Haren drops warmup, spintax and AI personalization
Taylor Haren ended the week sending cold email that looks like marketing email: HTML, images, no warmup, no spintax, no AI personalization. He says every client he moved to the new rail saw at least a 30% uplift, which puts the standard inbox playbook on trial.
Landing in the inbox
Haren now sends cold email that looks like marketing email
Taylor Haren has stopped trying to make cold email look like a rep wrote it, after a session with an infrastructure provider he says sends over a trillion emails a week. Out: AI personalization, spintax, warmup, reply-based CTAs. In: basic merge fields only, full HTML with images and links to book a call, on the theory that Google already knows what the cold email community does.
every client we moved from Instantly to Halo had a minimum 30% uplift in sign-ups, meetings booked, and paying customers, and the best client had a 5.1x multiplier
Campaigns and numbers
Christian reframes his 40,447-send finance campaign as market coverage
Christian took the finance campaign he broke down earlier in the week and rebuilt the argument around coverage rather than reply rate. The numbers are the same: 22,939 people contacted, 538 replies, 31 interested, $4M in claimed pipeline at $25k+ ACV, with meetings at Nvidia, Cisco and Cognizant.
Measured by reply rate, that campaign gets killed in week 3.
Copy that ran
Berman says the breakup email pulls prospects he had written off
Alex Berman says the last email in the sequence, the one that says you will not reach out again, is the step most senders cut. His framing is that buyers expect to be hounded forever, so the step back is what triggers the reply. He gives no volumes or reply rates, only that he has seen it on campaigns where the prospect was already dead.
We've seen it happen on campaigns where we'd written the prospect off completely.
Workflows and tooling
Lieben and Illingworth both publish Claude Code builds for cold email
Two operators published rebuildable Claude Code workflows in the same week. Michel Lieben names six APIs end to end: AI Ark for companies, PredictLeads for hiring signals, BlitzAPI for contacts and emails, LimaData for the misses, FullEnrich for mobiles, Instantly for the campaign.
99% of AI personalisation with cold email is slop.
Where they disagree
Berman argues volume beats hyper-enrichment, no test attached
Alex Berman says the new wave of enrichment flows (feeding scraped lists through filters to narrow them down) shrinks a few thousand scraped contacts to maybe 1% of the original list. His case: a broad Apollo scrape probably contains those same high-fit leads anyway, so the bigger list wins by letting you split test messaging angles faster.
Who closes more deals: The person emailing a hyper-enriched list of 8, or someone emailing thousands, including those same 8 leads?
Also on the timeline
Haren counts 2.11 signups per positive reply
Taylor Haren says cold email works better treated as an ad channel: one email is one creative, one segment is one audience.
Frequently asked questions
What is spintax in cold email?
Spintax is a technique that automatically generates variations of email text by swapping in different words or phrases. Taylor Haren stopped using it in favor of simpler merge fields that just fill in basic information like names.
What does ACV mean in sales?
ACV stands for Annual Contract Value, which is the average yearly revenue a customer pays. In the finance campaign example, the ACV was $25,000 or higher per client.
Should I use a breakup email at the end of a cold email sequence?
According to Alex Berman, the final breakup email that says you won't reach out again can trigger replies from prospects who were previously unresponsive, because it breaks the pattern of typical cold outreach. He recommends it as a low-cost final step rather than a reason to rebuild your whole sequence.
Is hyper-enrichment or larger contact lists better for cold email?
Alex Berman argues that using a larger scraped list beats spending time filtering it down to a smaller, highly-enriched list, because the broad list already contains the best prospects and lets you test messaging faster. However, he provided no test comparing the two approaches.
What changed about how Taylor Haren formats cold emails?
Taylor Haren switched from trying to make emails look like they came from a real person to formatting them like marketing emails instead, using full HTML with images and call-to-action links, while removing AI personalization and warmup techniques.