Archive, page 2
- Haren drops warmup, spintax and AI personalization
Taylor Haren says his new infrastructure provider told him the deliverability meta is backwards, and he has stopped using warmup, spintax and AI personalization in favour of HTML marketing-style email. He says every client moved over gained at least 30% on signups and meetings.
- Free tier: one signup per 52 emails vs 643
Taylor Haren ran two near-identical products to the same list and the free-forever tier signed one prospect every 52 emails against one every 643 for the 7-day trial. The argument is whether free offers just buy you tire kickers.
- 1.8M sends off subdomains, 99.7% inbox health
Richard Illingworth says a client ran 1.8 million cold emails in six weeks off root domains that never sent a single one, and claims 99.7% average inbox health across 5,000 accounts. The rule everyone repeats about subdomains burning together may only apply when the root is sending.
- Abraham: phone follow-up books half his email leads
James Shields says a "no results, you don't pay" PS line doubled his booked call rate, and Nick Abraham says a phone-first follow-up routine books about half his interested replies. Both numbers are self-reported, and both plays are cheap to test this week.
- Sabo: 86K emails, 101 leads, 50+ calls in 2 hours
Sabo says a campaign two hours old had already produced 101 leads and 50+ booked calls off 86,000 emails, with another 220,000 queued for the same day. No list, no offer and no vertical attached to the number.
- Abraham: five niche campaigns, 60 leads in 3 weeks
Nick Abraham's best-performing list last week was 999 people and returned a 9.31% reply rate on a travel expo booth offer. The lists are small enough that the lesson is in the offer, not the volume.
- Score cold email tests on interest, not replies
Jay Feldman hand-audited 274 replies on a dental campaign and found over half were out-of-office autoresponders, which flipped his angle ranking. The angle he would have kept on reply rate was his worst performer.
- Illingworth: never pull from Apollo alone
Richard Illingworth says he has never seen a successful cold emailer running Apollo as the only source, and that pulling the same list from seven angles outperforms by 3 to 4x. The tools he names are cheap to test, the multiple is his alone.
- 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.
- Christian: 30 demos in a week, and a side of SEO
Christian says a SaaS client with no prior outbound booked 30 demos in one week, and because the emails carry no links, search phrases stuck at rank 45 moved to page one. Nick Abraham spent the day asking what anyone actually does with account-level intent data.
- Christian publishes the build behind 1,061 leads
Christian put the whole workflow behind his foodservice campaign on the table, including the segment nobody expected: megachurches, which no database files as a foodservice buyer. Matt Lucero's three campaigns put a ratio on segmentation.
- Berman says compliments now hurt cold email replies
Alex Berman says the compliment opener won for years and then the data flipped, and that emails leading with a specific, costly problem are what get replies now. He did not publish the test size.
- One line to 4,800 restaurants, 61 replies in week one
James Shields says a Manchester extractor fan cleaner emailed 4,800 restaurants a single question and got 61 replies in the first week. No personalisation, no website, a list pulled from within an hour of his house.
- 44,212 emails, 7 paid jobs for a pest control firm
James Shields put 44,212 emails behind 7 paid jobs for an Ohio pest control firm, while Nick Abraham spent the week telling operators their two-variant copy tests measure nothing. Both are arguments about which number you should actually be judging a campaign on.
- 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.
- Illingworth skipped warmup and says it held
Richard Illingworth says he has been running live campaigns with almost no warmup and most held deliverability, against the three-week rule everyone repeats. He is still testing, so treat it as an early signal, not a licence to send cold off a fresh domain.
- Christian: calling booked 33 of 53 meetings
Christian put 41,150 emails against 32,577 dials on the same market for one client, and the phone booked 33 of the 53 meetings. He says it took 987 dials per meeting against 2,058 emails.
- Rahman: Google replies 1.75%, Microsoft 0.42%
Adam Rahman put 174,282 sends behind the provider gap this crowd keeps arguing about: Google inboxes replied at 1.75%, Microsoft at 0.42%, same copy and offers. Christian says that is why you pull MX records before you send anything.
- Christian's team runs TAM building out of Slack
Christian published the full build for an AI agent that returns verified contacts from a Slack message, wired to 16 data and verification tools. He says running it on one shared Codex account instead of per-person seats saves about $800 a month.
- Lieben: campaign built in Claude Code in 27 minutes
Michel Lieben says one of his GTM engineers dictated three sentences to Claude Code and had a verified list and written copy sitting in Instantly 27 minutes later. The caveat is buried in his own post: the TAM and ICP matrix were built first.
- 60 inboxes on one $10 domain, but Illingworth also warns it kills delivery
Richard Illingworth claims he runs 60 sending inboxes on a single root domain across 2,000 setups, with one 5,000-account client hitting 99.7% inbox on 1.8M sends. The same week he flagged 10 inboxes per domain as spam risk, so the line between packed infrastructure and deliverability collapse is narrower than the setup suggests.
- 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.
- 10M sends, five scripts, Apollo at 50-65% valid
Christian put five exact scripts behind 10M sends and says his best performing campaign ever has no personalisation in it. Richard Illingworth says Apollo on its own comes back 50-65% valid, which is where most of your bounces are coming from.