Do I need to upload a list of contacts?

No. You paste your website and the agent finds matching companies and decision-makers itself, verifying each email address before anything is sent.

Does it send from my own domain?

No. Outreach is sent from warmed lookalike domains we operate on your behalf, so your real domain's email deliverability is never put at risk.

Prepaid credits, no subscription. Sending an email costs about $0.03 and verifying a contact about $0.01. New accounts start with $30 in credits.

Is cold email legal in the EU?

Business-to-business outreach is permitted in most EU countries under legitimate interest, provided the message is relevant to the recipient's role and opting out is easy. Pipestork includes a one-click unsubscribe and a postal address in every email, and blocks countries that require prior consent, including Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland.

Is cold email worth it for agencies when most work comes from referrals?

Referrals are better business but they are not a pipeline you control, and they dry up in exactly the quarters you need them. Cold email works for agencies as the predictable layer underneath referrals — but it needs a narrow positioning to work at all. Generalist agency cold email performs badly.

How specific should agency targeting be?

One category, one problem. An agency emailing "B2B companies" gets ignored; an agency emailing "DTC skincare brands spending over £20k a month on Meta" gets replies, because the email can then say something true that a generalist cannot.

Cold email by industry · marketing agencies

Cold email for marketing and creative agencies

Agencies have the hardest version of this problem: you are cold-emailing people who write marketing for a living. Every template tell you have picked up, they use themselves. The upside is that agency deal sizes make a single reply worth a lot of sending, so a low reply rate on a well-targeted list still pays.

Who you are actually selling to

Head of Marketing / CMO: At companies of 50-500. Below that the founder is the buyer; above that you are dealing with procurement and an incumbent roster.
Brand or Category Manager: Often has discretionary budget for a project without needing a full agency review — the realistic way in at an enterprise.
Founder: Under 50 people, and the fastest path from email to signed. Also the most price-sensitive.

The trigger worth waiting for

A rebrand, a new CMO, a product launch, or — the most reliable one — a competitor of theirs doing something visible. Agencies win work when someone internally has just been asked a question they cannot answer.

What works

+Showing rather than describing: one link to work you did in their category, not a capabilities deck.
+A narrow claim. "We do performance creative for DTC skincare" beats "full-service digital agency" by a wide margin in a cold inbox.
+Naming the specific thing you noticed about their marketing. It has to be real — a marketer will spot a generic compliment faster than anyone.
+Writing it the way you would write to a peer. Agency prospects judge the email itself as a work sample, because it is one.

What fails

−"I had a look at your website and noticed a few things we could improve" — the single most-sent agency opener in existence.
−Attaching a deck to a first email. It reads as mass-sent and it triggers spam filters.
−Offering a free audit before establishing why you specifically. Everyone offers a free audit.

A worked opener

Subject

your Meta creative vs. the Lumin ads

Body

Your paid social is running the same three product stills that were live in March — meanwhile Lumin has cycled through about forty creative variants in the same window. We make performance creative for skincare brands at that cadence. Two recent examples: [link]. If creative volume is the constraint rather than budget, worth a conversation?

Why it works: Specific, checkable, and slightly uncomfortable — it names a real gap against a named competitor. The link does the credentialing so the email stays short.

Compliance notes

Agency prospecting is B2B by definition, so a legitimate-interest basis normally applies in the EU and UK. Be careful with sole traders and one-person consultancies: in several jurisdictions a sole trader's address is treated as personal data, which raises the bar. Keep unsubscribes instant and permanent — marketers are the most likely group to publicly complain about a badly run sequence.

Questions

Is cold email worth it for agencies when most work comes from referrals?: Referrals are better business but they are not a pipeline you control, and they dry up in exactly the quarters you need them. Cold email works for agencies as the predictable layer underneath referrals — but it needs a narrow positioning to work at all. Generalist agency cold email performs badly.
How specific should agency targeting be?: One category, one problem. An agency emailing "B2B companies" gets ignored; an agency emailing "DTC skincare brands spending over £20k a month on Meta" gets replies, because the email can then say something true that a generalist cannot.

Have the agents do this for you

Everything on this page is what a good marketing agencies campaign needs someone to work out. Pipestork works it out from your website — the profile, the companies, the decision-makers, the sequences — and sends from warmed mailboxes, not your domain.

Try it with $30 in credits →