Marketing agency — paid ads and SEO for SaaS

The task

The agency sells what thousands of others sell: paid ads and SEO. In a vertical like this a cold email reads as spam from yet another agency by default — it needed a reason to exist that competitors didn't have.

What we did

1. 01

   Narrowed to SaaS and the roles that decide

   We wrote to founders and heads of marketing at SaaS companies. Junior roles were excluded from the list — they don't control the budget for an agency.

2. 02

   Filtered on whether ads were already running

   Before sending we checked whether the company was running paid ads. That split the list into two different conversations: replacing the current contractor, or launching from zero.

3. 03

   Opened every email with a product teardown

   Not a pitch — a specific observation about the recipient's site and product. Expensive in hours, but that's what produced a 5.6% reply rate instead of the usual one percent.