Abraham says 2,412 emails returned 18 leads in 7 days
The client sells hardware to children's playgrounds, museums and schools, a vertical Abraham says rarely gets cold emailed.
Nick Abraham says his team delivered 18 leads in 7 days from 2,412 cold emails for a client that sells hardware to children's playgrounds, museums and schools.
That works out to roughly one lead per 134 emails sent over a single week. Abraham does not publish reply rates, open rates or what counted as a lead, so take the number as what it is, one agency's self-reported result on one campaign in one week. What he does describe is the copy, and his point is that there was not much to it.
Social proof plus a warranty
By his account the campaign ran on two things. Relevant social proof, meaning named or described customers similar to the prospect, and a 5-year warranty used as risk reversal. He calls the copy "nothing crazy", which is the part of the post that matters more than the lead count.
His conclusion is that the industry choice carried the campaign, not the writing. Playground, museum and school hardware buyers sit outside the agency, SaaS and recruiting lists that every sender is already hammering, so an ordinary email lands in a quiet inbox instead of a stack of forty identical ones.
"The BEST industries to cold email into are ones that rarely get cold emailed."
He pairs that with the offer side, saying the way to work an untouched vertical is to make the buyer an offer they would feel silly saying no to. A 5-year warranty on physical hardware is a concrete version of that. It removes the thing a school or municipal buyer actually worries about, which is replacement cost on equipment that gets abused daily.
What is transferable
The copy is not the lesson here, and Abraham says so himself. He has argued before that most copy split tests are noise, and this post is the same argument from the other direction. The variables he credits are list choice and offer, both decided before anyone opens a sequencer.
For people sending, the honest read is that nothing in the post proves the vertical caused the result. There is no control, no comparison campaign into a saturated industry, no deliverability data. What you have is an operator who ran the campaign telling you which lever he thinks moved, which beats an opinion from someone who did not run it but still is not evidence. If you want to test the claim, the cheap version is to run your existing copy into an adjacent industry that nobody in your space prospects and see whether the floor moves before you touch a single subject line.
The BEST industries to cold email into are ones that rarely get cold emailed.
We delivered 18 leads in 7 days from 2,412 cold emails