What is account-based cold email, and how do you score a company's temperature?

Account-based cold email treats a company as the unit of outreach. You contact several people at one account, and what any of them does counts toward a single picture of that company. Account temperature turns that picture into a number you can sort by, so the first rows of your morning list are the companies that answered.

The method has limits, and they are worth knowing before you build on it. A temperature measures reaction to your emails. It does not measure whether a company has budget, and a quiet account may simply be busy.

How is account-based cold email different from a normal sequence?

A normal sequence follows one contact at a time. Account-based outreach follows the company. Four things change:

• One row per company. Everyone you wrote to is a child of the account.
• Shared stop rules. A reply from one person should pause the others.
• Combined signals. A click from a junior contact and a reply from a manager belong to the same story.
• A plan per account. The question becomes what to do with Atlas this week.

How do you run it?

1. Choose the accounts. Write the criteria down before you build the list: industry, size, region, a trigger you can verify.
2. Map the people. Pick the few roles at each company who have a say in the purchase, and avoid emailing everyone with a similar title.
3. Group by company on import. A domain works for most lists. Give separate company names to branches that share a domain.
4. Send one sequence with company-level stop rules. When one person replies, the rest pause.
5. Read results per company. Count companies that replied, and treat several people clicking in one week as a stronger sign than one click.
6. Follow up by hand on the warm accounts. Use the score to choose who to call first.

How do you score a company's temperature?

Give every event a weight, let old events fade and add up everyone at the company. anymail follows this model, and the numbers below are its current settings.

A positive reply is a reply that the classifier marks as interested. The weights are tuned over time, and the order matters more than the exact figures: a reply outranks a click, and a click outranks silence.

How does time change the score?

Each event loses half its weight every 4 days. A click today counts 2, in 4 days it counts 1 and in 8 days it counts 0.5. Events older than four weeks are left out of the sum. A company that went quiet cools down by itself, without anyone resetting anything.

Here is an illustration with made-up numbers. At one company, a person clicked 2 days ago and another person sent a positive reply today. The reply counts 5. The click counts 2 multiplied by about 0.71, which is roughly 1.4. The company scores about 6.4.

What does the scale mean?

The temperature bar is full at 10. In anymail a company at 6 or above reads as Hot, from 2 to just under 6 as Warm and below 2 as Cold. A company with no events in the window reads as No signal, because missing data is different from a cold response. A negative total, such as a bounce with nothing else, draws an empty bar with a minus sign.

The home screen lists companies as warming up when they gained at least 2 points compared with a week earlier and sit at 2 or more now. That list is a quick answer to who to look at today.

What are the limits of a temperature score?

Three limits apply:

1. It reflects your sending only. A company that never saw your email has no signal, and that says nothing about interest.
2. Small numbers are noisy. One click is one data point. Wait for a pattern, such as two people from one account active in the same week.
3. Security scanners can add clicks. Filter clicks that arrive seconds after the send, and read the person and date behind each event before you call.

How does anymail do it?

anymail groups every contact by company and computes one temperature per company from the clicks, replies and offer visits of everyone you contacted there. Each temperature opens into the events behind it, with the person and the date, so you can check why a company sits where it does. The list is sorted by temperature, with the warmest account first. The weights and the fade are described on the temperature page.