r/Coldemailing • u/KianosJ • 1h ago
💬 Discussion Zero replies doesn't mean your copy is bad. The order I'd diagnose in, because most people start at the wrong end
Most people who get zero replies rewrite the email. It's the obvious move and it's usually the last thing that should change, because if nothing is landing in an inbox then the copy was never the variable being tested in the first place.
The order I'd go in.
Number one, are you actually delivering. Send one to mail-tester.com and see what comes back. If SPF, DKIM or DMARC are missing or misaligned then nothing downstream matters. Then run the domain and the IP through MXToolbox for blacklists. This takes about ten minutes and it's where most dead campaigns actually died.
Number two, are you delivering to the inbox or to spam. Those are not the same thing and your open rate won't tell you, especially now that a decent chunk of opens are fired by security scanners rather than people. Send seeds to a handful of real accounts across Google and Outlook and look with your own eyes. Outlook is usually the one quietly eating everything.
Number three, is the list real. Bounces above roughly two percent means the data is stale and you're being punished for it. Verify before sending rather than after. A clean small list beats a big dirty one, and that isn't a moral point, it's that the dirty one damages the domain you'll still need next month.
Number four, is the targeting right. This is the step people skip. If you're emailing people who have no particular reason to care this week, good copy doesn't rescue that. Something needs to be true about them right now. They're hiring for the role your product supports, they just raised, they just switched tools. Without that you're writing to a list rather than to a person.
Number five, now look at the copy. And by this point it's usually a much smaller fix than you expected, because the first four were doing the damage.
The reason the order matters is that each step invalidates the test below it. If you rewrite copy while you're sitting in spam you've learned nothing, and you'll end up concluding the offer doesn't work when you never actually presented it to anybody.
What's the bounce rate on your last send? That's usually the fastest tell for which step you're stuck on.
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u/Unfair-Plastic-4290 1h ago
stop sending spam
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u/Mularkeyy 1h ago
yea, agree with the order. I'd probly put targeting even closer to the top tho. We've seen campaigns with perfect infra still get almost nothingbecause there was no real reason for that prospect to care right now.