Traditional prospecting is saturated.
Traditional B2B prospecting takes more effort for fewer replies. Since 1 February 2024, Gmail has required anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail addresses to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, offer one-click unsubscribe and keep spam complaint rates below 0.3% (Google); the average cold email reply rate is around 3.4% (Woodpecker’s analysis of more than 20 million emails, cited by lemlist); LinkedIn caps invitations, at around 100 a week according to users, without publishing an official figure. One channel remains open: the contact form a business publishes on its own website. Of the 24.7 million business websites murmur had analysed by 05/11/2026, 4.8 million, or 19%, have a confirmed one.
Where it breaks down
Mail filters, dedicated domains and mailboxes to set up
Quotas, restricted accounts
No one picks up, do-not-call lists
Ad fatigue, rising CPA
What changes, channel by channel
Three ways to make a first contact, compared criterion by criterion.
| Criterion | Cold email | LinkedIn prospecting | murmur (contact form) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the message arrives | A mailbox, behind mail filters | LinkedIn messaging | The contact form the business publishes on its website |
| Who is contacted | A person | A person | The business, through its public channel |
| Where contacts come from | Addresses to find or buy | Named profiles | Included database (public sources) or your own list of websites |
| Personalisation | Templates and merge fields | Manual or templates | Opening written by AI from the website, examples approved by you |
| What you need to set up | Domains, sending mailboxes, gradual ramp-up | A LinkedIn account | A reply address |
| What limits volume | Email provider quotas | Invitation quotas | Your credits, the businesses you can reach, each country's rules |
| Billing | Depends on the tool | Depends on the tool | Charged on proof of submission |
The contact form, an underused channel
murmur handles the first contact through each business's own contact form; the conversation stays with you.
See how it works