Did I say OP should just send out emails willy-nilly to random businesses with no knowledge? No. I said the opposite. I'm not advocating a bullshit form letter but an actual case study of an individual website. This means I would have to actually go to a website, check it over, notice a problem worth fixing and then contact them to fix it. No problem? No contact.

Let's say I'm a designer and I went to your website because I wanted to contact you to offer my services. I check over your website and notice that you have some PPC landing pages, but I notice that your all of your images are centered for no reason, that you're using the font Papyrus (people hate this with a passion) on a white background at a weird size, and that, just for shits and giggles, you're using an animated tumblr background on your FAQ page that makes it hard to focus on the answers.

I'd email you NOT to offer my services, but to tell you how to fix this shit yourself. It would take me five minutes tops, you may or may not come back to me to find out what else you could change. Either way, it makes the internet a nicer place to visit AND it helps make an introduction.

If someone is cold emailing you without a good reason, of course you're not going to be interested. If they're telling you that you have problems and not offering up a solution, of course you're not going to be interested. If they just send out the same exact email to everybody, you guessed it, you're not going to be interested.

But by personalizing your marketing, by actually building a connection and by offering something of value with a small hope of gaining something in return by being altruistic, you'll be amazed at what it can do for your business. I send out cold emails all the time and this works. There's no reason to spam because there are always problems out there that we can solve!