This Weird Outreach Method Books 1 in 5 Prospects
Michael Gardiner joins Alex Godlewski on Behind The Offer to break down cold email, B2B outreach, lead generation, and one weird outreach strategy that gets 1 in 5 prospects to book.
Michael has spent years building cold email systems for B2B businesses, and in this conversation we go deep into what actually works in outbound sales today, what most people get wrong, and how businesses can consistently turn cold prospects into qualified sales opportunities.
We also explore the bigger picture of modern lead generation: cold email, direct outreach, sales automation, appointment setting, and how AI is changing the way businesses acquire and convert customers.
One of the craziest strategies Michael shares has nothing to do with sending more automated emails. It involves real, physical mail and achieves an insane 1-in-5 booking rate.
If you are building an agency, SaaS company, high-ticket offer, or B2B sales operation, this episode is packed with practical ideas around cold outreach, client acquisition and building predictable lead generation systems.
The short version
- Michael Gardiner's best direct mail campaign books 1 in 5 recipients into a call. His worst books 1 in 25, which still beats his cold email.
- The funnel is a personalised gift, a letter explaining the outreach, a QR code to a custom landing page, then a short cold email asking whether the package arrived.
- Cold email got harder because it got cheaper: sending tools now cost around $100 a month, so more people send and fewer people reply.
- The industries that still respond are the offline ones, such as medical devices and manufacturing. Agencies and online services are the most saturated.
- Reply rate is the deliverability signal that needs no tracking. Far under 1% usually means the inbox is landing in spam.
- Around 40% of the money Michael has made online came from a YouTube channel of roughly 5,000 subscribers.
Because it is easier to send cold emails, more people get cold emails. And because more people get cold emails, fewer people respond to cold emails.
Michael Gardiner
What they covered
Why he moved from cold email to direct mail
Michael ran direct mail back in 2014 and 2015, then dropped it and spent years building cold email systems instead. AI made cold email easier to run and harder to get results from, so he went back to physical mail. He now does it for clients and for his own agency, DFY Meetings. His argument is simple: in a world full of AI, people miss having something physical and personal.
What the direct mail funnel actually looks like
A personalised gift goes out first, often something funny or engraved with the prospect's name. A letter is attached explaining why he reached out, with a QR code pointing to a custom landing page. Some clients also print case studies into the package. When someone puts the package down and forgets it, a very short cold email follows: did you get the thing I sent you? That email is easy to answer, which is the whole point. The cost per prospect is far higher than an email, and the conversion is roughly ten times better.
The 1 in 5 number, and the worst case
His best direct mail campaign converts about one in five recipients into a booked call. His worst converts one in 25. Even the worst campaign beats what he gets from cold email, which is why the economics still work despite the cost of physical packages.
Why cold email got harder
Six years ago cold email software was expensive and billed per email address, to the point where Michael was paying over $10,000 a month in sending subscriptions. Lists were hard to build and everything took effort, so fewer people did it and results came easier. Today data is cheap, sending tools cost around $100 a month, and someone with a $300 monthly budget can reach 10,000 people. More senders means more cold email in every inbox, and fewer replies for everyone.
Which industries still respond
Marketing agencies and online services are the most saturated and the hardest to sell into. Michael's cold email clients are mostly medical devices, manufacturing and traditional businesses that do not live online. His reasoning: an ads agency can figure out cold email themselves, but a chemicals company will not, and that gap is where the results still are.
Three ways to stand out
First, sell something other people are not selling. Second, use cold email differently, with custom landing pages, custom videos, a podcast invitation or an event invite instead of another pitch. Third, do genuinely good AI personalisation. He is blunt about the third one: most people's AI-personalised cold emails look like garbage, and it only works if you know what you are doing.
Sending links without wrecking deliverability
Links hurt deliverability, and so do plenty of other things. Michael treats it as roughly 20 to 30 rules where you can break one or two if you get the rest right, as long as you plan for the consequences. He runs two sets of inboxes: one follows every rule and rarely lands in spam, the other is expected to and carries the links at lower volume, five to ten emails a day instead of 25 to 30. Burned inboxes go back into warmup for two or three weeks, or get replaced. The separation is what stops one campaign from contaminating the rest.
How to know you are in spam without open tracking
Three ways: check whether you are on a blacklist, check the health score in your sending tool, and above all watch reply rate. Reply rate needs no tracking pixel because it is simply how many people answered. Far under 1% usually means spam, and a drop from a steady 2% down to 0.5% is a signal something broke.
Why YouTube is the organic channel he would pick
Michael estimates roughly 40% of all the money he has made online came from YouTube, from a channel of about 5,000 subscribers. He argues it is comparatively AI-proof because it still requires being on camera, and that the work involved keeps it uncrowded: most niches have only a few hundred people actually publishing video. It is also how people find Grow B2B, his community, without any advertising.
Instagram as a landing page, not a content channel
He barely posts. Instagram does two jobs for him: people who watched a YouTube video but did not book a call come to his DMs with questions, and it is where he meets people online. In his words, he sees Instagram as a landing page rather than a place to publish.
What he is building next
Two goals for the next twelve months. Make direct mail the primary business, which is operationally harder than cold email because it mixes digital work with physical fulfilment. And relaunch Grow B2B so it covers client acquisition broadly, direct mail, cold email, Instagram, YouTube and Upwork, instead of cold email alone. He wants it to stay small and personal at three to five new members a month rather than turn into a high-volume community.
Want to be a guest?
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