Learn / Infrastructure
Why adjacent markets beat more contacts
I sent over 1.8 million cold emails in the past 6 months, and the biggest change had nothing to do with copy. It was price. Sending got cheap, and cheap volume stops being an advantage the moment everyone has it. The edge moved to market selection, which is the whole argument for adjacent markets in outbound: the same offer, repositioned slightly, pointed at a market nobody in your niche is emailing yet.
The written version of the training below, with the worked example.
Sending got cheap, so volume stopped being a moat
In 2020 a thousand cold emails pulled a 10 to 15% reply rate on almost any offer. Then the automation tools arrived, everybody started sending, and reply rates fell to 3 to 5%. The industry answered with volume. Google and Microsoft answered the volume with strict authentication and hard spam-complaint thresholds, published openly in their sender requirements, and one burnt domain took a whole setup down. The market went to whoever could afford the volume.
Which forced the big players to build cheap sending infrastructure, and with that many providers the only thing left to compete on is price. Domains used to run $10 to $20 and inboxes $7 to $8. Inboxes now go as low as $2 to $3. Monthly infrastructure went from $1,000 to $1,500 in 2020 down to $300 to $500 in 2025.
Budget used to gate everyone, and budget is gone. Anyone can send 10 times what they sent in 2020, so volume is not the advantage. The only question left is who receives it.
The wrong way to spend the savings
The obvious move is the bad one: more emails to more people inside the same companies. Adding job titles at similar accounts does not expand your market, it puts you in front of people with no reason to care. They mark you as spam, and the campaign that WAS working gets pulled down with them.
Same budget, different shape. Instead of 20,000 emails into one saturated industry, send 5,000 into four different industries. Identical volume, four independent reads, and none of it burns the prospects you are already working. It also stops you scaling into a pool that was never big enough, which is what sizing your market catches first.
What counts as an adjacent market
A market where you take your existing offer and reposition it slightly for people with a similar problem. The other version is going upstream or downstream: approaching the companies that already sell to your buyer and turning the offer into a partnership. One test decides it. If the fulfilment has to change, it is a new business.
The real example. A client of ours runs Amazon growth services for ecommerce brands, and that space is picked over. Instead of pushing more volume at the same brand owners, we asked ChatGPT which markets would fit a partnership version of the offer. We had started with logistics and manufacturing. The rest came back in one pass, and none of it touched the back end.
| Adjacent market | Why the same offer fits |
|---|---|
| Logistics and 3PL companies | They already hold the same brands as clients. |
| Manufacturers | Their customers are the ones selling what they make. |
| Ecommerce accounting and CFO firms | A client book of brand owners who ask about growth. |
| Shopify app developers | Same merchants, a service beside yours. |
| Ecommerce law firms and IP attorneys | Brand registry work puts them in the room early. |
| Influencer agencies and UGC platforms | They make the creative, you make it convert. |
| PE firms and VC portfolios | One relationship, then every portfolio company. |
| Ecommerce coaches and course creators | They teach it. Students still need it done. |
| Packaging and branding agencies | The next line item after the brand is built. |
Anyone can buy the volume now. Almost nobody changes the market.
Now rewrite the email, because this is where it breaks
People pick the right markets and paste one email across all of them. Each market ends at the same result for you, but what they care about is completely different. The original went to brand owners on a two-step framework: curiosity in email one, detail in email two.
{{first_name}}, have you launched your top product on Amazon yet? If not, I might have an interesting proposition for you.
Send that to a 3PL and they are confused, then annoyed, then you are in spam. So it got repositioned into the same shape, asking about something that market actually has:
{{first_name}}, do you have many clients selling in the Amazon space? If so, I might have an interesting partnership idea for you.
Email two is where they separate. For brand owners it elaborates on the growth offer. For the 3PL it lays out the partnership: a percentage on every client sent either direction, and the sweetener, the more we grow that brand, the more it needs the 3PL to fulfil. The structure never moves. The noun in line one always does, and the front-end offer still has to be worth replying to in the market you moved it into.
Run each market like a separate client
Give every industry its own batch, the way an outbound agency segments clients. Above, that was six industries, just under 57,000 emails in the last 30 days, roughly 10,000 each, carried by just over 1,600 email accounts. Low volume per account, spread wide, so no single reputation carries everything. Then hold above 2% reply and below 2% bounce per market rather than blended, the same discipline segmenting and cutting lists applies inside one market.
The honest caveat: adjacent markets do not rescue a weak offer. If the core market is not replying, four more buy you four more copies of that answer, and each is another batch of inboxes to keep clean. Everything underneath this sits in the full cold email guide.
tl;dr: cheap infrastructure made volume a commodity, so the advantage is market selection. Split the same send across markets your fulfilment already covers, and rewrite line one for each.
FAQ
What is an adjacent market in cold email?
A market where you take the offer you already fulfil, reposition it slightly, and sell it to people with a similar problem. The test is the back end. If delivering it needs a new service, new hires, or a new process, that is a second business, not an adjacent market.
How do you find adjacent markets for your offer?
Start from your current buyer and list every company that already sells to them, supplies them, or advises them. Those are the upstream and downstream partners. Then ask an AI model which of those markets fit a partnership version of your offer. Shared customers, not shared job titles.
Why does adding more contacts to the same niche stop working?
You run out of people who care long before you run out of names. Once the real buyers are covered, more volume means more job titles at similar companies. Those people have no interest, so they mark you as spam, and the campaign that was working gets dragged down too.
Do you have to rewrite cold email copy for each market?
Yes, and this is where most expansions fail. The markets get picked well, then one email gets pasted across all of them. A logistics company reading a message written for a brand owner has no idea what you are saying. Change what line one actually asks about.
How many emails should you send per market?
Enough to read the market, not enough to burn it. In the campaign on this page, six industries ran just under 57,000 emails in 30 days, roughly 10,000 each. Splitting a fixed volume gives you a read per segment instead of one blended number that hides the winner.
If you would rather not map markets and build the sending system yourself, that is what we do: a finance client booked 20 calls in the first 30 days on this setup. Every training is free on the trainings hub, and this one is on YouTube.
PS - that market list came out of a single prompt, and the fulfilment behind it never changed. Finding the markets was never the hard part. Rewriting the email for each one is.
