Most freight brokers send generic, high-volume emails that get ignored. This guide covers the infrastructure and tactics required to reach shippers and carriers consistently.
Logistics buyers ignore emails about 'competitive rates.' Focus on specific lane availability, equipment type, or backhaul opportunities.
Sending 500+ daily emails from one inbox guarantees you land in spam. Cold email for freight requires multi-inbox rotation to scale.
Your main domain is for operations. Using it for cold outreach risks your ability to send load confirmations and invoices to clients.
Shippers won't reply to your first email. A 5-touch sequence across email and LinkedIn is the baseline for getting noticed in a crowded inbox.
Outbound in freight and logistics is a volume game, but playing it wrong is a fast track to getting your domain blacklisted. The competition is fierce, and logistics buyers are inundated with identical-sounding emails about “competitive rates” and “reliable capacity.”
The standard approach—blasting thousands of emails from a single company inbox—no longer works. It damages your sending reputation, ensures your messages land in spam, and makes your team look disorganized.
Doing this well in 2025 requires a shift in thinking: from 'more emails' to 'smarter infrastructure.' This guide breaks down the strategy, tactics, and technical foundation needed to build a predictable outbound engine for your logistics business.
The core challenge isn't a lack of shippers to contact; it's the noise. Every broker has access to the same lists and sends nearly identical messages. Breaking through requires overcoming specific hurdles:
Success in 2025 isn't about finding a magic template. It's about combining disciplined list building, relevant messaging, and a multi-touch approach.
Hyper-Segmented Lists
Instead of a generic list of 'shippers,' build targeted segments based on specific lanes, required equipment (e.g., reefers, flatbeds), or recent shipping activity. The more granular your list, the more relevant your message.
Message with Specific Value
Stop leading with price. Lead with concrete value that solves an immediate problem for the shipper.
Example 1: Lane-Specific Outreach
Subject: Capacity: Dry Van Chicago -> Atlanta
Body: "Noticed you ship from the Chicago area. We have 3 dry vans finishing a run nearby next Tuesday looking for backhaul to Atlanta. Worth a quick chat to see if we can cover a load for you?"
Example 2: Equipment-Specific Outreach
Subject: Reefer capacity in CA
Body: "Your company moves a lot of produce out of California. We specialize in temperature-controlled freight and have reefer capacity available on the I-5 corridor. Are you the right person to discuss logistics partners for these loads?"
Multi-Touch Cadence
A single email is not enough. A 5-7 touch sequence over 2-3 weeks across email and LinkedIn is the baseline. The goal is to be persistent and helpful, not annoying.
You can't scale a logistics outbound program on a handful of Outlook inboxes. Once you try sending more than 100-200 emails a day, the system breaks. Emails stop getting delivered, and you don't even know it's happening.
Scaling safely requires thinking like an infrastructure operator:
getyourcompany.com, yourcompany.io) to protect your main brand.For freight and logistics companies, your primary domain (yourbrokerage.com) is a critical operational asset. It's used for load confirmations, invoicing, and carrier communication. If that domain gets flagged for spam because of aggressive cold outreach, your core business operations grind to a halt. This is why disciplined teams send from secondary, warmed-up domains to insulate their operational email flow from sales risk.
Here are a few practical patterns you can run with the right infrastructure.
1. Net New Shipper Outreach
2. Carrier Network Expansion
3. Dormant Account Reactivation
The shift happens when you move from one rep sending emails to a team of 3, 5, or 10 reps trying to hit the market. It's the point where spreadsheets break, reps step on each other's toes, and your main domain's deliverability is at risk.
This is when you need an outbound engine—an infrastructure-first platform like SuperSend. It's not another CRM. It's the technical layer that manages hundreds of sending inboxes, rotates domains, warms up accounts, and executes multi-channel sequences over email and LinkedIn automatically.
This isn't about a 'better template.' It's about building a scalable sending machine. The next step is to understand the specific use cases for this infrastructure, like building a lead generation engine for your brokers. From there, you can explore the strategies for managing deliverability at scale.
Join thousands of teams using SuperSend to transform their cold email campaigns and drive more revenue.