Two Operators Post Full Campaign Numbers, Not Screenshots
One 70 day foodservice campaign and one single day database reactivation send, both with the denominators attached.
Two senders posted complete campaign numbers this week instead of cropped inbox screenshots.
Christian, posting as @coldemailchris, says a campaign for a foodservice manufacturer produced 1,061 interested leads in 70 days off more than 100,000 emails a month. He puts 86% of those leads as qualified and 8 deals closed inside the window. Every reply was routed round-robin to a five person sales team the minute it landed, which is the part most people skip when they talk about lead counts.
His explanation for why it worked is mechanical rather than clever. The first line of the email names a number the owner already knows about his own business, so the recipient does not have to take the sender's word for anything. The offer at the end, he says, costs the owner nothing to say yes to. He also makes the case that restaurants, coffee shops and local businesses are the easiest cold email market in B2B right now, on the grounds that owners do not read past line two.
Shields' 9% came off a warm list
James Shields, posting as @scaling_shields, reported a different shape of result. One campaign, one day, 727 emails sent, 67 replies for a 9% reply rate, 51 interested leads, which he calls a 76% interested to reply rate, and 15 booked calls. He describes database reactivation campaigns as cheat codes and says to run them every month.
That is the number to be careful with. A database reactivation send goes to contacts who already have some relationship with the sender, so a 9% reply rate there is not the same instrument as a 9% on a cold prospecting list. Benchmarking your cold sequence against it will make a working campaign look broken. The useful read is the interested to reply ratio and the 15 calls off 727 sends, and even that is one campaign on one day from one account.
What is actually comparable
Christian's number is the volume story. More than 100,000 emails a month for 70 days is roughly 230,000 sends producing 1,061 interested leads, which is a low single digit fraction of a percent as an interested rate and 8 closed deals at the end of it. Shields' number is the warm list story. Both are self-reported by the people who ran them, neither has been independently checked, and neither says what the offer was priced at or what the sending infrastructure looked like.
For people sending, the transferable piece is not the percentages. It is that both operators attached a denominator, a time window and a follow-up path to their claim, which is the minimum needed before anyone else can tell whether the result would survive on their list.
It works because the first line of the email names a number the owner already knows about his own business.
database reactivation campaigns are literal cheat codes