Shields: 19-word email pulled 9.1% replies
James Shields says his best cold email this year was 19 words built on one LinkedIn hiring signal and returned a 9.1% reply rate. Nick Abraham, separately, has a three-step test for telling a copy problem from an infrastructure one before you rebuild anything.
Read the whole week in one go44,212 emails, 7 paid jobs for a pest control firm
Campaigns and numbers
Christian credits speed to lead for 9 in 10 meetings showing
Christian says every positive reply in the system he runs for clients goes straight to a person who picks up the phone, and that call gets around 9 in 10 meetings to show against around 4 in 10 from a calendar link. He attributes a large part of $70M+ in client pipeline to that speed.
Every positive reply goes straight to a person, who picks up the phone and calls them.
Copy that ran
Shields says a 19-word email returned a 9.1% reply rate
James Shields says the best performing cold email his team sent this year was 19 words and returned a 9.1% reply rate. The copy: "hey {name}, saw you're hiring 2 sales reps on linkedin / would 10 booked calls a month help more? / james". His explanation is relevance, not structure: find an actual reason to reach out.
would 10 booked calls a month help more?
Workflows and tooling
Abraham posts a three-step test for copy versus infrastructure
Nick Abraham published a three-step test to check whether spam placement is a copy problem before rebuilding sending infrastructure. Send a plain B2B email from the same setup, something like "Hey, what time are we planning to speak?", run an inbox placement test, then send the campaign copy through the same setup.