This is exactly how the cold email agency awards are scored.

No agency can pay to rank, and none can apply for a place.

• The awards are yearly. This is the 2026 edition, and every agency is scored again next year.
• We choose which agencies to review from public lists of cold email and outbound agencies. Nobody pays to be reviewed.
• There is no fee, no sponsored place and no paid badge. A badge is free for any agency that earns one.
• The scores use only public sources, listed below, so any agency or reader can check them.
• Agencies owned by the people behind Emailchaser are not ranked.
• Agencies that use Emailchaser are not ranked either, so we never score our own customers.

Each agency earns up to 100 points from four signals.

• 40

  Client reviews

  Up to 40 points for client reviews on Clutch. The first reviews count the most: 10 reviews earn about 17 points and 250 reviews earn all 40. A rating under 4.0 halves the points.

• 25

  Published results

  Up to 25 points for case studies or client results that show real numbers. The first ones count the most: 5 earn about 11 points and 60 earn all 25.

• 20

  Their own email setup

  DMARC policy reject is 20 points, quarantine 14, none (monitoring only) 6, and no DMARC record 0. No SPF record takes 6 points off.

• 15

  Track record

  1.5 points for each year the agency's domain has existed, up to 15 points (10 years).

A signal we could not find scores 0, and the agency's page says “not found”. We never fill in a number.

Here is how we check each signal.

1. Client reviews: we read the agency's public Clutch profile.

   We count the published client reviews and note the overall rating. G2 and other review sites are not counted, because we cannot read them without an account.

2. Published results: we count the case studies on the agency's own website.

   A case study counts when it is a published write-up with real numbers, such as meetings booked, pipeline or reply rate. The client's name may be hidden. One-line quotes, screenshot galleries and claims without figures do not count.

3. Their own email setup: we look up the agency's own domain in public DNS.

   We read its SPF record and its DMARC policy, the same records the free Emailchaser DMARC checker reads. An agency that sells deliverability should have its own house in order.

4. Track record: we look up when the agency's domain was registered.

   We use the public registration date. When a registry publishes none, we use the first copy of the website in the Internet Archive, which can only make an agency look younger, never older.

Scores become ranks and badges in three steps.

1. Agencies are ranked by total score.

   A tie goes to the agency with more Clutch reviews, then more case studies, then the older domain, then the name in alphabetical order.

2. An agency is ranked in every category it belongs to.

   Industries come from the agency's own site or Clutch profile, and the country from where it says it is based. A category gets a page only when we reviewed at least 5 agencies in it: 10 categories qualified this year.

3. Badges go to the top 10 of each ranking, or fewer in a small ranking.

   The badge reads “#N of M reviewed”, where M is the number of agencies reviewed in that category. Places 1 to 3 are gold, places 4 to 10 are navy. In a ranking of fewer than 25 agencies, the badges go to the top 40% (rounded up) instead, so a badge never goes to most of a small list. Every ranking lists its badge holders by name and says how many agencies were reviewed; the others are counted, not listed.