The Cold Email Playbook

PECR, the UK's rules on electronic marketing, treats emailing a company differently from emailing a person. Get the difference right before the list goes anywhere near a campaign.

Since 5 February 2026, the ICO can fine up to £17.5 million or 4% of global turnover, whichever is higher, for breaking these rules. Its business-to-business guidance is under review after the Data (Use and Access) Act, so check the page before each new campaign.

This is what we follow, not legal advice. ICO: one year on from the Data (Use and Access) Act

When an email reads like a sales deck, prospects delete it to protect their calendar. When it is three or four lines highlighting one specific operational headache and asking a simple question, they reply.

We get our best return when we focus on a specific event or moment that's coming up, like a webinar or a conference. It gives you somewhere to focus your attention, and a reason to reach out. One of our best campaigns was for a client with a conference coming up: we did lots of pre-work, then cold emailed the people we felt fitted his ICP.

Early on, longer emails outlining our full service got buried. Response rates jumped the moment we stripped the copy down to under 60 words. In a separate campaign in September 2026, that structure booked five new business meetings from cold email alone, in a single day, for one of our clients.

When it's completely cold, keep the focus on the pain, and only use personalisation if it's good personalisation. Go into your inbox now and you'll probably see loads of emails that just don't hit the mark. If you're going to personalise, really think about it, and look at a tool like Claude to dig a bit deeper. We've also been testing Lavender, which helps us score our emails.

The subject line

A few words about them, written the way a colleague would write it. No hype, no fake “Re:”, nothing the email doesn't deliver.

Open rates stopped meaning much once Apple Mail Privacy Protection arrived. It loads an email's images privately in the background when the message arrives, and stops senders seeing whether you opened it. Your tool logs an open that may never have been a person.

For a sense of scale, Instantly's 2026 benchmark puts the average reply rate across its platform at 3.43% of emails sent. That's every reply, good and bad, from a vendor's own customers, so treat it as a rough marker, not a target.

We run cold email for B2B teams from sending domains we set up, warm and keep healthy, in their name, alongside LinkedIn and cold calling, and nothing goes out without their OK. If you'd rather we ran it, book a call and we'll show you what it would look like for you.

Who wrote this

Chris May

Co-Founder, JumpLead

Twenty-plus years in sales: ten of them leading sales teams and five leading a business, most recently as Managing Director of graduate-jobs.com. He has run straight new-business desks through to account-managed teams, and co-founded JumpLead with Joe.

Joe Stone

Co-Founder, JumpLead

Fifteen years in UK B2B sales, every seat. In my last role at TopScore I closed £1m+ in new business across 20 clients in 2.5 years. I co-founded JumpLead with Chris May to run outbound for UK B2B companies, as part of their team. Chris and I write I Love Sales about what the numbers actually say.