Cold calling or cold email?

Calling and emailing are often set against each other as if there is a winner. There is not, but there is a clear difference in cost per conversation, in reach per week and in the rules you have to follow. Below, the numbers side by side.

The short answer

Cold email is by far the cheapest per company reached and scales without hiring people. Calling gets you a real conversation faster and works better for a complex offer, but you pay for every hour on the phone and it only scales by buying more hours.

US market ranges from published pricing guides: Cleverly on B2B lead generation agency costs (cold email retainers) and Prospeo on cold call outsourcing (calling retainers, pay-per-meeting prices, dials and connect rates), checked on 4 October 2026. We did not find UK ranges we could verify, so we leave those out. Our own cost per meeting in a campaign for a software company came to €134.

Cost per conversation

With calling you pay for time. Published US benchmarks put a rep at 150 to 250 dials a day, with 5 to 10 percent of those dials reaching a person. Agencies charge a monthly retainer or a fee per meeting for that. That amount is fairly stable: whether you want ten or a hundred meetings, the price per meeting barely moves.

With email you pay for capacity, and the price per conversation drops as your target group gets bigger and more sharply defined. In our own campaign for a software company, €5,085 in campaign investment produced 38 qualified meetings, so €134 per meeting, and €84,000 in pipeline. That same calculation can come out three times worse with a poorly defined target group, because the list determines the result more than the copy.

Reach per week

This is the difference most people underestimate. A caller spends the day dialing, and most dials never reach the person they are meant for. An email campaign on our Scale package approaches 500 companies per day, seven days a week, so 15,000 emails per month to around 5,000 companies.

That also makes email the only channel you can test with. With five segments side by side, you see within a month which segment replies. In one of our campaigns of 18,594 contacts, the reply rate per segment ranged from 2.3 to 7.8 percent with exactly the same copy. On the phone it takes months before you know something like that reliably.

When calling wins

There are situations where the phone is simply the better channel.

• Your target group is small. Below a few hundred companies, you might as well call them all. Email needs volume to learn anything.
• Your offer cannot be explained in four sentences. If the proposition needs context, a drawing or a demonstration, you lose that in a cold email.
• Your customer value is high and your market is known. With a handful of large accounts and a long sales cycle, personal contact is worth more than reach.
• Your target group hardly reads email. In some sectors the decision-maker is out in the field all day.

The rules differ

Calling and emailing fall under different rules in both countries.

United States. Live business-to-business calls are largely exempt from the National Do Not Call Registry rules in the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule. Since 2024 the rule's ban on misrepresentations does apply to B2B calls, so what you say on the call has to be true. Separately, under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, autodialed or prerecorded calls and texts to a mobile number need the person's consent, and many business contacts only have a mobile number. State laws can add their own requirements.

United Kingdom. You may make live marketing calls to businesses, but you must first screen every number against both the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) and the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS), plus your own do-not-call list. Sole traders and some partnerships register with the TPS. Automated marketing calls need specific consent. You must show your number and say who is calling.

What applies to cold email in both countries is in is cold email legal in the US and UK. We set up campaigns to be business-focused and relevant, with a clear opt-out option, and process opt-outs immediately. For your specific situation, legal advice is appropriate.

Sources: FTC amendments to the Telemarketing Sales Rule, Federal Register, 16 April 2024, FCC on robocalls and consent and ICO guidance on telephone marketing, accessed 4 October 2026.

Both, in this order

The combination works better than either channel alone, but only in the right order. Email broadly first, see which segments reply, and use the phone on the companies that opened, clicked or replied without saying yes. Then you call warm instead of cold, and the number of calling minutes per meeting drops sharply.

Anyone who does it the other way round pays for the most expensive hours to find out which segment is interesting. Email answers that question in a month for a fraction of the money.

Frequently asked questions