No — skip the links in your first cold email.
According to George Wauchope, founder of EmailChaser (a cold email tool), adding links to cold emails can negatively affect deliverability, making emails more likely to land in spam instead of the primary inbox. Note: Wauchope has a commercial interest in plain-text sending, since EmailChaser sends plain text by default — so treat this as informed vendor opinion, not an independent study. That said, the underlying logic is sound: email providers flag link-heavy emails because links are used in phishing scams and because emails stuffed with links tend to be promotional — exactly what Gmail and Outlook are trained to deprioritize.
A first email loaded with links screams "sales blast" instead of "actual human starting a conversation." And cold email response rates are already brutal. According to a 2024 study by Pipeful and Belkins — analyzing over 7.5 million B2B cold emails — the average response rate is around 5.1%. Every deliverability advantage counts when the baseline is that low.
Keep your first email clean: no links, no attachments, no images. According to Lavender.ai's internal platform data (based on their users' emails), the optimal cold email length is between 25 and 50 words — shorter emails consistently outperform longer ones on reply rate. If you absolutely have to include a link later in the sequence, Wauchope recommends limiting it to just one or two links total. But for first touch? Zero links. Get the reply first, send the link after they've already engaged.
Why Email Providers Penalize Links
There are two concrete reasons spam filters treat links as a red flag:
- Phishing risk: Links are the primary vector for phishing scams. Providers like Gmail and Outlook aggressively filter emails with suspicious-looking URLs to protect their users.
- Promotional signal: On average, emails packed with links are more likely to be sales or marketing messages — not personal correspondence. The more links you include, the more your email pattern-matches to bulk promotional mail.
Even linking to your own website isn't a safe bet. The EmailChaser recommendation: if a prospect wants to find your site, they'll type your domain into the browser themselves. You don't need to hand it to them in email body text.
What To Do Instead
- First email: Plain text, zero links, zero attachments, zero images. Write like a person, not a marketer.
- Follow-up emails: Once a prospect has replied, you can include links freely — at that point it won't hurt your deliverability. If you're adding a link before you have a reply, keep it to one or two clean links maximum, and skip tracking parameters.
- Signature: If you want your website in your signature, include the plain domain text (e.g., yourcompany.com) without hyperlinking it.