Cold AI Emails vs Cold AI Calls: Which is More Effective for Your Sales?

“If you build it, they will come.” 

That’s what people like to say, but you might have learned that it’s not always true. Even the most revolutionary product can run into zero sales.

Marketing a product can be just as demanding as building it. And in order to spread the word about your solution, you’ll likely need to send out unsolicited messages. 

However, are cold calls or cold emails still useful for effective sales outreach?

What is cold calling?

Cold calling is making unsolicited phone calls to prospective customers, hoping to sell them your product or service. It’s one of the oldest forms of telemarketing, so you’re probably familiar with the concept. 

Here’s the real question – Is cold calling as effective as it used to be?

Wilbur You started YouTech by making 100 cold calls each day. Two weeks later, he landed two projects, planting the seeds for what would become a successful digital marketing agency. 

This was 2012. 

Fast-forward to 2024, and top executives are still singing praises for cold calling. 

Chris Ritson, co-founder of The SDR Leader, asserted that calling is 4.5x more powerful than writing because you get to use your tone of voice. 

Then there’s Emerald Maravilla, the director of sales development at Snowflake, who revealed that they put a lot of emphasis on improving the cold-calling skills of their team. 

However, their cold calls frequently ended in rejection as they involved contacting people who had never expressed interest in their offer. Out of 5,265 calls, only 254 led to booked meetings. 

To succeed, sales teams must invest plenty of effort. Nowadays, this is a bit easier as salespeople can use AI tools like voice assistants to make calls without taking coffee breaks or getting emotionally drained by rejections.

What are cold AI calls?

Cold AI calls leverage voice assistants that use speech recognition and natural language processing to run human-like conversations. Sales teams can use AI to initiate contact with prospects, gather lead data, and deliver pitches. 

Pros of cold AI calls

• Efficient workflows – Voice assistants streamline sales processes by automating repeated and time-consuming tasks.
• Accelerated sales cycles – AI assistants call more prospects and speed up the process, pushing leads down the pipeline faster.

Cons ​​of cold AI calls 

• Privacy concerns – AI assistants collect large amounts of data, which can raise concerns about the security of sensitive information.
• Lack of a human touch – AI phone calls can feel impersonal, and unnatural speech patterns may prompt leads to hang up. 

AI voice assistants are so powerful that you may be wondering whether they’re out to replace human sales representatives. 

As Ken Corbit, academic director at Texas Christian University Sales Center, pointed out, AI can never replace the human ability to understand complex needs and build personal connections. It’s just a tool to handle the heavy lifting of routine sales processes and customer interactions, which frees human sales reps to focus on relationship building and address more complex issues like the privacy concerns we just mentioned. 

What is cold emailing?

Cold emails initiate contact with prospects to establish connections and drive sales. However, since cold emails are unsolicited, they are more likely to end up in spam or never be opened at all. The good news is that with the right tactics, you can stop your emails from going to spam, while open rates can shoot up to 24%. 

One of the go-to strategies is personalizing emails and crafting messages that resonate with recipients. But this can make the process much more time-consuming, which is why it’s sometimes outsourced to specialized SDR agencies. Fortunately, AI technology has stepped up, taking over repetitive tasks without compromising quality.

What are cold AI emails?

Cold AI emails use personalization and writing tools to research lead data, create campaigns, and send emails. They leverage generative AI to craft human-sounding messages. 

Pros of cold AI emails

• Impactful email content – Written by AI in a matter of seconds, these cold emails can still be persuasive and human-sounding. AI can sort through large amounts of data to understand the intent and the target audience, adopting a tone that resonates. 
• Error-free messages – AI-powered cold emails avoid typical human errors, such as typos and grammar mistakes that a tired eye can easily miss. 
• At-scale personalization – Emails written and sent by AI in bulk can still have personalized details that resonate with recipients. AI personalization tools make this possible by dividing the audience into segments and tailoring sales emails to each one. 

Cons of cold AI emails

• Lack of a human touch – AI can never fully replace human empathy and creativity. 
• Need for a large dataset – AI email assistants work best if they have a large body of evidence and several examples of good emails to pull from.
• Privacy concerns – AI tools use customer data to create and personalize sales messages. If you’re worried about how data is used and by whom, it’s a good idea to discuss it with the AI provider.

To balance the pros and cons, sales teams can delegate repetitive tasks to AI tools while routinely checking and tweaking email campaigns to add a human touch. 

Cold call vs cold email: Which is more effective?

Even as AI-powered voice assistants speed up the process, sales calls still mean dialing one number and speaking with one person at a time. Email campaigns, meanwhile, can reach hundreds of recipients in a single click. 

Emails can also bring up to 24% open rates, while cold calls can only see a success rate of 4.82%.

The jury is in. 

Cold emails are more effective and efficient than cold calls, but that doesn’t mean they should be your only tool.

Combining cold calling and cold emailing

A good outreach strategy finds a way to blend email and calls. That’s because combining both tactics can create a powerful, multi-touch sales approach that increases your chances of connecting with leads.

Here’s how:

• Increased reach and engagement – Different people prefer different communication channels. Sure, the majority might prefer email, but some would rather talk over the phone. By using both, you cover more ground.
• Enhanced lead qualification – Cold calling is a chance for real-time interaction, immediate feedback, and the ability to assess a lead’s interest. Cold emails can support cold calls by setting the stage with information that can make calls more meaningful.
• Greater familiarity – Consistent outreach through calls and emails keeps your business top-of-mind, building brand recognition to help turn cold leads into warm ones.

AiSDR as a scalable solution for effective email campaigns

Here are five ways AiSDR can help your SDRs automate their work and grow your outreach using cold emails:

• Content generation – Powered by generative AI, AiSDR’s email writer can craft human-sounding outreach emails in less than five seconds. 
• Lead qualification – AiSDR can go through your contacts to find qualified leads. Simply upload your spreadsheet or link your HubSpot, specify your criteria, and let the AI do its magic. 
• Audience segmentation – AiSDR allows you to segment your target audience by filtering leads by specific attributes, including hiring intent. 
• Email personalization – AiSDR can tailor your outbound emails and responses based on the recipients’ pain points, job titles, industries, and other key attributes. It also offers a database of over 700 million professional contacts, providing access to countless fresh leads. 
• Lead nurturing – AiSDR excels at speaking to customers in your voice and nurturing them to a decision. Every conversation is made more meaningful as AiSDR users every lead’s three most recent LinkedIn posts to tailor emails. The tool also sends contextualized follow-ups and quickly responds to incoming queries.

As an AI with many hats, AiSDR speeds up your sales processes while stopping deals from slipping through cracks in your sales funnel.