some capacity. If you must, door‑to‑door prospecting is a viable alternative; absolutely crush it.
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.
Cold calls are far less efficient than cold emails these days. Roughly only 10% of the effort you put into calling translates into real results because many leads never answer, you often talk to gatekeepers, and even qualified prospects are frequently busy or uninterested. In contrast, a cold email campaign can reach thousands of leads, pre‑qualify them, and give you a list of warm prospects before you ever pick up the phone. Cold calls can still have a place, but they’re much more manual and low‑yield compared to email outreach.
It depends on who you're contacting, but if I were in the EU I would send B2B cold emails without any problem. I'm not a lawyer, so this isn’t legal advice.
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.