Christian, 22,000 emails sold event tickets, 160+ leads
A CE credit incentive, two personas and two emails, on a campaign that is still running.
Christian says a cold email campaign selling tickets to a construction event has returned 818 replies from 22,000 emails, with 160+ leads, one for every 87 people contacted. He puts the yes rate at one in every five replies. The event is not until June and he says the campaign is still live.
The hook is CE credits, continuing education credits that architecture and engineering firms already carry budget for. That matters more than it sounds, because the money is already allocated and the email is not asking anyone to create a new line item.
Two personas, two emails
The campaign splits the audience by who pays and who shows up. One email goes to the people who buy the ticket, a second to the people who attend. Christian also names a second buyer entirely, general contractors who want to be in the room with the firms that hand out projects.
Targeting is narrow and stated as exclusions. Commercial only. Structural engineers, not civil or MEP. Architects, not interior designers. The list came from what he calls a honeypot database, every company that has built a mass timber project, scraped with Claude Code. Contacts are principals, partners and VPs, plus info@ addresses for the smaller firms where a named decision maker is harder to find.
The lead magnet lost
The test worth noticing is the offer test. Christian ran a free CE credit lead magnet against leading with the event itself, and the event won. His reasoning is that both produced the same number of yeses, but the ones from the event came from buyers. A free credit pulls in anyone who wants a free credit. A ticket pitch filters for people willing to spend.
For people sending, this is the same pattern that shows up whenever a free offer gets compared to a paid one. Volume of positive replies is not the metric. Who sent them is. If a lead magnet and a direct offer return the same count, the direct offer is strictly better because the list it produces is already qualified on intent.
Behind the replies, Christian describes an AI reply flow that answers every lead, syncs it to the CRM and drops it into a nurture sequence. With 818 replies against a June event date, the nurture side is doing as much work as the send.
The full breakdown is a video he is gating behind a like, a comment of "EVENT" and a follow, so the numbers above are what is public. One client, one campaign, mid flight.
22,000 emails, 818 replies and 1 in every 5 replies saying yes
the same number of yeses, but they came from buyers
Know what is landing before you burn another domain
One email a day. Under three minutes. What the operators found out yesterday.