MCP

Campaign types and use cases

TL;DR

  • Sales outreach is the default the whole literature is written for. Most of it transfers to the other types, but not all of it.
  • The variable that changes most between types is what you are asking for and how much it costs the recipient to say yes.
  • Recruiting and partnership outreach usually earn higher reply rates than sales — a targeting and self-interest effect, not a copy effect.

Sales outreach

The baseline case: reaching a potential buyer to start a commercial conversation. Everything in Offer and messaging and Writing the email is calibrated for it, and it is the hardest version, because the recipient's default assumption is that you want money from them.

Partnership and business development

You are proposing something mutual, which changes the emotional starting point: the recipient is evaluating a trade rather than defending against a pitch. Two adjustments follow. Be concrete about what they get in the first three lines, because a vague "explore synergies" reads exactly like a sales email wearing a disguise. And target by fit rather than by volume — partnership lists should be small enough that every name is defensible.

Recruiting

Reaching candidates who are not looking. The asymmetry is favorable: people are interested in their own careers in a way they are not interested in your software, and relevance is easy to demonstrate because their public work is the personalization. The failure mode is the generic template that could have gone to any engineer, which is read as an insult rather than as noise.

Note that recruiting outreach can fall under different rules than commercial marketing in some regimes, and under the same rules in others — worth checking rather than assuming (Staying legal in a nutshell).

The ask is small — a link, a mention, a quote — but the recipients are the most heavily solicited population in this list, and their spam tolerance is correspondingly low. The one well-known large-corpus study of outreach at this scale is drawn from this population rather than from sales, which is worth remembering whenever you see its numbers quoted as general cold-email findings [1]. Its own headline result is the one that generalises best: multiple touches roughly doubled response versus a single send.

Press and analyst outreach

Journalists receive more pitches than anyone and decide in seconds. The whole email has to be the story rather than a request to talk about the story, and timing beats everything — Triggers and timing.

Fundraising and investor outreach

A small, highly targeted list where a referral path almost always outperforms a cold approach. Use cold email to find the warm route rather than to pitch — the referral motion in Referrals and "not now" applies directly.

What actually transfers

Across all of them: the list decides the ceiling, one clear ask beats three, follow-ups produce a large share of replies, and the opt-out duty is identical regardless of how commercial the message feels. What does not transfer is the benchmark. A 3% reply rate is respectable in sales outreach and poor in recruiting, so compare a campaign against its own type and its own history rather than against a published average — Benchmarks.

References

  1. Brian Dean — Email outreach study (12M-email study with Pitchbox, 2019)