Ask HN: Dos and donts of first email marketing campaign for a B2B SaaS product?

From my experience, and this may be because of the industry I am working in, the overall idea is "dont". That is not to say that it doesn't work for other sectors & I'm pretty sure there are lots of evidence to say otherwise, but you should certainly consider if it is appropriate for your target market.

My cold outreach email campaigns have generally been met with silence, with the occasional response of "Looks great but not for us right now", or "We pick our own security tools, so if you show up in our research, we'll reach out to you".

Looking back on it, I completely agree with the responses I have had - if I was on their side of the fence, I would certainly just archive the email & ignore it. With this in mind, I think the effort is probably better spent doing research and content based marketing - getting eyes on your site and/or content for people who are clearly already interested in what you have to say or what you are up to.