Best cold email agencies for PPC agencies

The ten at a glance

Prices were read on each vendor's own site on 2 November 2026. Where a row says not published, it means the pricing page was checked, the site's own FAQ was checked, and there was no number on either. A figure reported by somebody else's blog isn't a price, it's a rumour with a decimal point.

What one click costs in your own aisle

A PPC agency pays an average of $81.51 for a single click on the keywords that describe what it sells. Every other kind of agency pays $12.37. The worst term in the category, "google ads management," runs $228.10 a click. You sell clicks for a living and you've been quietly priced out of your own.

Here is the thing nobody puts in the deck. $228.10 buys you one click. One. A stranger lands on your page, reads two lines, decides your case studies are too long, and leaves, and you've just paid more than a tank of gas for the pleasure of watching it happen in Clarity.

Now the same measurement for everyone else's category, which is where it stops being an interesting number and starts being a problem.

And for scale, the all-industry average cost per click across every category LocaliQ measures is $5.42. A PPC agency buying its own category pays roughly fifteen times what the average advertiser pays for anything.

That's a 6.6x gap. An SEO agency chasing "seo agency" pays $18.20. You pay 12.5 times that for "google ads management," to reach the same business owner, frequently on the same afternoon, frequently with both tabs open and a spreadsheet he will never finish.

Run the arithmetic forward and it gets worse before it gets better. At a 3% landing page conversion rate, which is a respectable number for a B2B service and not the one most agencies actually hit, $81.51 a click becomes roughly $2,717 per lead.

Not per client. Per lead. Per human being who filled in a form, one of whom turns out to be a student writing a dissertation on attribution modelling.

He will be delightful. He won't have a budget.

At the top of the table it's $7,603 a lead. You could hire a person for that.

Source. CPC pulled from Semrush on 2 November 2026, US database, across twenty keywords split into two sets of ten. These are Semrush's average CPC estimates rather than quotes out of your own account, and your real numbers move with quality score, match type and however many competitors are feeling brave that week. The size of the gap is the finding, not the decimal places.

None of which means paid acquisition is a mistake for an agency. It means the channel you're best in the world at is the one channel where your expertise buys you the least advantage, because everybody bidding against you is also a PPC agency and also read the same three posts about bid strategy. Expertise isn't an edge when the auction is nothing but experts.

What agency inboxes actually do

Outbound into marketing and advertising returns 0.5% human replies per email sent. Including the machines it reaches 1.7%, which means roughly 71% of everything that comes back is an auto-responder, the highest share of any industry in the dataset. One booked meeting costs about 4,200 emails.

Those come out of 6,074,430 cold emails sent between October 2023 and October 2026, 330,000 of them across 102 campaigns into marketing agencies. Grow Surely publishes the whole dataset broken down by industry, including the rows that don't flatter it, which isn't a sentence vendors enjoy typing.

Hold any proposal you're given against that last row. If somebody promises ten meetings a month and plans to send four thousand emails to do it, one of you has the wrong arithmetic, and it's not the spreadsheet.

There's a reason agency inboxes are the most hostile in B2B, and you already know it, because you're part of it. The marketing director you're trying to reach gets pitched by eleven agencies before lunch.

His filter isn't Google's, it's his own, trained over four years, and it fires on the second line. Copy barely moves that. Targeting does.

What a paid ads agency actually did instead

One of Grow Surely's clients, AdLeverage, a full-service paid advertising agency serving home service companies, spent $35,000 on campaigns and generated $1,585,000 in revenue over four months. That's a 45.3X return, given on the record by its Chief Revenue Officer, Lou Petracci, on camera, with the full numbers on a published case study page.

The part worth stealing isn't the number. It's how they got there, because they started from the same place most agencies reading this are standing right now.

They were already doing it themselves, and it was working. AdLeverage ran cold email in-house and got results from it. Then Google and Microsoft tightened their spam filters, the same campaigns started landing in spam instead of inboxes, and a channel that had been producing simply stopped.

Nothing about the offer changed. The plumbing underneath it did.

They had nowhere else to go. A home service company doing $10M or more a year isn't browsing for an ads agency on a Tuesday. Paid channels reach that owner eventually, along with four hundred people who aren't that owner, and the agency pays the same price for both. Cold email and cold calling are the two routes that go directly at a named person, which is a short list.

So the targeting got narrow on purpose. HVAC, plumbing and electrical operators doing $5M+ and $10M+ a year, which at that size is usually all three trades inside one company. Owners, CEOs, CMOs and VPs of marketing, named individually on every account. The list was built in Claude Code and Clay off Google Maps, LinkedIn and several contact databases, which is a sentence that sounds like overkill until you notice how few companies of that size exist and how badly you need every one of them.

And the proof did the persuading. AdLeverage has years of client results sitting in a folder, so every prospect was matched to the case study closest to their own business rather than to a first line about their LinkedIn headline. Four to five proven angles stayed in rotation against the same finite list, each with something to give away behind it instead of a request for a call.

Seven months in it's still running, and it closes $20,000 a month retainers with some of the largest HVAC companies in the country.

For the adjacent case, one of Grow Surely's clients, Courimo, an SEO agency, broke into the US market with no network there and closed $100,000+ from 33 meetings in two months, a 6X return. Different service, same shape: go at categories where the buyer's need is continuous, and the churn problem gets solved at the targeting stage instead of the delivery stage.

Neither campaign needed volume to do it. AdLeverage's account has sent 231,100 emails across its lifetime at a 2.19% reply rate, more than four times the marketing agency average, because the list was right rather than large.

Why this got harder in the last twelve months

Three things moved at once, and all three moved against a PPC agency specifically.

PPC clients leave faster than almost any other agency type. A First Page Sage study of roughly 19,700 client relationships across 418 US agencies, published on 30 October 2026, puts the average PPC and paid media client at 8.5 months.

SEO clients last 11.0 months. Full-service digital lasts 20.8. Only 22.5% of PPC clients are still there at twelve months.

Source. First Page Sage, published 30 October 2026, built from anonymised billing records rather than from asking agencies to estimate. Worth knowing that First Page Sage is itself an SEO agency and this is a lead-generation asset, so treat it as a stated-method study rather than independent research. It's still the only source here reading invoices instead of memories.

The replacement channel stopped working. Referrals fell from 76% to 44% as a top source of new business in a single year, and the share of agencies saying it's harder to reach prospects went from 35% to 75%, per the RSW/US 2026 Agency New Business Report. RSW/US sells new business services to agencies, so the finding flatters what they sell, and that's worth saying out loud rather than quietly not saying it.

And everyone else arrived. North America now holds more than 71,000 digital agencies, up from about 50,000 two years earlier, 87% of them under fifty people. Meanwhile 94% of agencies name paid advertising as their most promising service for 2026, up from 68% a year before. The service with the shortest client lifespan is the one everybody is piling into.

Put those together and the shape of it isn't a marketing problem, it's an arithmetic one. The client leaves around month nine, the referral that used to replace him has halved, and the replacement is being chased by twenty thousand agencies who weren't there in 2024.

One number to be careful with. Search for PPC agency churn and almost every result says 49% a year, or a 45 to 55% range. All of them trace back to a single self-published agency blog post with no sample size and no stated method, and its own figures don't reconcile: it gives 4.1% monthly churn and 49% annual, when 4.1% monthly compounds to about 39%. That's practitioner folklore with a decimal point on it, not a measurement, and it shouldn't be in anybody's pitch deck.

One of these isn't selling you pipeline

The same search returns two products that solve opposite problems, and for a PPC agency the confusion is more expensive than usual.

Outbound for your agency books meetings with businesses that might hire you. The output is your own calendar, filling up, with your own brand on everything.

White-label PPC is fulfilment you resell. Softtrix will run Google and Meta campaigns for your clients, under your brand, with Softtrix in the background, at $200 to $300 a month per account. The output is capacity, not pipeline.

Both are legitimate businesses. Buying the second while needing the first leaves an agency with a new delivery partner and the same empty calendar, which is a costly way to discover what you actually wanted.

And there's a wrinkle here that doesn't exist for an SEO agency or a web design shop. White-label PPC means handing your core competence to somebody else.

For a branding agency outsourcing paid search, that's sensible. For a paid search agency, it's asking a stranger to be the thing you tell clients you're. Worth a long think before the discovery call, ideally one that happens before you put it on the website.

There's a third version worth naming because it's easy to miss. CIENCE runs a partner program, and it's the exact inverse of white label: its own partner page states that partners "operate under the CIENCE brand" and that client-facing materials stay "branded CIENCE for consistency and trust." That's not a criticism, it's a model, and some agencies are happy with it. But an agency that spent six years building a name is being asked to put it in a drawer, which is a conversation to have on purpose rather than discover in month three.

The four standards everyone here is judged on

Each agency below is scored on the same four.

Which product is it. Outbound for your agency, or white-label fulfilment you resell. Nine and one respectively, and it's the first thing stated in every entry.

Published proof with an agency client named. Ask for a company name, a figure and a link that opens.

Four of the ten clear that bar: Grow Surely, Belkins, Leadium and CIENCE. One anonymises every agency case study it has. One has no agency client in sixteen published studies.

A price anyone can read without a call. Seven state one on their own site: Grow Surely, CIENCE, Abstrakt, Callbox, Cleverly, SalesRoads and Softtrix. Belkins, Leadium and Martal publish nothing, though Belkins and Leadium at least publish what you get instead of a number.

What happens if it doesn't work. Contract length, notice period, and whether any risk sits with the provider rather than all of it with you.

1. Grow Surely

Grow Surely is the only agency on this page that will run the campaign before being paid for it. Seven days, three to five qualified meetings booked against criteria agreed in advance, no card and no contract. For an agency that has just read what a click costs in its own category, a free week of real sending is a cheap way to find out whether the channel works before any of it's committed.

It's also the only one of the ten whose named agency proof includes a paid ads agency specifically: AdLeverage, $35,000 spent against $1,585,000 generated over four months, with the figures on camera from its Chief Revenue Officer and a full case study page anyone can open.

Pros. The free pilot removes the only decision that carries real risk. The underlying reply-rate data is published in full rather than summarised, including the marketing agency row that's among the worst in the set. Eighteen named case studies, 95% monthly retention against an industry norm closer to 65%, and billing month to month with no minimum term.

Cons. Email only, so an agency that wants phone coverage or LinkedIn as a primary channel is better served elsewhere here. The pilot is aimed at companies over $2M a year in revenue, which rules out smaller agencies. A public review base of 5 on Clutch, all at 5 stars, against generalists carrying two hundred.

2. Belkins

Belkins has the deepest review record here and two named agency clients, one of which is a paid search reseller. 4.9 on Clutch across 234 reviews, which is more than double anyone else on this page and the single most verifiable thing about them.

The agency proof is specific. Semify, a white-label SEO and paid search reseller, booked 54 appointments in five months from 9,604 delivered emails. ATS Marketing, a retail growth agency in Austin, reported 49 sales meetings and $2.4M in pipeline from one signed client and eight trade shows covered.

Pros. The review base is the real asset, and 234 of them at 4.9 isn't something a vendor can manufacture quietly. Two named agency clients with working case study URLs. Channels run wide: email, LinkedIn, intent-based calling, messenger, even executive dinners and conference activation.

Cons. The pricing page has four tiers and no dollar figure on any of them. The only number is a claim about savings, which is a strange thing to find on a pricing page.

Cold calling sits in the Growth Plus tier and above rather than the base one, so the channel mix depends on what you buy. Neither named agency is a PPC agency specifically; Semify is the closest.

3. Leadium

Leadium publishes the single best-fit agency case study on this page, and a perfect Clutch score across ninety reviews. 5.0 out of 5, 90 reviews, and every contract month to month.

The case study is SmartBug Media, a digital marketing agency in Newport Beach running inbound and e-commerce growth. Published results: a 27% increase in meetings booked with Director-level and above marketing contacts, a 35% conversion rate from outbound, and 18% of leads converting into full-service marketing clients. Their Director of Sales is quoted by name.

Pros. 5.0 across 90 reviews is the strongest rating-to-volume combination here. Month-to-month contracts stated plainly in the FAQ.

Four channels listed as real services: email, cold calling, LinkedIn and gifting. The SmartBug study publishes five separate numbers rather than one flattering headline.

Cons. No price anywhere. The pricing page offers budget bands to tick in a form, which tells you what they want to know about you rather than what they charge.

Their marketing-agency page runs a ten-logo wall with no results attached to any of them, and a logo isn't a case study. One named agency client against Belkins' two.

4. Cleverly

Cleverly names more agency clients than anyone else here and publishes the clearest white-label offer, and none of the case studies has a link you can open. Nine agency clients with numbers sit on one index page, and every card on it links to "#".

The numbers themselves are good: Velox Media at 60 meetings in six months, SEO Blue at five new clients in three months, Contractors Creative at ten new clients in six months on a 37% reply rate. They just can't be cited individually, which for a buyer doing diligence is the difference between proof and a claim.

Pros. The cheapest entry point of the nine outbound providers, with real numbers published in the FAQ rather than extracted on a call. Month to month, no contracts. The white-label tier is the most explicit on this page: campaigns "all managed seamlessly under your brand," with pricing per account and discounts at volume.

Cons. LinkedIn-first, with email as the supporting channel, which is a different product from cold email at volume. No individual case study URLs.

The site tags Velox Media as "Retail & Ecommerce" on one page and "Staffing & Recruiting" on another while the body text describes digital marketing, and their own homepage claims over 1,000 five-star reviews across Trustpilot and Clutch when the Clutch profile shows 4.3 from 85. Neither of those is fatal. Both are the kind of thing a buyer notices on the second read.

5. CIENCE Technologies

CIENCE publishes the most detailed pricing on this page and the most agency case studies, and wants you to operate under its brand rather than yours. Twelve case studies sit in its Marketing and Advertising category, four of them with usable numbers.

Grow, a digital strategy and creative agency, reported a 367% increase in client meetings year over year. August Ash, a marketing agency, reported 4,000+ qualified B2B leads. Panacea3, listed simply as a digital agency, reported 30+ appointments at a 25% open rate.

Pros. The pricing page is genuinely unusual: a flat campaign team fee, a platform fee, per-SDR rates split by geography, a published performance bonus formula, and a worked example showing five offshore SDRs at $11,249 a month. Month to month, no long contract. Four agency case studies, more than anyone else here.

Cons. The setup fee exists but has no published amount, which is an odd gap in an otherwise transparent page. None of the four agency clients is described as a PPC or paid media agency.

The partner program asks agencies to go client-facing as CIENCE. And 4.2 on Clutch across 142 reviews is the lowest rating of the ten, which with that much volume is a real signal rather than a bad month.

6. Abstrakt Marketing Group

Abstrakt is the one that guarantees appointments, and the one whose single agency result is smallest relative to what it costs. From $5,000 a month, cold-calling-led, with calls every working day on recorded lines.

The agency proof is Big Time Advertising and Marketing, reporting nearly $30,000 in new sales. It's the only agency client in their case study index, and against a $60,000 annual commitment it's a number worth thinking about rather than skimming.

Pros. A published price on the service page, which puts them ahead of three vendors here. Team, tools and data included in one flat monthly fee rather than itemised later. The appointment guarantee means they keep working at no further charge if the promised volume doesn't land, which moves real risk off the buyer.

Cons. Phone-led, with email and direct mail in support, so an agency whose buyers don't answer unknown numbers is paying for a channel it can't use.

The guarantee upgrade is attached to a one-year agreement at $1,000 more a month. One agency client, and the number on it's modest. 4.6 on Clutch from 44 reviews, the smallest review base of the established vendors.

7. Callbox

Callbox has ad-industry case studies and won't tell you who any of them are. Every marketing, advertising and ad tech client on their site is anonymised, which on a page about verifiable proof is the whole story.

The closest fit is a study headed "The Client is a global advertising technology firm known for pioneering programmatic media solutions," reporting 56 MQLs and 32 sales appointments. Another covers "an evolving web advertising firm" at 87 SQLs. The numbers may well be real. There's simply no way for a buyer to check one of them.

Pros. Genuine multi-region coverage, which matters for an agency selling into APAC or the UK as well as the US. Six channels run through one platform: phone, email, LinkedIn, web, chat and events. 4.6 on Clutch across 128 reviews is a solid record at real volume.

Cons. No named agency client anywhere. The published price carries the words "exact pricing provided after consultation" attached to it, which is a number and a disclaimer doing battle in the same sentence. Contract length isn't stated at all, only an invitation to ask.

8. Martal Group

Martal sells a fractional sales team rather than a campaign, publishes no price, and its one advertising case study contradicts itself. Tier 1A is a flat monthly fee after a three-month pilot; Tiers 2 and 3 add sales commission.

The advertising client is Awin, an affiliate marketing platform. The study reports 10,500 prospects generated a month and three qualified leads a month. The page header also says "Confidential client" while the title and logo say Awin, so the site is naming and not naming the same company on the same screen.

Pros. 4.8 on Clutch across 109 reviews is a strong record. The fractional-team model suits an agency that wants a named rep rather than a campaign.

Published pilot lengths of three and four months mean the first commitment is bounded and stated up front. They also sell an inbound tier, so SEO and LinkedIn ads can sit alongside the outbound.

Cons. No price at all. The pricing page has an ROI calculator, which produces illustrative figures like 400% returns and isn't the same thing as telling you the cost.

Three qualified leads a month from 10,500 prospects is a thin headline to put on a case study. Their own homepage claims 4.9 on Clutch while the live profile reads 4.8, a small gap that's easy to check and therefore not worth having.

9. SalesRoads

SalesRoads publishes every price on this page in full and hasn't published a single agency client. Sixteen case studies, none of them a marketing, advertising, PPC or paid media agency.

The pricing, by contrast, is the most complete here: $11,950 per four-week engagement for one SDR, scaling to $43,150 for six, with the per-SDR rate dropping at every step and 500 records per SDR per month included.

Pros. Full published pricing at every team size, which almost nobody in this category does. No long-term commitment, and they say so plainly: cancel anytime.

4.9 on Clutch across 69 reviews. Onshore SDRs, which for buyers who still answer the phone is a real difference rather than a talking point.

Cons. The most expensive entry point here by a distance, charged per four weeks rather than per month, which quietly adds a thirteenth payment a year. No LinkedIn anywhere in the methodology, and agency buyers live there. No agency proof at all, which on a page ranking agencies for agencies is the thing that decides it.

10. Softtrix

Softtrix is on this list because it ranks for the search and sells the opposite product, and a PPC agency should know that before the call. It's not an outbound vendor. There's no cold email, no cold calling, no LinkedIn outreach and no appointment setting anywhere on the site.

What it does sell is white-label PPC: Google, Meta and Instagram campaigns run under your brand for your clients, at $200 a month per account for client ad budgets under $1,000, and $300 for budgets between $1,000 and $2,000, on a three-month minimum.

Pros. Published per-account pricing with the client budget band attached to each tier, which is more transparency than most outbound vendors manage.

5.0 on Clutch across 53 reviews. A stated three-month minimum, so the commitment is known before signing. For an agency genuinely short on delivery capacity, this is a real option.

Cons. It won't book a single meeting for your agency, which is presumably why you're reading this. Their one named agency client, Salt Marketing in Dublin, is an SEO case study reporting impressions and domain authority, not outbound results. And the deeper issue is the obvious one: a PPC agency buying white-label PPC is subcontracting the thing its clients believe they're paying it for.

What a meeting actually costs, in emails

Work it forward from measured rates rather than from a promise. Into marketing and advertising: 0.5% human replies per email sent, about 18% of those replies positive, and roughly one positive reply in four turning into a calendar entry. That lands at one meeting per 4,200 emails, and about 42,000 for ten a month.

Now put the two numbers side by side, which is the comparison this whole page exists to make.

Those aren't identical units and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. A form fill isn't a booked meeting, and 4,200 emails is a volume rather than an invoice. The useful comparison is the shape: one of these costs more every time a competitor raises a bid, and the other costs more only when the list is wrong.

That's the actual argument for outbound at a PPC agency, and it has nothing to do with outbound being clever. It's that an auction prices you against everyone who wants the same click, and a list doesn't. Google decides the first number. You decide the second one.

Five questions to ask on the first call

These produce different answers from different providers, rather than the same reassurance from all of them.

1. Am I the client, or are my clients? The question that sorts this page in half. Outbound for your agency fills your calendar. White-label fulfilment gives you capacity to resell.
2. Name an agency client and send me the link. Not "we work with agencies." A company, a number, and a URL.
3. Whose brand is on the outreach? Yours, or theirs? Ask it explicitly, because at least one provider on this page expects partner agencies to go client-facing under its own name, and that's the sort of thing that reads very differently in a contract than it does on a call.
4. How many emails a month does your plan actually involve? Then hold it against 4,200 per meeting. If the promise is ten meetings and the plan is six thousand emails, somebody is relying on you not doing arithmetic in front of them.
5. What happens in month two if nothing lands? Listen for the specifics: notice period, who owns the domains and the list, whether anything is refundable, whether they keep working.

The ten, scored against the four standards

Every claim in this table was read on the vendor's own site on 2 November 2026.

Read down the third column rather than the fourth. A price is easy to publish and tells you what a vendor charges; a named client with a link that opens tells you whether anyone like you has bought it and said so out loud.