Which Cities to Target First for Cold Outreach: A Step-by-Step Way to Choose

You know your service and your niche. Now you open a map and freeze. New York? Your own town? Somewhere mid-sized nobody else is emailing? Picking cities at random wastes your first weeks of outreach, and picking too many at once means you learn nothing from any of them.

This guide gives you a simple process you can finish today: shortlist cities, score them, pull a small test list from each, and let the results tell you where to go next.

Decide what a good city means for your offer

Before you look at any city, write down three things:

• Who pays you. A web designer selling to plumbers needs cities with lots of trades businesses. An accountant-focused service needs cities with plenty of small firms (see accountants).
• Where you can work. Time zone matters if you sell calls or meetings. If you are 10 hours away from a city, every call is at an awkward hour for someone.
• What you can prove. If your past clients are in a certain country or region, cities there are an easier sell because your examples feel local.

These three answers will filter out most of the map before you start.

Build a shortlist of 8 to 10 cities

Start wider than you need. Mix three types:

1. Your home city or region. You know the market, the language and the local references. You can also offer to meet in person, which a remote competitor cannot.
2. Mid-sized cities. Places with a few hundred thousand people often have plenty of businesses but get less cold email than the biggest metros. Treat that as a hypothesis to test, not a fact.
3. One or two large cities. More businesses means more leads, but also more agencies and freelancers pitching them.

If you work from abroad, for example from Bangladesh selling to clients overseas, pick cities in countries where your English, pricing and working hours fit. The post on freelancers in Bangladesh finding global clients covers that angle in more detail.

Score each city on four factors

Give each city a 1 to 3 score on these factors. It takes about an hour and stops you choosing on gut feel.

The "gap" score matters most. A city with fewer businesses but many obvious problems you solve beats a huge city where everyone already has a polished site. If you sell websites, the guide to finding businesses without websites shows how to spot that gap fast.

Add up the scores and keep your top three. That is your first test.

Pull a small test list from each city

Don't scrape thousands of leads yet. Aim for a rule-of-thumb 50 to 100 well-matched businesses per city. That is enough to see a difference in replies without burning time or credits.

You can do this by hand from Google Maps, or use a scraper. In GetClient, the Google Maps scraper lets you run the same keyword across several cities at once, and each lead can include the website, emails found and the owner's name where public. The walkthrough on scraping Google Maps without code explains the steps.

Keep each city in its own folder or tag so you can compare them later. A clean lead list per city is what makes the test readable.

Before sending, verify the emails. Bad addresses raise your email bounce rate, and a high bounce rate hurts deliverability for every city, not just the bad list.

Send the same campaign to every city

To compare cities fairly, change only the city. Use one email, one subject line and one follow-up schedule for all three lists. If you change the copy too, you won't know whether the city or the message made the difference.

A few practical points:

• Mention the city. A line like "I was looking at {{params.category}} businesses in {{params.city}}" makes the email feel less generic. Keep it short.
• Send in their morning. Schedule by the recipient's time zone, not yours.
• Plan two or three follow-ups. A short follow-up sequence spaced a few days apart gives each city a fair chance.
• Write a subject line that sounds human. See cold email subject lines for ideas.

Check the sending rules that apply to you and to the recipients' country. Include a clear way to opt out, and stop emailing anyone who asks.

Read the results and pick a winner

Give the test a week or two after the last follow-up. Then compare cities on what actually matters:

1. Positive replies. Interested answers, questions, requests for a call.
2. Total replies. Even a "not now" tells you people are reading.
3. Bounces. A high bounce rate in one city can mean the data there is stale.

Treat open rate as a weak signal only. Privacy features in email apps make opens unreliable, and replies are what pay you.

With 50 to 100 leads per city, small differences mean little. One extra reply is noise. Look for clear gaps, like one city producing several positive replies and another producing none.

Scale the winner, then add neighbours

Once a city works, go deeper before going wider:

• Add more keywords in the same city. If "roofer" worked, try "roofing contractor" and related trades.
• Move to nearby towns. Suburbs and surrounding towns share the same economy, time zone and references.
• Reuse what worked. Keep the winning email and swap in new cities one or two at a time.

If a city flopped, don't write it off immediately. Check whether the list was weak, the niche was wrong, or the offer didn't fit. Sometimes the same city works with a different niche.

When a reply comes in, answer quickly and clearly. The guide on following up after a positive reply helps you turn interest into a call.

Your plan for today

1. Write down who pays you, your workable time zones and where your proof is.
2. List 8 to 10 candidate cities across home, mid-sized and large.
3. Score them and keep the top three.
4. Pull and verify 50 to 100 leads per city.
5. Write one email with two follow-ups and schedule it for each city's morning.

If you want to try this inside one tool, new GetClient accounts get 100 free credits with no card needed, and you can see plans and credits when you are ready for more.