Cold Email Vs. Cold Call: Which Is More Effective In 2025?

Cold calling and cold emailing are like old-school classics of sales outreach — always around and still going strong.

But are they equally effective in 2025? 

In this article, we’ll draw a comparison between both techniques. We’ll analyze their key differences, advantages, and disadvantages to help you decide which is better for your sales objectives.

Cold call and cold email: definition and use

Before we dive into the depth of analysis, let’s recap the meaning of these communication strategies.

Cold calling is a sales outreach tactic that started long before the Internet. It involves making unsolicited calls to people with the intent to sell them something. This technique aims to pitch your product, arrange demo meetings, and hopefully close the deal. 

Cold emailing, on the other hand, is a newer technique that emerged with the internet in the past 25 years or so. It involves emailing people to introduce your business, product, or service and help you make a sale.

🖊️Expert note: Both cold call and cold email strategies are widely used for B2B outreach. Now, you can automate and streamline this process. For example, you can automate multichannel campaigns with the Snov.io cold email tool. The software allows you to build complex sequences (cold email + follow-ups) and message hundreds of prospects simultaneously with personalized emails.  To enhance your sales strategy, we recommend implementing LinkedIn outreach in your cold email campaigns. The Snov.io LinkedIn Automation Tool perfectly syncs with your emails and creates a smooth flow that helps you increase your conversion rate. Add automated LinkedIn touches, such as connection requests, messages, and InMails. Monitor your campaign results with detailed reports: Snov.io takes extra care for your data safety: Get a dedicated proxy for each LinkedIn account you connect. Enjoy the benefits of cloud-based operation. Operate within automated limits based on your SSI. Warm up your account just like you warm up your email account.

Cold email vs cold email: common goals

Before reviewing the key differences between cold calling and cold emailing, let’s highlight the common goals these two sales techniques pursue:

1. Lead generation
2. Sales prospecting
3. Buyer interest ignition 
4. Follow-up

1. Lead generation

Both a cold email and a cold call aim to reach potential customers who may not be aware of existing products or services. They help identify whether a lead is interested and what nurturing strategy may bring them closer to purchasing.

2. Sales prospecting

As sales strategies, a cold email and a cold call involve researching and finding contact data of specific prospects. Their further outreach helps to ensure the offered product or service is relevant and tailored to their needs.

3. Buyer interest activation

Either of the sales tactics aims to establish rapport with necessary leads and ignite their interest in learning more about the product. This helps salespeople secure a follow-up conversation and proceed to a sales presentation and further funnel steps.

Regular cold calls and emails keep relationships with prospects strong, even if you don’t make a sale right away. 

4. Follow-up

Both methods create key touchpoints to nurture leads and advance the sales process. To succeed in sales, you should be prepared for a sequence of follow-up calls or emails. Your goal is to convince the prospect your solution may bring real value.

Cold calling vs cold emailing: key differences, pros and cons

Here’s a breakdown of the criteria that sets cold email and cold call strategies apart:

1. Interaction type
2. Scalability
3. Personalization 
4. Affordability
5. Message delivery
6. Lead qualification speed
7. Testing opportunities
8. Performance tracking
9. Call-to-action

1. Interaction type

A cold call is perfect for real-time conversations, allowing salespeople to connect directly with prospects. They help gauge interest, answer questions, and handle any concerns promptly.

This often leads to way quicker sales than other methods. 

Meanwhile, sales calls are often perceived as intrusive. This is why sales representatives may feel discouraged and demotivated when their calls are rejected.

Cold emailing, by contrast, lets recipients reply whenever they want, so the conversation isn’t as immediate. This makes cold emailing less pushy and allows sales reps to prepare a well-thought-out response to any prospect’s questions.

📊 What does the research say: Most buyers (80%) prefer to be contacted by email, while only 49% like receiving a call  from sellers. But don’t get discouraged if some people aren’t thrilled by your cold calls. You might be targeting the wrong folks! According to the RAIN Group research, 57% of C-level and VP clients prefer phone contact.

2. Scalability 

The efficiency of cold emailing for mass outreach is superb. Unlike cold calling, it allows you to shoot out messages to hundreds or even thousands of people in no time.

With all the email marketing automation tools available, sending out emails in bulk is a piece of cake in 2025. For example, with the Snov.io Inbox rotation feature, you may use several email accounts in a single campaign. This allows you to increase your daily volume while staying within the total sending limit.

3. Personalization

Though calling feels more personal because it is a live discussion, cold emails also offer many opportunities for personalization.

As emailing allows for delayed communication, salespeople have more time to research prospects’ needs and pain points. This data helps craft personalized messages that address each prospect’s challenge thoroughly. Similarly, they have extra time for A/B testing their email personalization level to boost response rates.

And even with preparation, cold call conversations often take unexpected turns.

🖊️Expert note: According to the HubSpot 2024 study, 49% of marketers generate email content with AI. Indeed, AI speeds up personalization, helping you tailor messages to prospects’ needs and interests. With Snov.io’s AI Email Writer, you can add a personal touch to your cold emails. This cool collaboration between Snov.io and OpenAI is already embedded into the campaign automation settings. You may either choose the in-built categories of prompts or provide your custom prompt. The AI Writer will analyze your prospect’s info and write the perfect cold email in seconds. Plus, you can easily tweak your email’s tone, fix spelling mistakes, and even translate it into 36 languages. It’s time to reach a global audience with highly personalized cold emails! In addition to AI, Snov.io offers great opportunities for bulk personalization for cold emails. For instance, advanced dynamic content variables let you program how your email changes based on particular conditions. For example, if your prospect is a sales rep, they’ll receive one version of your cold email, and if they’re a sales director, another.

4. Affordability 

Since cold emails scale easily, they are much cheaper than cold calling. Set up a cold email campaign, and it will continue to work for you. 

With cold calling, however, you need to invest human resources in every call. The more calls you make, the more people you need. That’s one of the disadvantages of cold calling — not every business can afford such expenses.

You can, of course, use automatic pre-recorded calls, but let us tell you right now—they won’t work as you’d like them to. So don’t waste your time and resources on them.

5. Message delivery

One of the main disadvantages of cold emailing, by contrast, is deliverability issues. Cold emails often get bounced, stuck in spam filters, or go to the promotions tab. A typical scenario for a sales rep is waiting weeks for a prospect to respond to their message. Meanwhile, they simply didn’t get an email in their inbox.

With a cold call, you simply dial the number and either get a response or not. After several follow-ups, you can quickly give up the idea of contacting this particular prospect. That saves much of your time, doesn’t it?

🖊️Expert note: If your cold emailing strategy ‘suffers’ from low inbox placement issues, it’s time to adopt a good deliverability software.  For example, Snov.io offers its own Email Deliverability Test embedded into the platform. It’s packed with handy features to help you land in the inbox. Handle increasing email volumes with Snov.io Email Warmup. Improve your sender reputation with Domain Health Checker and Email Placement Test. Scan your emails for potential spam words with Spam Checker. With Snov.io Deliverability Insights, you can analyze your email performance and see what needs to be optimized. ❗ Automatically analyze the tone of your prospect’s replies to assign the interest level with the Sentiment Analysis feature. Sentiment Analysis helps you automatically identify interested prospects, prioritize potential customers, and save time on less promising leads. It is perfect for large campaigns with many replies or small teams managing multiple campaigns with limited resources!

6. Lead qualification speed

Cold calling is usually the way to go if you need to qualify leads quickly. Making a live call gives you quick, direct feedback on who your leads are and how they perceive your solution. This can be super helpful for shaping your product and deciding on how a lead fits it.

Cold emailing takes a bit longer for qualifying leads. However, as you remember, they offer help to reach prospects in bulk with minimal effort. Hence, your choice between emailing and calling should depend on your lead qualification volume.

7. Testing opportunities

The key advantage of cold emails is that you can experiment with different approaches to see which resonates best with your audience. This allows you to fine-tune your follow-ups with interested leads or non-responders.

🖊️Expert note: In Snov.io Campaigns, you can test up to five variations of your email elements. You can experiment with subject lines, email lengths, value proposition, CTA, personalization level, etc. Remember: to carry out the A/B test effectively, your email list should have at least 100 prospects. In addition, it’s better to test 1 element at a time. Otherwise, you may not understand which element exactly made your cold email perform better.

Experiments are more complex with cold calls, as you can’t contact leads in bulk. You can change your approach after an unsuccessful call, but who says it will work for another lead? 

8. Performance tracking

Cold call performance is more difficult to track because of the nuances of human communication, which often require subjective evaluation. Special, robust tracking software is needed to monitor parameters such as tone of voice, objections handled, etc.

As cold call conversions may often be delayed, tracking the return on investment (ROI) for cold calling can also be tricky.

With cold emailing, you can download simple tracking extensions for Google to monitor email opens and clicks. And, unlike in cold calling, you usually don’t need a highly advanced solution to track other outreach metrics.

For example, in Snov.io Campaigns, you have an in-built Reports feature to view the email statistics:

You can analyze the effectiveness of your cold email strategy, including open rates, click-through rates, bounces, and replies, and make adjustments to improve your results.

Call-to-action 

With cold emailing, you have more time to craft targeted CTAs that will help you boost your response rates.

You can plan your cold call CTAs ahead of time, too, but there’s no guarantee they’ll work perfectly in a live conversation. Each call can become a test, and you might risk losing a customer if it doesn’t go as planned.

Well, both cold calling and cold emailing have pros and cons that you should consider while making a choice. I’ve summarized them all in the following table:

Cold call or cold email: which sales strategy should you choose?

Taking into account all differences, advantages, and disadvantages, you may still face this dilemma. Looking into the conversion rates of both strategies won’t help. On average, cold calling has a 2% conversion rate. For cold emails, this rate falls between 1 and 5% (3% on average). 

Any difference?

I doubt anyone will tell you that cold calling is a total must in 2025. Similarly, I won’t convince you to choose cold emailing. It all depends on your business goals, the volume of leads, and the specifics of your product.

We’d better examine cases where a cold email works better than a cold call and vice versa.

When to use cold call vs cold email for sales

Your choice would depend much on how the prospect moves through the funnel. In the classic sales approach, you’d assume they do it linearly, stage by stage.

In such context, you’d use cold emailing at the beginning of the sales funnel to:

• Start the conversation without coming across as too pushy 
• Reach a large number of prospects quickly and track your sales performance
• Provide detailed information (attached portfolio, product demo) that prospects can review at their convenience
• Set the stage for more personalized follow-ups down the road.

Cold calling works totally fine at the beginning and in the middle of the sales funnel if you aim to:

• Engage and assess the prospect’s interest in your product quickly
• Establish more personal connections with a decision-maker
• Sell complex products or services that require thorough explanations or objection handling in real-time
• Create a sense of urgency and encourage a prospect to make a decision faster
• Follow up on earlier email conversions (open or click) to make your engagement even deeper
• Cater to prospects who prefer phone interactions.

However, now, customers often take unpredictable paths, so you’ll hardly have a picture-perfect sales cycle.
As there is no one-size-fits-all solution, we recommend you mix cold calling and emailing smartly. This approach lets you reach potential customers at various stages, keep them engaged, and boost response rates. 

Tips to improve your cold email and cold call success rates

No matter which strategy you choose for your sales outreach, you’ll always have room to improve your conversions. So, we’ll crown this post with several best practices for nailing a successful cold email and cold call.

Cold emailing best practices

📧 Personalize.

Research your prospects to create a highly targeted message. Mention details about their company, job, and recent successes or bring up any shared connections or interests. This will help you build rapport faster.

📧 Spark interest.

Make your subject line short but catchy and intriguing. 

📧 Bring value.

Show how your offering can help prospects solve their pain points. Highlight your readiness to address any concerns they might have.

📧 Ignite action.

Use a clear CTA to prompt your prospect to take the next step. Be specific with your request, whether to set up a call, check out a website, or reply to your message.

📧 Follow-up.

Don’t be sad if you don’t receive a reply to your email. A friendly follow-up (or several of them) can boost your chances of receiving a response. 

📧 Track deliverability.

Ensure your messages don’t end up in spam. Use a trusted mail service provider and steer clear of any spammy language.

🎁 Thank you for reading our blog! You help us prepare the most relevant and value-bringing posts! Get a free guide on mastering email deliverability in several clear steps.

Cold calling best practices

📲Do your homework.

Get to know your prospect before dialing. Learn more about their company, needs, and pain points to be ready to hook them up with your cold call.

📲Prepare a flexible script.

Be ready that not everything will go as you’ve planned. Add the B and C options to your script. 

📲Talk less, listen more.

Pay attention to what your customers say, and never cut them off. Express understanding of their situation, respect their position and opinion, and show your support.  

📲Handle pushback smoothly.

Be ready for objections and address them calmly and confidently.

📲Set a clear goal.

Know what you want to achieve with each call, whether you aim for setting up a meeting or getting more info.

📲Don’t give up if you don’t connect right away. 1-3 follow-up calls can make a big difference. But don’t focus much on one particular prospect. Remember, you can’t reach out to prospects in bulk with cold calling. So, filter out uninterested contacts after several follow-up attempts.

📲Analyze. Note what works and what doesn’t so you can keep improving your approach. 

Wrapping up 

A cold email and a cold call are strong contenders for communicating with prospects in 2025. How well they work will depend on your product specifics, sales goals, and contact list growth. 

Mixing the two approaches is usually the best idea. But if you’re not up for a call, cold emails for sales outreach would be the way to go. Remember that Snov.io is always here to put your cold email outreach on total autopilot. Delegate your sales routine to us, grow your productivity, and enjoy fulfilling more strategic tasks!