Written By Rokas Jukna

The real question: scale or warmth?

Agency owners do not lack channels; they lack clarity. The real question is not “cold email or LinkedIn?” but “what gets me the most profitable, predictable pipeline for my specific offer, niche, and stage of growth?” When you strip away opinions and look at the mechanics—costs, risk, conversion, and long‑term upside—you see that both channels shine in different dimensions.​

Cold email is a scalability machine: cheap, high‑volume, and brutally efficient if your infrastructure is dialed in. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a lower‑volume but warmer environment where people see your face, content, and social proof before they ever hop on a call. The smartest agencies stop arguing “either/or” and build an omnichannel system that uses each platform for what it’s best at.​

Cold email: volume, control, and cheap scale

Cold email wins the raw numbers game. You can send thousands—even millions—of emails per month without needing an army of SDRs or a massive software budget. With a solid setup, sending 10,000–30,000 emails a month is absolutely realistic, and the cost per 10,000 sends can sit roughly around the low hundreds of dollars if you’re using bulk infrastructure smartly.​

In the video, Rokas gives a practical example: buying 100 email accounts for around $49 and safely sending ~400 emails per account per day. At 22 sending days, that’s roughly 8,000 emails per “tenant”; two such batches push you to ~16,000 emails a month for around $100. That kind of volume is impossible to touch on LinkedIn without spending aggressively on accounts and automation.​

But volume only matters if it generates appointments. A realistic baseline booking rate from cold email is around 0.1%—that’s 1 meeting per 1,000 emails sent. If you lift that to 0.2%, you’re now at 2 meetings per 1,000 emails, and at scale that difference is huge. At 1,000 emails per day and 0.1% booking rate, you’re looking at roughly one new appointment per day; double the rate or double the volume and your calendar quickly fills.​

The catch? Deliverability. Cold email is unforgiving if you ignore infrastructure. You need:​

• Properly warmed domains and mailboxes

• Safe sending limits and ramp‑up schedules

• Clean lists and sane sending patterns (no link‑stuffed HTML blasts)

If you break the rules—too many links/images in the first email, poor warm‑up, spammy copy—Google and Outlook will gladly dump you in spam and force you to cycle domains. The upside is that even when a domain “burns,” replacing it is cheap and fast compared to losing a LinkedIn account; a new domain might cost you only a few dollars and a week of warm‑up.​

Cold email’s biggest advantages:

• Everyone has email. You can reach local trades, corporate finance, B2B SaaS, and blue‑collar contractors alike.​

• You’re not constrained by platform usage. Even if your ideal buyers never open LinkedIn, they still have an inbox.​

• It’s system‑friendly. Once your infrastructure and copy are dialed, you can scale from 1,000 to 2,000+ emails per day mainly by adding accounts and domains, not headcount.​

If you are early, budget‑sensitive, and need deal flow fast, cold email is the first engine to build.

LinkedIn: higher intent, higher conversion, long‑term upside

LinkedIn trades raw volume for intimacy. Prospects see your name, face, content, mutual connections, and headline before they ever reply. That “warmth factor” alone changes how people react—this is not a faceless message from a random domain, it’s a person with posts, comments, and a visible professional identity.​

That shows up in conversion rates. On his personal LinkedIn, Rokas mentions booking around 13 meetings out of every 100 people he messages—a roughly 13% booking rate. On rented or less‑warmed accounts, he still sees around a 5% booking rate from connection requests. Compare that to cold email’s baseline 0.1–0.2% and you see why agencies love LinkedIn for professional niches.​

The big limiter is scale and cost. Quality LinkedIn accounts can cost around $120 per account from vendors, and running 10 accounts can quickly reach $1,200+ per month before you even add automation tools. Layer on something like a LinkedIn automation platform (for example, a tool in the ballpark of $79 per user per month) plus Sales Navigator, and you’re playing a very different budget game than cold email.​

However, LinkedIn delivers unique benefits cold email cannot:

• 100% deliverability after acceptance. Once someone accepts your connection request, your messages land. There is no “spam folder.”​

• Rich media freedom. You can send links, images, Looms and memes without worrying about domain reputation on that first message.​

• Personal brand compounding. As you post consistently, your outbound efforts and your content start feeding each other. Over time, inbound opportunities appear off the back of your posts and profile alone.​

LinkedIn is especially strong in “professional” segments: agency owners, accountants, coaches, B2B consultants—people who actively use LinkedIn to market, recruit or network. If your ideal clients are scrolling LinkedIn most days, your profile and DMs can become both an outbound and inbound channel simultaneously.​

Cost, risk, and who each channel is best for

When deciding where to focus, think in trade‑offs, not hype. Each platform has clear strengths and clear pain points.​

Cold email – biggest pains:

• Deliverability and inboxing. Misconfigured DNS, aggressive sending, and link‑heavy templates will destroy your inbox placement.​

• Infrastructure complexity for beginners. Warming, rotation, and tracking are non‑trivial if you have never done it.​

LinkedIn – biggest pains:

• Account cost and fragility. Buying/renting multiple accounts gets expensive, and restrictions or bans can stall your pipeline for weeks if vendors are slow.​

• Scalability ceiling. You are constrained by connection limits, vendor supply, and platform rules.​

Viewed purely as a scoreboard in the video, cold email racks up more “points” overall—mainly because of cheap scalability, reach, and lower long‑term cost per attempt. LinkedIn scores slightly lower on an absolute scale but overperforms on conversion, warmth, and brand‑building.​

For different agency profiles:

• Beginner agency / low budget:
  Start with cold email. Build a lean system, hit your first consistent 1–3 meetings per day, fix your offer and positioning, and use profits to expand.​

• Professional B2B niche (agencies, consultants, coaches):
  Use both, but lean harder into LinkedIn as soon as you can. Your buyers are there, and your brand can compound.​

• Home services / local trades / non‑LinkedIn natives:
  Cold email (and phone/SMS) will outperform LinkedIn in sheer reach and consistency, because your buyers are not glued to their LinkedIn feed.​

The real edge: omnichannel, not obsession

The cleanest insight from the video is that the “best” channel is both—used intelligently together. Outbound becomes far more powerful when you stop treating platforms as silos and start treating them as touchpoints around the same conversation.​

A simple omnichannel play looks like this:

• You send cold emails to a targeted list and start generating positive replies.​

• For each positive email reply, you search the prospect on LinkedIn, send a connection request, and reference your email in the DM.​

• If someone responds positively on LinkedIn but then goes quiet, you follow up via email to re‑activate the conversation.​

This does three things for your agency:

1. Increases touchpoints per prospect. People see you in multiple inboxes and channels, which boosts recall and perceived seriousness.​

2. Lets each channel do what it does best. Cold email handles scale and surface‑area; LinkedIn carries the relationship, warmth, and social proof.​

3. Stabilizes your pipeline. If email deliverability dips, LinkedIn still runs. If a LinkedIn account gets restricted, your email engine keeps producing meetings.​

From there, you layer in automation: cold email sequences for volume, LinkedIn automation for connection requests and follow‑ups, and tight tracking of appointment booking rates by channel. The goal is not to obsess over which channel “wins,” but to build a system where each channel clears its lane—email for scale, LinkedIn for conversion and brand—and together they produce a predictable stream of qualified meetings.​