Half of Feldman's 274 replies were out-of-office
Jay Feldman hand-audited every reply from 39,834 dental sends and found over half were auto-responders. Re-scoring on qualified interest flipped which angle won, and the second-best replier turned out to be the worst performer.
Read the whole week in one goScore cold email tests on interest, not replies
Campaigns and numbers
Feldman: 39,834 dental sends, 274 replies, 54 opportunities in 7 weeks
Jay Feldman says a campaign for Spark Study Club sent 39,834 emails to 15,114 dentists over seven weeks and produced 274 replies and 54 opportunities, run off 50 mailboxes across 17 domains at a 2.49% bounce rate. He tested four angles, hand-audited every reply, and found over half were out-of-office auto-responders.
The surprising part: the angle that got the 2nd most replies was the worst performer.
Workflows and tooling
Christian posts a five-step build, says phone booked 62% of meetings
Christian published a five-step outbound build: map the market, score every company's website with AI and cut anything under 80%, then send from separate domains at 2 to 3 inboxes each with three weeks of warmup. Copy is under 65 words, 15 versions launched at once with 1,000 sends each, bottom two thirds cut.
On one of our builds the phone booked 62% of the meetings.
Illingworth says Claude Code replaced his Apollo, Clay and Instantly stack
Richard Illingworth says he has automated his entire cold email process end to end in Claude Code, from ICP definition through list building, enrichment, sequence writing and post-send analysis. He names what it displaces: Apollo for the list, Clay for enrichment, Instantly for sending, each covering about a third of the workflow with manual copy-paste between steps.