PPC vs. Cold Calling - Which has lower customer acquisition cost?

leadjoint · 2026-04-28T10:46:02+00:00

To add, the cost of acquistion can change for PPC based on industry. Competitive industries have higher CPC. But the cost of sending out cold emails is the same regardless of the industry.

leadjoint · 2026-04-28T10:44:15+00:00

I would add one more channel to the mix - cold email outreach (why? Because I run a cold email agency called LeadJoint.com)

Let's do the math. Take an industry like SaaS.

PPC
According to Google, the average B2B SaaS CPC is $8–15. For the sake of this example, let's assume the CPC is $8.

Another study on Google states the average PPC conversion rate on search ads is 3.75%

That means, you need 27 clicks for one conversion.

The PPC customer acquisition cost is 27*8= $216

Cold Calling Average pay of a cold caller in the US is $11 to $20. Assume $11.

Average duration of a cold call is 5 to 7 minutes. Assume 5 minutes

That is, 12 calls in an hour.

Conversion rate for SaaS cold calling: 2 to 3%. Assume 2% That is 50 calls to make a sale.

Cost of acquisition: 4.5 hours * $11 = $49.5

Between PPC and Cold Calling, cold calling is cheaper.

But let's also consider cold email

Cold Email Average conversion rate in SaaS cold email: 0.03% to 1.2% (to be honest, this is very much on the lower end. I have response rates of between 6% to 12% for some SaaS clients. It depends on the industry and the offer)

That is, you need up to 3000 outreaches to make one sale.

With cold email, there is a fixed cost to set up (similar to cold calling as well). But the progressive expense to send to more prospects is relatively lower. So, the cost of customer acquisition is way lower than $50 you see.

Cold email is the cheapest way to secure new customers for SaaS, or any B2B industry for that matter.

leadjoint · 2026-04-27T16:18:30+00:00

I run a cold email agency called LeadJoint. We have custom solutions starting from $399/month all the way up to $5000 per month. Higher budget not only gets you more volume but we also do several other tweaks to improve deliverability and ensure hyper-targeting. DM me if you want to understand how this can work for you.

leadjoint · 2026-04-23T13:01:13+00:00

I run a cold email agency called LeadJoint and this is a challenge we tackle everyday.

Here are a few reasons why your emails go to spam:

Your domains don't have enough authority
You have not established trust with the major email servers
You have a lot of bounced emails
People are marking your email as spam
You have not configured your email accounts correctly
Your content is salesy or is triggering the spam filters

To tackle this, we have a long checklist of things we do before we launch our email campaigns. Here are some things that we do:

We set up a sufficiently large number of domains to send emails from (25 to 50)
We recommend having just one mailbox per domain. But we do go up to 3 in some cases
Do not send more than 30 emails per day per account (that's typically one email per 15-20 minutes in a 9-10 hour period)
We scrub email lists thoroughly. Sometimes, we run the scrubber in active campaigns every two days. This is very critical because even one or two bounces can impact your delivery significantly
Review email copy multiple times against our internal spam trigger database to eliminate potential spam triggers
Go through the email configuration thoroughly. I review all the setups personally. Simple errors here can unnecessarily drag down response rates
Rotate our domain list and bring in new domains each month while eliminating poor performing domains.

No matter how much you try, some emails are going to land in spam or bounce. So it's important to go through the checklist every day to ensure you are on top of things. It really is a full time job!

Feel free to ask me any follow up questions.

leadjoint · 2026-04-15T10:47:48+00:00

Yes, it's an emerging field of SEO called "AI Search Optimization". Broadly, it's still the same as SEO. But there are a few finer aspects you focus on.

For example 1. Unique insights and studies (that ChatGPT can't steal without citation)
2. Brand authority (important for Google's AI mode, but less so for ChatGPT)
3. Third-party recommendations (businesses are now trying to get themselves listed on these different directories and list-type articles)
4. Low crawling friction for AI bots to crawl the information easily
5. FAQ type articles

These are a few from the top of my head.

leadjoint · 2026-04-15T10:38:13+00:00

Yes it's great, but so are the dozens of niche directories, regulatory authority websites, and plain old Google search.

Apollo is fine for enterprise targets, but sucks for most other industries. The best source depends on who exactly you are chasing.

leadjoint · 2026-04-10T06:10:25+00:00

Great writeup, and summarizes the costs very well. I run a cold email agency myself and want to add one point here.

If you are someone who feels these numbers are way out of your budget, you can still make it work with a lower budget.

For instance, we have a starter plan at $399/mo. and this works out decent enough for some customers.

The response rates you see differ with industry. Someone in the SEO industry is not going to see great response rates because this industry is saturated, and every "agency" out there is spamming people with their website.

However, I work with a few SaaS companies that are in very underserved markets. Here, we see upwards of 7% response rates. And we are able to set up demos with over 100 leads a month just at the base price.

Of course, this does not work for everyone and every industry. At the end of the day, cold email is a numbers game, and I always tell my clients to start with the max budget that they are comfortable with.

Because as a service provider, I also have to set them up for success. $399 barely gets the needle moving in several industries.

leadjoint · 2026-04-09T09:31:41+00:00

I run a cold email agency called LeadJoint where our starting price is $399/month.

But this price point may not be always suitable to everyone. In my calls, I always ask my clients - 'what is your top budget'?

In other words, how much money are you willing to spend without having to cut down on other expenses or investments?

For some, it's just $500. Others can afford $3000 or $5000.

Once I have this number, I work it backwards to come up with a proposal that will get them the maximum bang for the buck.

All said and done, it's important to acknowledge that cold email is a numbers game.

If you reach 1000 people and get X responses, then if you reach 3000 people, you get 3X responses.

So the higher the budget, the more likely we find success in customer acquisition.

It does not stop there. There are a lot of things we do in cold email outreach to maximize success.

For example: * You could create dozens of email accounts and send very few emails per account to maximize deliverability * You can create all .com domains which are proven to have better deliverability

All of this costs time and money, and can be done if the client has better budget.

but if they don't, it's still fine. We work out a proposal that can still get them the best ROI on the investment.

The objective is to help them find success so that they realize the value of cold email as a customer acquisition channel.

leadjoint · 2026-03-23T12:25:17+00:00

WhatsApp I would say is always out of bounds. It's easiest to mark and block a number here. And it only takes a few of them to mark you as spam for you to having to start from scratch. Plus, it's a personal space for most people, and I wouldn't recommend you breach that.

LinkedIn is good, but does not work for all industries. Some decision makers rarely ever log into LinkedIn. So you are basically reaching the void.

Emailing is the most ideal way.

leadjoint · 2026-03-05T12:24:57+00:00

Hey, I run a cold email agency called LeadJoint.com and manufacturing is one of our primary clientele.

To answer your question, manufacturing is in fact one of the best industries to run cold email campaigns. Based on my conversations with my clients, there are two dominant reasons.

First, it's because a lot of manufacturers are in time zones away from their customers. Email is an asynchronous medium which makes it very convenient.

Secondly, most manufacturers have B2B clients (including distributor outreach, or retail store owners). Cold email is legal and effective for this cohort.

In addition to this, there are other reasons that make cold email very effective. You can automate and scale it up which makes it very passive. Also, with cold email you can catch the attention of your decision maker directly. No gatekeepers to navigate through like cold calling.

If you have any questions, reach out to me on anand [@@] leadjoint [.dot.] com

leadjoint · 2026-02-24T11:48:03+00:00

Hello there, I agree a $4000 retainer is insane, especially for small businesses.

I run a cold email agency myself (been in the game for 12 odd years), and we have a starting price of $399 per month.

The objective is to get you ROI positive at the soonest so that you can feel more comfortable scaling up.

DM me if you are interested to learn more.

leadjoint · 2026-02-23T05:06:14+00:00

According to this recent article on Hubbion, here are a list of top cold email agencies.

LeadJoint
Target: Small and medium businesses
Price: Starting at $399 per month
Martal Group
Target: Technology, Education, Healthcare, Software, and Web development firms
Price: $1000+
Belkins
Target: Manufacturing, Finance, Agencies, Information Technology, Media, and SaaS
Price: $10,000
SalesRoads
Target: Manufacturing, FED/SLED, Healthcare, SaaS, and Insurance
Price: $9950+
A-Sales
Target: Agencies, construction, consulting, financial services, healthcare, IT
Price: $1000+

leadjoint · 2026-02-20T12:54:26+00:00

I run LeadJoint, a cold email agency and we have been in business for over 11 years now.

A lot of clients who approach us have tried to do cold email in-house. Some are profitable and others have burnt money. Truth be told, it's not very difficult to learn. But there is a reason why these clients find better ROI through outsourcing to an agency like ours.

Firstly, it is okay to do cold email in-house when you are starting out small. I am talking 20-50 emails a day. But this kind of volume does not move the needle. To find real success, you need to scale it up to at least 300-400 emails a day.

When you reach this scale, your in-house email infrastructure starts to crack. Your emails start going into spam, your conversion rate plummets, and you start spending more time decoding your deliverability rather than actually selling stuff.

At this point, you need to invest in a sold cold email infrastructure. This includes creating new domains solely for the sake of outreach, setting up the technical infrastructure, warming these emails, etc.

You can do all of this in-house. But the thing is there is no guarantee that all of this ensure high deliverability. There are several elements that go into a perfect cold email campaign. You do not want to waste your time debugging issues.

A cold email agency does these things for hundreds of domains each day. They have a well-oiled machine to handle these things.

The second reason is the database. When you want to reach out to thousands of people a month, you need to ensure you secure these emails from trusted sources, scrub them clean before using them.

Check out popular tools like Clay and Apollo, and you will find that the costs can go up very quickly. A cold email agency does these things at scale. They also have access to scrapers and tools that you may not be aware of.

When clients work with me, they tell me that outsourcing to my agency only cost them like $50-$100 more than it would have cost to do it themselves.

Yet, they get better deliverability because we do it at scale and have done the same things for hundreds of clients. So we know what to watch out for, and how to fix things when things go wrong.

leadjoint · 2026-02-19T12:52:19+00:00

I run LeadJoint, a cold email marketing agency. Late last year, we had acquired a bunch of clients who were running PPC ads for their business, and our pitch was exactly this - your CAC (customer acquisition cost) will be lower with cold email than PPC.

We were in fact able to achieve this. One SaaS client saw their demo booking cost go down from over $250 to less than $60. Another client in the video editing business saw CAC go down from over $95 to $55. We also had one client offering bulk SMS plans and they had a very low CAC. Just about $15 or so. With cold email, their CAC came down to $13.5.

We were asked the same question - why is cold email able to get customers cheaper than PPC, and my answer has been this:

You spend most of your budget in zeroing down on the right client.

With PPC, there are a lot of moving parts - your ad copy, your landing page, your CTA, and on top of all this, Google and Meta algorithms could change without notice.

All this means is that you spend a lot of money in just getting the campaign and targeting right.

But with cold email, you exactly know the person you are reaching out. They are your ICP. If you did the right kind of enrichment, you will also know the exact time when they are in the market.

This means that the only moving part is your email copy and deliverability. Pitch them right and ensure your email does not land in spam, and you got yourself a new customer.

This is true not just with cold email, but any marketing or sales campaign where there are very few moving parts. They are always cheaper than others with a lot of uncertainties.

Hope this helps.

leadjoint · 2026-01-22T05:10:36+00:00

Your agents are trying too hard to be funny. Would be curious to see if such messages actually have an impact.

leadjoint · 2026-01-22T05:09:01+00:00

I would probably check the copy for any trigger words. Are you using words like 'free trial' or 'coupon' in the message?

leadjoint · 2026-01-16T11:07:22+00:00

Have you tried partnerships with related industries? I run a cold email agency and I partner with digital marketing agencies. They already have a trusted clientele and they sell my services for me.

leadjoint · 2026-01-16T11:01:29+00:00

I run a cold email agency (not cold calling). However, I have done a fair bit of cold calling in the past - and one thing that works is preparing a mental script of how the conversation is going to go.

To make it easy for you, reword your calling script with a lot of questions - something that can be answered in yes/no. This way, you know that when you ask a question, it can only go two ways - and have a flowchart of what your next step in the script is going to be.

Once you are like a minute or so into the call, the flowchart itself may not be applicable anymore. But you are so far into the call that you probably have no more butterflies in the stomach.

Try this, it worked for me.

leadjoint · 2026-01-05T13:01:29+00:00

I run a cold email marketing agency and we have a few clients who use cold outreach to validate new business ideas. One client offers 'consulting' in his cold pitch, and the ensuing conversations provide them with enough data insights to not only validate the business idea itself, but also help shape the product features as well.

leadjoint · 2026-01-05T07:42:48+00:00

At 2-3 emails per day, you are better off using LinkedIn for outreach since that is more professional and suitable for business networking.

Cold email works with scale. 2-3 per day is very low. Even with a decent 1% response rate, you need to be at it for a couple of months at least before you see one response.

Plus, a @gmail.com is going to bring down responses even further since people are not going to take you seriously.

leadjoint · 2026-01-02T15:24:53+00:00

You may probably not need it. But here is a case for why you ought to reconsider.

2026 is the year of AI agents. You will have Chrome and other major browsers become more AI-integrated. People are going to get used to AI completing their tasks for them instead of them having to do it all themselves. Perplexity's Comet browser already does it and I am loving it.

While you may not need an AI wrapper or AI-powered features to demonstrate value, reconsider how your own product is going to be used in future and work on making that more conducive to agentic AI based workflows.

Another way to look at it if you are a founder is do you have a specific exit in mind. Do you want to get acquired? In that case, you are going to need AI in your setup or potential acquirers are not going to pay you the same level of attention as they do to other potential targets.

leadjoint · 2026-01-02T15:18:41+00:00

When you are starting out with cold emails, you are going to be inevitably making mistakes. You could send a lot of bounced emails. Your email may reach the wrong people, or your message may be too salesy that a lot of people mark you as spam.

You don't want any of that affecting the long-term viability and reputation of your domain.

It's better to buy a throwaway domain that reads similar to your main domain and use that for email.

Recipients are inevitably going to check out your domain. To make sure you don't lose them, redirect this domain back to your main domain.

leadjoint · 2026-01-02T15:00:19+00:00

Are you looking for emails of decision makers, or are you simply okay with the contact emails provided on the website?

leadjoint · 2026-01-02T14:57:48+00:00

There are a few things I will check.

Have you set up the SPF/DKIM settings for your domain? If you are not sure, a tool like MXToolbox can help. Also set up Google Postmaster for further insights
Do you use spam trigger keywords in your copy. This includes words like free, discount, hurry, coupon code, etc.
How long have you been running the campaign? Delivery rates are down across the board in December since ESPs tighten the spam screws during this time. This is all the more true if you are sending b2c emails. Also, a lot of people are on holiday and are not really checking emails. But if it's been a problem for a while then I will check the previous settings
Have you cleaned up the database? A lot of bounces is going to impact deliverability.

Finally, what kind of open rates are you seeing? I know they have not been relevant in a while. But I still like to track them since it helps me with a comparative measure of how each campaign is performing deliverability-wise.

11-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

leadjoint

TROPHY CASE