Haren now sends cold email formatted like marketing email
One sender's switch, built on a briefing from a provider he says pushes over a trillion emails a week.
Taylor Haren says he has stopped trying to make cold email look like a message a rep typed out, and started making it look like a marketing email. That follows a session with the infrastructure provider behind Halo, which he says is built by a billion dollar B2C email company and sends more than a trillion emails a week. He earlier listed what he cut.
What he cut and what replaced it
Out go AI personalization, spintax, warmup and reply-based CTAs, the "reply X and I'll get you Y" pattern. In come basic merge fields only, full HTML with images, and links that go to a booking page or the client's website. Haren's argument, relayed from the Halo briefing, is that Google and Outlook already know what the cold email community does, and that every lookalike domain, every spintax variant and every thousand-way A/B test is just training the filters on the permutations of a single offer.
The logic behind the format change is blunt. A cold email has a CTA in it, so it does not look like an employee email, and the type of mail that is allowed to carry CTAs all day is marketing mail. Haren says he was previously spending $50,000 a month on Instantly, running the standard setup of multiple domains, three to five accounts per domain and ten to twenty five sends per account, and burning the accounts two days later.
The numbers he is claiming
Haren says every client he moved from Instantly to Halo saw a minimum 30% uplift in sign-ups, meetings booked and paying customers, with one client at a 5.1x multiplier. He also says he has been the only sender allowed to run cold email on that rail for the past two months.
He ends on the part that does not depend on formatting at all. What matters, he says, is whether more than one in a thousand sends gets marked as spam, which makes the offer the real variable. He points to Ramp as an example, arguing it can send 300,000 emails a day because its total volume runs into the hundreds of millions daily, so the complaint ratio stays survivable.
For people sending, this is one operator's account of one provider's advice, and the uplift figures are his own tally across clients he moved, not an independent test. The underlying point about spam complaint ratios is not new, but the HTML-and-images recommendation runs directly against what most cold email guidance still says.
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
Everybody is trying to make a cold email look like a normal employee email
Know what is landing before you burn another domain
One email a day. Under three minutes. What the operators found out yesterday.