Nowoslawski says a PR offer returns 80 positive replies a day
The campaign names the outlet and the article before asking for anything, and Nowoslawski says that is the whole reason it works.
Eric Nowoslawski says his PR customer Pathos gets 80 positive responses per day from a cold email campaign built around a single question. The campaign looks at each prospect's website, picks the publication they should be in, TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal or Entrepreneur, and the email asks "Do you want to get featured in this? If we wrote an article for you, it would be about [topic]." AI writes the publication pick and the article angle for every contact.
Nowoslawski posted it as a case study against the idea that cold email is dying, while conceding that conversion rates on every marketing channel trend toward zero. The argument he draws from it is not about copy mechanics or sending infrastructure. It is about whether the prospect already knows the offer exists.
Why he says bookkeeping fails and this does not
His explanation is that buyers now have more access to education than ever and can ask ChatGPT about anything. Email a founder about bookkeeping and they have heard it a hundred times. They know the offer exists and they know where to get it when they need it, so the email adds nothing. He points to offshore staffing as an offer that had a similar spike in easy to acquire customers and then fell off over the past years, precisely because it became so easy and so well known.
The PR offer, he says, is different because not every founder knows you can just pay writers to help you get into major publications. The email is the first time the prospect learns the category exists, and the personalization work, the named outlet and the specific angle, is what makes that education land on one person rather than reading as a pitch.
For people sending
Treat the 80 a day as a raw count. Nowoslawski gives no send volume, no contact count and no time window for the campaign, so there is no reply rate here to benchmark your own numbers against, and no way to know what it costs in sends to produce those 80. What is portable is the test he is proposing for your own offer. If your prospect already knows the service exists and already knows where to buy it, the email is competing on timing alone.
Outbound works better when you're showing people offers that they didn't know existed.
Know what is landing before you burn another domain
One email a day. Under three minutes. What the operators found out yesterday.