Illingworth: Google to Microsoft replies at 0.3%
Richard Illingworth says the same cold email gets a 4% reply rate Google to Google and 0.3% Google to Microsoft, which makes recipient provider a targeting decision, not a detail.
Landing in the inbox
Illingworth: Google to Microsoft replies drop to 0.3%
Richard Illingworth put numbers on recipient-side provider mix in a seven-point list of why cold mail lands in spam: Google to Google returns 4% replies, Google to Microsoft 0.3%.
go check your auth records and your bounce rate first.
Campaigns and numbers
Christian says building materials campaign returned 741 leads, no personalisation
Christian says a building materials client campaign produced 741 interested leads and $3.7M in pipeline with no per-contact personalisation. The offer was one line about cutting cost per square foot, and eight angles were tested before one was scaled. Once that angle won, he says they stopped touching the copy and put every send behind it.
The inbox you're fighting for has forty people in it this week. The one nobody's fighting for is empty.
Workflows and tooling
Illingworth rebuilt his cold email process inside Claude Code
Richard Illingworth published an eight-step build that runs list pull, enrichment, validation, writing and QC inside Claude Code. Claude pulls from Apollo off his ICP and offer, scrapes sites and tech stack in parallel, verifies before writing, then caps every email at 80 words.