This is the cold email plan we'd run for an SEO content agency that wins rankings with articles and guides for one industry. It covers the signals that show a company needs content and the offer that gets them to reply and the emails word for word. Run it yourself or have us run it for you.
Content agencies do well with cold email when these things are true.
Your total market is every company in your industry that sells something people search for before they buy. For a software content agency that is every software company in its category. For an accounting content agency it is every firm big enough to want clients from outside its own town.
Narrow that to your ideal client before you build anything. Write down their size and the services they sell and the ones they want more of.
Content agencies get one gift in cold email. A company's blog shows exactly how much effort goes into content and anyone can read it in a minute. These are the signals worth looking for.
The date on the newest post tells the story. A company that posted every week and then stopped lost the person or the budget behind it.
Put the blog into Ahrefs or Semrush and look at search traffic by page. A long list of posts with almost no search traffic means they write about the wrong things.
Run a content gap in Ahrefs or Semrush against their closest competitor. It lists the topics the competitor ranks for and they don't.
A blog full of award announcements and team photos is not built to rank. Nobody searches for those posts.
Crunchbase shows new funding rounds. A company with fresh money and a new product needs buyers to find it and search is where those buyers start.
A content writer job on LinkedIn or Indeed means content is a priority this year. An agency can start next week and a new hire takes months to find.
Split the market by what the blog tells you. Each group gets its own first line.
Lead with the date of the last post and the topics that would have kept it going.
Lead with their post count next to their search traffic. The gap makes the case without you saying much.
Name the competitor and a few of the topics it ranks for that this company never covered.
Lead with the launch and the searches buyers make before they find a product like theirs.
A software content agency should split its list by software category. Payroll software and security software have different buyers and different searches and the emails should show it.
For a content agency the best lead magnet is the content plan itself. It is useful the moment they open it. The only question left after reading it is who writes it.
Ten article titles picked from the content gap against their closest competitor. Each title shows the search it targets and the monthly volume. Ahrefs or Semrush finds the gap and a person picks the ten that fit the company.
It works because it is specific to them and it is exactly the work you sell. A plan with no writer is a problem you already solve.
The five posts already on their blog that sit closest to page one and what each one is missing. These are pages they already own that need a better draft.
It works because the fix is cheap and fast. Once they see how close those posts are the next step is asking you to finish the job.
Content is easy to prove because the work is right there on the page. Give them one piece and let them judge it.
Take the top title from their plan and write the full article in their voice. Hand it over ready to publish and charge nothing.
It works because it is the exact product they would buy every month. If they publish it and like it the retainer is simply more of the same.
Deliver it within a week of the call. A draft that shows up on time says more about your agency than any pitch.
For companies with a big blog. Rewrite the post closest to page one and send it back with the changes marked so they can see what you did.
Keep emails under 100 words. Open with something you saw on their blog and close with a question they can answer in one word. Send from a person and not from the agency.
Hi {{first_name}},
The last post on the {{company}} blog went up in {{last_post_month}}.
We write content for {{industry}} companies only. I mapped out the next 10 posts I'd publish for {{company}} and the search each one goes after.
Want me to send it over?
{{sender_first_name}}
Hi {{first_name}},
{{competitor}} ranks for {{gap_count}} topics that {{company}} has never written about. A few of them get real search volume every month.
I pulled the full list and picked the 10 worth writing first.
Useful?
{{sender_first_name}}
Hi {{first_name}},
We write articles for {{industry}} companies that rank and bring in buyers.
{{proof_line}}
Worth a conversation?
{{sender_first_name}}
Swap {{proof_line}} for one real result of your own. An article you wrote and where it ranks now. If there is no result yet then leave the line out.
Two or three follow ups in the same thread and three to five days apart.
The person who owns content at a small company is usually the founder or the head of marketing. At a bigger one it is the content lead or the marketing director.
Reply inside the hour. Two sentences and two times for a call is enough.
Results depend on the offer and the list. Three outbound agencies that publish their own numbers land between one booked meeting per 1,000 people contacted and one per 2,000. One of them also tested 650,000 cold emails with a plain offer and got about 3 to 6 interested replies per 10,000 people.
Those are other people's numbers and not a promise about your market. Your market's number only comes from testing it.
We build and run this campaign for one agency per industry.
Thirty minutes on your market and how we'd reach it.