A cold email breakdown from the Marketing Agency Near You desk of passive-aggressive market research
Alright, let’s get into one of my favorite useless on-the-job pastimes: trolling garbage marketing.
Not trolling like Twitter beef. More like… lifting the curtain on the kind of low-effort, high-BS tactics that make business owners skeptical of marketing in the first place. You know the ones.
This stuff gives good marketers a bad name, and the kicker? It’s not even our fault.
Today’s example: Cold Email Theater, Vol. 1
I got a cold email pitch the other day. Nothing new—I get them daily. But this one had all the usual suspects:
- “Love your company’s approach.”
- “I built a system that generates 100 blog posts for your clients for free.”
- “Scaled my own agency to $92K/month.”
- “Wanna hop on a call?”
Structurally, it was fine. Ticks the boxes. But here’s the thing:
If you’re pitching me something that’s supposed to be scalable, seamless, and high-ROI… your own system better not break on first click.
So what do I do?
I check the domain.
Always.
And what do I find?
The domain in the email forwards to another domain…
Which lands on a default GoHighLevel 404 page.
Complete with the shocked-face placeholder image.
Chef’s kiss of bad first impressions.
Let’s unpack what that tells me:
- You’re probably a GHL white-label affiliate kiddo who spun up a funnel but didn’t finish.
- You likely haven’t hit $92K/month if you can’t get a homepage to load.
- You’re selling systems without… a functioning system.
This isn’t a dig at GoHighLevel or SaaS tools in general. It’s a dig at flimsy execution.
Trust is in the details
You’re not gonna land clients—especially ones who know what they’re doing—if your links don’t work.
If your brand feels hollow.
If your credibility falls apart in 12 seconds.
The takeaway?
If you want people to trust your offer, at least check off the basics.
Working domain. Built-out site. Cohesive message.
And maybe don’t pitch your services to someone who offers the exact same thing.
