{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The GTM Engineer Podcast","title":"AI Made Cold Email Worse ft. Michael Gardiner","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":892,"description":"In today's episode, I chat with Michael, founder at DFY Meetings, about why channel selection is the diagnosis most cold email agencies skip entirely—and why he regularly talks clients out of cold email and into direct mail or Upwork depending on how competitive their category actually is. His framework is straightforward: the more crowded the outreach landscape for a given offer, the more unique the channel needs to be, which is why a bulldozer rental company can still crush it on cold email while a web dev agency has basically no room to stand out there but can own Upwork or direct mail. On segmentation, he breaks it into two types—logical segments (target companies hiring Salesforce developers if you do Salesforce dev) and personal segments (you're an e-commerce agency and an avid mountain biker, so let's go after mountain bike brands and mention it)—both of which get you most of the personalization benefit without burning API credits or hiring writers. The campaign story that stands out most is the direct mail play: handwritten cards, personalized or joke gifts tied to a specific angle, sent to a dream 100 list, followed up by email and phone. One example was sending a branded piggy bank with a note about all the money they were about to make together. No one does it, almost no one will start doing it because it's expensive and painful, and the conversion rate is accordingly ridiculous. Michael's backstory runs through Instagram page networks in high school, a first exit before graduation, a VA agency he built in Bangladesh and sold, another VA business with an international team he also sold, and finally DFY Meetings—all four grown on cold outbound, which is exactly why the agency works. His prediction: cold email isn't dying, costs are just rising the way Google Ads and Facebook Ads costs rose before it, and the real problem isn't that more people are good at it but that more people are in it making noise without being good at it. His advice for anyone...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/_OACHDe9ElXR9DTbOLoP4tR2qTxfhcBnxoBX4sm6BJ4/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8yOGJi/ZGE0ZmU3YmNhNjhm/ZDg0NGRiNTFmMmIw/NzEwNC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}