Cold Email
Cold Email With No Website: What I Send Instead
Three of my four positive replies asked for a website or catalogue my company does not have. What I sent instead, and what it actually cost.
On 22 July a director at a Vietnamese electrical company replied to one of my cold emails. He asked for two things: our website and our product detail pages. A fair request, and the first human reply I had seen in four days.
We do not have a website. The company manufactures medium-voltage switchgear in Nanjing and has never owned an English domain. What we have is a storefront on a B2B marketplace and a shared folder of Chinese datasheets, several of which are scans of printed sheets.
I sent him the marketplace link and a one-page PDF I built that morning out of our own material. Then I spent the rest of the day wondering whether I had just spent a positive reply badly.
The replies were not asking for meetings
282 emails in the first round produced four positive replies from decision-makers. I have written separately about what the reply-rate number hides. What I had not noticed until I put the four side by side is what they actually asked for.
Business director, Uganda: said plainly that he wanted to work together. No documents mentioned.
CEO, Bangladesh: asked for the catalogue, same day.
Chairman, Egypt: one neutral line saying he was waiting to hear back.
Director, Vietnam: website and product documentation.
Two of the four are explicit document requests. The Egyptian chairman is waiting on a quotation, and a quotation in this industry travels with a datasheet underneath it. So three of four replies arrive at the same shelf, and the shelf is bare.
Almost all cold email advice, mine included, optimises the step before this one. Writing a first email when nothing has happened at the target company is that genre exactly. Subject lines, list size, sending volume, warm-up, signals. All of it is about earning the reply. The reply lands, and the literature stops.
At a 1.4 percent positive reply rate, fumbling one costs a quarter of the quarter.
The instinct is to send everything
A marketer in a B2B forum ran a small split test last year. Fifty prospects received a twelve-page service brochure; fifty received a double-sided A4 sheet with a business card. Both groups got a LinkedIn request about two weeks later, and the flyer group accepted at roughly three times the rate. One hundred people, one industry, no controls worth the name. I would not build a strategy on it. But it points the same direction as everything else I have watched happen, which is that a twelve-page company profile is the easiest document in the world not to read.
I had a twelve-page profile on my list of things to build. Factory photographs, the certificate wall, every product line, a page about our corporate vision. A week of work, arriving in a buyer's inbox as homework.
The Vietnamese director did not ask for that. He named one product family and wanted to know whether we make it and what it does.
What goes on the page
One page per prospect, in this order.
The prospect's company name and the product family they raised, in the header. It should be obvious in two seconds that the document was made for them and not for a trade fair.
A ratings table. Rated voltage, rated current, breaking capacity, enclosure protection, the standard we build to.
Two photographs. One of the assembled unit, one of the interior.
Lead time and minimum order. In industrial distribution these are the first two questions, and we can quote single units at 15 to 30 days on switchgear and 7 to 20 on low-voltage assemblies. Saying so early removes a round of email.
A street address and my direct line.
No corporate vision. No case studies either, because they need customer permission we do not have, and in a first exchange nobody believes them.
The marketplace link goes in the body as the third-party page. It is not a domain we control, which cuts both ways. A buyer can see a verified business licence and transaction history there, which a three-week-old .com cannot show him. A buyer can also see that we chose not to build a site of our own. I do not know which of those weighs more. The two prospects who got the link have not told me.
Building the page without a design department
The source material is a mess: Chinese Word files, a few Excel sheets of ratings, and scans. Turning that into a template is two separate problems, reading and rendering, and both have decent open-source answers now.
Reading it. Docling is MIT-licensed, came out of IBM Research and now sits under the LF AI & Data Foundation. It swallows the mixed pile — PDF, DOCX, XLSX, images — and recovers table structure with a dedicated table model instead of guessing from whitespace. That matters here more than anything else on the list, because a ratings table read as loose text is worth nothing to me. Microsoft's MarkItDown, also MIT, is faster and covers more formats, but it is weaker on tables, which is the wrong trade for this job. For the Chinese scans I use MinerU instead: it was built by a Shanghai lab specifically on CJK layouts, and it is the only one of these that has not yet mangled a two-column Chinese spec sheet on me. Baidu's PaddleOCR-VL currently leads the document-parsing benchmarks and is CUDA-only, so on a Mac it means renting a GPU — worth knowing before you plan around it. One licence note: Marker is popular and good, but its terms carry a revenue threshold, which matters if you ever intend to sell what you build on top of it.
Rendering it. The one-pager is a Typst template, Apache 2.0, fed a small YAML file of prospect and product values. The usual alternative is an HTML template plus WeasyPrint, which I ran for a few weeks. Typst won for a reason that has nothing to do with typography: a .typ file is a short text file I can keep in version control and hand to a coding agent without first explaining a CSS print stylesheet to it. The speed gap is real and irrelevant at my volume — an independent benchmark in February had Typst finish a 500-page job roughly fifty times faster than WeasyPrint, and I produce two documents a week.
The rule that matters more than the tools. No number produced by an OCR or vision model reaches a customer-facing datasheet until I have checked it against the Chinese original. A model that turns 12 kV into 24 kV has not made a typo, it has made a commercial claim I cannot honour, to a distributor who will check. We have already had to tell one buyer that 24 kV equipment is outside what we build. Machine reading gets the sheet drafted in ten minutes instead of ninety. It does not get to sign it.
What this does not fix
The PDF is a bridge over the gap, not a repair. The gap is that we own no domain, have no indexed product pages, and hold no English documentation a buyer can find without asking me for it first. Every custom one-pager is a manual answer to a question a website would have answered while I was asleep. It has gone into the weekly report as a formal request twice.
The one part of the credibility problem I have actually closed is authentication on the sending domain, which no buyer will ever see and which decides whether he sees the email at all.
The time it costs
Ten to fifteen minutes per one-pager once the template exists. Two hours to build the template. About a day to get the parsing stable across our own folder, most of it spent on the scans.
All of it lands in the morning, which is the only window where I send anything and also the only window where marketplace enquiries are worth working. The same constraint is why a second cold-email pass is nearly free in list cost but expensive in mornings. So the pipeline is not saving money. It is buying back the hour I would otherwise lose inside a layout program, and that hour is the scarcest thing I have.
FAQ
What do you send when a prospect asks for your website and you do not have one?
Send the most verifiable third-party page you have — a marketplace storefront with a business licence and transaction history is stronger than a brand-new domain — plus one page of documentation built for the product family they named. Do not apologise for the missing site and do not explain it. Answer the question that was asked.
How long should a product one-pager be?
One page. A marketer's small split test found a double-sided A4 sheet outperformed a twelve-page brochure by roughly three to one on a follow-up LinkedIn request. The mechanism is not mysterious: a brochure is a meal, a single sheet is a snack.
Do attachments in cold email hurt deliverability?
In first contact, keep the email plain text with no attachment, no tracking and few links. Once someone has replied asking for documents, the attachment is what they asked for and the risk profile is different. If you want to know whether your attachment is what routes you to spam, the sending platforms all ship placement testing.
Can custom datasheets be generated automatically?
The drafting can. Parse your existing material with Docling or MinerU, hold the values in YAML, render with a Typst template. Every technical figure still needs a human check against the source document before it leaves the building, because a wrong rating is a commercial claim rather than a formatting error.
Is a marketplace storefront a substitute for a company website?
Not for search, and not for the buyers who look you up before they reply. It works as a proof-of-existence link inside a conversation someone has already started. That is a narrower job than a website does, and it is the job I currently need done.
Continue the series: Cold Email Follow-Up: Why the Second Pass Is Nearly Free and Positive Reply Rate vs Reply Rate: 282 Sends of Data.