Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
How to Book More Meetings With Cold Email in 2026
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Is cold email still one of the most effective ways to generate leads, book meetings, and grow your business?
In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, Kendra Corman sits down with Adam Rosen, Founder and CEO of EOC Works, to discuss why cold email continues to deliver results even as marketing channels become more crowded and AI-generated content floods inboxes.
Adam shares how he used cold email to land customers like Amazon, Apple, Disney, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, raise funding, grow his first startup, and ultimately sell the company. He also explains what has changed dramatically in the email landscape over the past few years and why businesses need a much more sophisticated approach than they did even a few years ago.
Together, Kendra and Adam explore the importance of deliverability, targeting, messaging, lead nurturing, and patience. They discuss why email remains one of the few marketing channels where businesses can directly reach their ideal prospects and why relevance is the key to getting responses.
In this episode, you'll learn:
• What cold email marketing is and how it differs from traditional email marketing
• Why deliverability is now one of the biggest challenges marketers face
• The three essential components of a successful cold email strategy
• How to identify and target the right prospects
• Why lead nurturing often generates results long after a prospect first enters your pipeline
• Common mistakes that can damage your domain reputation
• Why patience is one of the most important factors in marketing success
Whether you're a business owner, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur looking for new ways to generate qualified leads, this conversation offers practical insights you can apply immediately.
About Adam Rosen
Adam Rosen is the Founder and CEO of EOC Works, a cold email marketing agency that helps businesses generate qualified meetings through strategic outbound email campaigns. After building and selling his first startup, Adam launched EOC Works and has since helped nearly 200 clients improve their lead generation through modern cold email strategies.
Connect with Adam:
Website: https://eocworks.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamirosen/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a colleague who wants to improve their marketing and lead generation efforts.
#EmailMarketing #ColdEmail #LeadGeneration #B2BMarketing #DigitalMarketing #MarketingStrategy #BusinessGrowth #Entrepreneurship #SalesStrategy #MarketingPodcast
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Show Opening
SPEAKER_01Hi, I'm Kendrick Corman. If you're a coach, consultant, or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science. And that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, Kendra Corman, and I am very excited to be joined today by Adam Rosen. And we're gonna be talking about one of my favorite topics, email marketing. Uh, but today we're gonna be talking a little bit different. We're gonna be talking about cold email marketing, which I can't wait to hear more about, especially nowadays in 2026. Uh welcome, Adam. Thanks so much for joining me.
SPEAKER_00Kendra, thanks for having me.
Why Cold Email Still Works
SPEAKER_01So, how did you get into email marketing? I'm dying to know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, ever since I was a little boy, I remember on the playground when I was six years old. I dreamed of starting a cold email marketing agency like everybody does. Um, I it's it's the business thing. Exactly. Then it was I want to play in the MBA, but first was definitely I want to be the CEO of a cold email marketing agency. Well, one thing I've learned, even just being on my entrepreneurial
Adam’s Path To Cold Email
SPEAKER_00journey, is that you don't necessarily select the business you should run. The business you should run typically selects you. So for me, I started my first company uh right as I was graduating from my MBA. So about three weeks before I graduated, I started what ended up becoming my first company. I had that business for about five years, selling that company back in 2019. And we did a million things wrong with that startup. But the one thing we always did exceptionally well was getting new customers. So we landed the biggest brands in the world: Amazon, Apple, Goldman, Disney, BlackRock, Bank of America, you name it, in almost all through cold email. How we raised money was through cold email. How we ended up finding the company that bought my startup was through cold email. How the overwhelming majority of our 100,000 users signed up on our platform was through cold email. Uh, so when I sold that company, I started to buy startups. And one of those startups I was advising said, Hey, Adam, my head of sales is struggling to get meetings on the books. Can you help? So, anyway, that's where we started. Uh, we got our first customer back in 2021 to start email outreach company. And now we're closing in our 200th customer about five years later.
SPEAKER_01It's that's so impressive, right? I mean, just think about the power of email. And then cold email. I mean, I run a marketing agency, but in addition to that, I teach at um a local university here in Metro Detroit. And sometimes I can't get my students to reply to a warm email. Um, so so talk to me more about cold email marketing. How do you define cold email marketing?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the difference between more cold email and warm email, like a newsletter, for example, is opt-in versus not opting in. So cold email, this person is not necessarily signing up to receive your emails. They may or may not want to hear from you. You know, you may be scraping their contact from one of the many different sources out there, and then you're sending them an email with the hopes of some type of CTA, which at least in my world is typically, hey, you have 10 minutes to chat. Uh, so cold
Cold Email Basics And CAN-SPAM
SPEAKER_00email is a little bit more challenging than somebody who's opting in, like one of your students. So you have to be especially talented to cut through the noise uh to make sure that this person says, you know what? Sure, Kendra, I'll give you 10 minutes of my time. Let's chat.
SPEAKER_01Okay. So I have some technical questions and you know, feel free to push back. How does this work in the world of like can spam, GDPR, all the things, right? Because you're supposed to have people opt in.
SPEAKER_00It's very easy to be can spam compliant. That's number one. And number two, I would just tell everybody don't worry too much about can spam.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Yeah, it is very easy to be can spam compliant. I mean, most of the systems take care of that, that right away.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's like anyone can search on Google, you know, the can spam laws. So you can follow those and boom, you're can spam compliant, but you could also do some research on all the many can spam cases out there, and you're gonna be hard to hard press to find any.
SPEAKER_01I mean, clearly you've built a humongous business off of cold email, right? Um, more than one now, right? And then helped over 200 clients now build their businesses with cold email. What's the trick or what's the the plan? Is it understanding your audience and knowing who to go after? Is it the actual email? Um, where are people leveraging cold email the best?
SPEAKER_00Well, cold email, I always try to encourage people. Like a lot of times people will silo email marketing into one bucket. Like this only works in this industry. I always like to share some of the different use cases with email to just showcase what you can do. Like the over I've been on, I don't know, 120, 130 podcasts at this point. The majority, especially in the early days, came from my team just emailing podcast hosts saying, Hey, Adam does A, B, and C. I see your podcast does D E and
Relevance First For Replies
SPEAKER_00F. Would you want to have them on your podcast? And I got on some of the biggest podcasts in the world just from cold emailing them. Uh getting new business, obviously, is the is the obvious one. Raising money, selling my company, um, getting advisors, you name it. There's a lot of different use cases because all email is at its core, is connecting party A to party B. And to your point, Kendra, the number one thing I look at with email is how can it be relevant to that person? One of the biggest mistakes people make in email, aside from the technical side, like they don't know how to set up an infrastructure, they don't know how to write good email copy that's going to cut through the spam filters, they don't know how to get high-quality lists and vet those lists to make sure it's accurate contact information. But if you push away all that stuff, it's all about relevance. Why should this person open your email? Why should they read read that second line in the email, the third line, the fourth line? Why should they book the meeting? Why should they get on the call with you? So, what is relevant about what you offer to that recipient to make them want to take their valuable time to read your email, respond to you, and hopefully book a meeting with you?
SPEAKER_01So when you're working with clients and trying to determine the best way to get started with email or cold email for them, are you starting with their offer? Are you starting with their target? What do you recommend people share with you or to determine the best way to move forward?
SPEAKER_00The goal for any company when it comes to really any marketing, but specifically on the email side, is to get to email message fit, where you can get consistent lead flow, not just on one campaign, but over months and then eventually years, of course. The goal is to get there as quickly as possible. So what's included in email message fit? One of which is deliverability, which is so much more difficult than it used to. Cutting through Google, Yahoo, you know, Microsoft,
Email Message Fit Framework
SPEAKER_00you name it, just landing in the inbox is complicated. So how do you build a significant infrastructure that allows you to email at scale? That's number one. I always said you can't hit what you can't see. So if you don't land in the inbox, you're done. Then number two is what's your offer? How do you pair that offer into good copy that's going to cut through the noise? My industry, there's probably more emails that are in every single one of your inboxes right now that's listening that says, hey, we can book you a million meetings next week or you get your money back, right? So how do I cut through the noise of all those other companies, some of which are legit, other of which are not so legit, that are in all of our inboxes right now? So what is the offer that I could present that makes someone want to speak to me versus my competitors? Then it's the list. How can you create high-quality lists that's relevant? So, for example, if you sell a certain type of software to talent acquisition professionals, how can you make sure that when this certain signal happens in their company or with that individual person that they get an email from you instantly because now the timing is perfect versus maybe a month ago it wasn't perfect. So it's all about deliverability, it's all about copy or offer, and then it's all about the list. If you can do those three things well, you should be able to email well and do it at scale.
SPEAKER_01Deliverability has been a major issue, right? There, I mean, there's things that go into my spam folder that I want. And I'm constantly there fishing it out because it's just, yeah, it's crazy. Um how much they're they're flagging things as spam. And it's like, no, no, no, I signed up for this. No, no, no, I bought this service. Like, please send me my verification code and don't put it in junk, um, which is just crazy to me. A lot of people are talking about AI for lead generation, things like that. I've been hearing people talking about leveraging AI in like their LinkedIn for cold outreach and the DMs and things like that, um, which I don't recommend because it's a violation of LinkedIn's terms and conditions. And I've seen people get kicked out of LinkedIn for way less important offenses. So I think somebody actually got kicked out of LinkedIn because they had so many tabs open of LinkedIn because they were doing a bunch of different things that they're actually like put in like LinkedIn jail for two weeks, um, which is crazy. But my question for you though is why is cold email so much better than some of those other platforms or other directions?
SPEAKER_00It may not be for everybody. You know, like if you're great at cold calling, cold call. Like if you're great at LinkedIn, do LinkedIn. If you're great at putting up billboards in New York City and that gets you a ton of leads, put up billboards in New York City and keep getting those leads. Like I always tell people if you find a great channel that's getting you consistent lead flow and your CAC is strong, continue in that measure. Email has always been my secret weapon for the past 10 years. That's why I love it. And that's why I love to build it for our customers, because we know it works. But if you have another channel, go with that. The reason why I personally love email, though, is because one of how targeted you can get. If you're doing meta advertising, LinkedIn advertising, SEO, you name it, like you might get really good leads, or you might get really poor leads that are outside your ICP. You know, if you only want to reach out to companies that are doing $20 million or more in revenue, and you could reach out to just those folks through email. But in SEO, you might have a solo shop founder that just started that books a meeting, which I know I've had. The meetings I look forward to the least, or when I see someone books on my calendar and they just came from my website, or we're we've been named experts at tools like Clay and Instantly and others, and they'll find us on their experts page and they'll they'll book a meeting and then I'll do some research before the call. And I'm like, I'm basically just going to give a 15 to 30 minute free consulting uh feedback for these folks because I know they're not gonna be able to afford what we do. Where email, you can get pinpoint to your exact ICP, but also you're able to get rapid feedback. Like you know pretty quickly if a campaign is hitting or not. You know pretty quickly if people understand what you're trying to get across in your email. You can do such quick market development in email, which I think is very unique from other marketing channels.
SPEAKER_01I love email. You don't have to sell me on it. I'm like the huge fan. Um, always have been, ever since I saw like how well it worked. And it it um took me a while to to get into like the more to higher frequency, but I talk to people that triple their business, just increasing their email frequency. And that's just to their warm list, right? Email, it's you're showing up in someone's inbox. They have to see you, right? They take action. I just um did a um a campaign for an event ticket sales with a nonprofit, and they kept pushing, oh, we need more social media posts, we need more social media posts. So I did a huge analysis at the end. 90% of the ticket sales were sold that were that were sold not at the door, um, were sold online through the email, not through social, because people aren't always in a place to take action on social. It's just not, I view social as a way to get people on my email list, right? Um, cold email for you know, for me to get people right to have a conversation. So when people are building and moving forward with cold email, have you seen any changes in 2026? Because I think for about 20 years, now you said it's been working really well for you for 10 years, it's been working well for me for 20 plus years. People keep saying email's dead. I think they've been saying that for at least 20 years now, it feels like, right? Um, and it's definitely not dead. Um, but are you seeing any change in response rates or effectiveness since well in 2026, since email's been dead for 20 years, supposedly?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, one thing when people say that to me, Kendra, when they say, Yeah, email's dead, I say, you're right. I agree. Email is dead if you don't know what you're doing. Because to your point, the level of complexity today in 2026 is night and day, not just from what it was when I started emailing in 2014, but from what it was the first two and a half years of my agency. Like it was really in September of 2023. I remember the
Deliverability Changed After 2023
SPEAKER_00day to a T. I was in Sicily, Italy, and my business partner calls me up. He says, Adam, we got a problem. Basically, there's a big acquisition between Google Domains and Squarespace, and our bounce rate went from like 1% to 50% overnight. And everything that we did as an agency from that day to call it three to six months later, just looks almost unrecognizable, let alone what it does to what it looks like today. So the email game has changed completely. And I still will get on meetings with people who are operating like it's 2018, blasting thousands of emails a day from their primary inbox, wondering why their whole domain is toast, why every email they send is going into spam, why no one gets back to them. And it's because they're still operating like it's 2019. So the email game has changed completely. And what I've learned too is the value of a lead, not just with email marketing, but across the board, is significantly higher because it is harder to generate leads than you used to. There's more noise out there in every marketing channel, partly because of AI. And it's so easy for people to just, you know, check the box and do something and put a bunch of AI slop out there in the universe. So, because of that, us as consumers, we tense up and we kind of reject marketing than we used to. So whether it's email marketing, social media marketing, you name it, it's getting more and more challenging to get leads. So that's why you have to, you have to value each lead you get more than ever. But we get as many meetings today through email as we ever have, but the cost is definitely higher than it used to be. And the level of complexity is it's it's like getting a PhD versus like being in middle school math is what email is today versus just a few years ago.
SPEAKER_01When you were talking about the um like the domains and the the blacklisting and things like that, I mean, I started at a company in 2009 that was just doing horrible email practices, like horrible email practices. Like one person was getting 16, up to 16 emails a day from different people because they didn't police like how people sent emails and they were just like mass sending them from a system, which was just crazy. To this day, they still don't have the same domain. They had to change their email domain away from their website domain so they don't match anymore because they were blacklisted everywhere, and all of their business is done by email. It's crazy, right? When you start to think about how damaging not doing it right, not having an infrastructure that's properly set up can just stop your business in its tracks. And that's pretty serious, especially when you think about how much business you really truly do by email. So sending thousands of emails through your primary inbox is not recommended by either of us at all because it does cause some significant issues.
SPEAKER_00That's why I tell people either become an expert in email, hire an expert, or at this point, don't even email because it'll have adverse effects for you. So it's not like it was a couple of years ago where it really was kind of like the wild, wild west. It's not like that anymore.
SPEAKER_01Right. It's just, it's gotten so much stricter. I mean, some of the assumptions that I think Microsoft and Google make on my behalf really starting to annoy me. Um, just because someone else didn't like it doesn't mean I didn't, I don't like it. All right. So ultimately, you're sending emails. Um, they're sending cold emails. Are they sending emails, you know, multiple? Is it just one and done? The goal clearly for most of your clients is probably a meeting or a call, right? So that they've got lead generation. Um, or is there a goal to nurture sequences?
SPEAKER_00Or how do you look at it? For cold outbound, we typically have one primary email and then a couple of follow-ups attached to that. So
Follow-Ups And Nurture That Convert
SPEAKER_00a typical sequence is three total emails. If they don't respond to that, typically we'll put them into a new sequence uh with new messaging from new infrastructure about six weeks later. And then your other question was around nurturing. For nurturing, that's where when you get your leads, what do you do with those leads? Like our largest customer right now started by just saying, hey guys, we have all these old leads. They're one of the largest real estate development firms from a few years back, even from Facebook ads. They're like, they're dead leads. Good luck. We took those dead leads and we kept converting and converting and converting. And now they're our largest customer, and now we do cold outbound as well as nurturing, but because their sales team, admittedly, wasn't doing a good enough job of engaging with leads when they were in their system. So you think about any company that's investing money, that's investing ad dollars into getting these leads. But then maybe you reach out to them once and you don't, they don't respond and you're like, oh, they're not interested. No, you have to find the relevance. Maybe timing isn't right today, but maybe in three weeks or in three months it is. But you have to stay top of mind. If you fail to do that, your competitor, I almost guarantee, will be. And who do you think they're gonna choose? The person that they already forgot about because you haven't emailed them in three months, or the other company that's been emailing them, you know, every 10 days with something relevant to them. And now the timing is right. Who are they gonna give the shot to?
SPEAKER_01Relevance, frequency, all good things. And they come through with email marketing. Again, I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of email marketing. Reaching people in the inbox is um a great place to find people and to connect with them in a way where they're in a place to take action, right? So um very cool stuff. So if somebody wanted to start working with you, um, where do they go? Or what do they look for? Or or how do they self, how should they self-select if they're looking to work with your agency? And we'll have uh information in the show notes on how to get in touch with you. But I don't want anybody setting up meetings if uh if they're gonna be a waste of your time.
SPEAKER_00Well, anyone listening to this wouldn't be a waste of my time. Cause what I always say, whenever I get in these podcasts, like I give everyone who's listening so much credit, genuinely, because there are a million and one things that we can do to feed ourselves junk food every single day. So the fact that you were listening to Kendra and the Imperfect Marketing Podcast shows that you are someone who is a learner and a grower. And I love to just connect to those types of people, period. Um, so you genuinely would not be wasting my time if you booked meetings with me. Um, but you can check us out at ecworks.com. And most of our customers say, look, we don't want to deal with anything related to email. Just do it all for us. Just book the meetings and let us show up to those calls. But if you're someone who's like, look, I just want to learn about email marketing, we have masterminds you can join. We have consulting options for you. We have DIY hybrid setups for you. So we do have something for that early stage solo shop founder. Uh, and then we have the options for more of the product market fit type of companies that just need more meetings and uh can make the sales that we book for them.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Thank you. So definitely check that out and connect. Um, now, before I let you go, Adam, I do have to ask you the question that I ask all of my guests. And that is that this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Marketing is anything but a perfect science. What's been your biggest marketing lesson learned along the way?
SPEAKER_00You have to be patient. You have to be patient. Some marketing is going to work incredibly well. Other marketing is going to be a swing and a miss. The best business, the best leaders I've learned
Patience And Final Takeaways
SPEAKER_00from, period, are people who look at the ROI, of course, hold people and vendors and employees and themselves accountable, of course, but also are patient. I've worked with other companies in the past in the past, or even currently, that you don't get results in the first 10 days and they cut it, or they cut it right before things really were about to take off for them. And they just go to the next vendor and then they had the same problem. They go to the next one, the next one, the next one. And then they find themselves in the same position 18 months from now where they feel like nothing is working. So you have to be patient when it comes to marketing and know that not everything is going to be a home run. But if you learn from the breadcrumbs that you get from any type of marketing you do, you are going to grow and you're going to get closer and closer to, in my case, email message fit.
SPEAKER_01I just had a meeting with a client and we've been working on email marketing with them, um, nurture sequences mostly, um, for the last um, I would say it's gotta be a year now. It's funny because like people are engaging with her email. There was somebody who joined her email list five years ago. Five years ago, sat there patiently, like started to see things show up once a week in her inbox now, kept it top of mind. She's ready to act and is probably one of the quickest, largest deals that she has done because they were primed to do it. And now is the right time and they were there. And I think that patience is so important. It's so hard, right? When you've got bills to pay and things to do and dreams that you want to fulfill. But I think that patience is a really, really important key part. Thank you so much for all your time today, Adam. I do appreciate it. Hopefully, all of you listening and watching got something out of this too. If you did, it would really help us out if you would rate and subscribe wherever you're listening and watching. Until next time, have a great rest of your day.
