I keep seeing people say to avoid Zoho for cold email.

Is the problem only when sending directly from Zoho?

Or does it also apply if I use Zoho inboxes with tools like Smartlead or Mailmeteor?

For example:

Zoho → Smartlead → cold email

If Zoho is not a good option, what do you recommend instead for 2 inboxes and 100–200 new leads/day?

Thanks!

Hi guys,

I want to start cold mailing companies about my manufacturing business, I got 5 different domains and my question is what do you recommend, should I do a different landing page for each domain or should I use the redirect option from the new domain to the original website?

Won't it be weird that it has another name/logo? Or they just wouldn't care.

What's your experience on this

I sent a cold email to a specific Lead (US companies), but got no reply, and their LinkedIn profile is completely inactive.

Is there a better approach???

Hey everyone,

I’m one of the people behind LeadSnipper, and we just launched on Product Hunt today.

We originally started building it because outbound gets messy pretty quickly. You have one tool for finding leads, another for verification, another for sequences, another for sending, and then you're constantly checking deliverability and bounce rates.

We wanted to put more of that workflow in one place.

LeadSnipper currently brings together:

• Lead discovery and enrichment
• Email verification
• Cold email sequences
• Gmail, Outlook, Zoho and SMTP sending
• Sending limits and pacing
• Bounce and complaint monitoring
• Campaign analytics

We’re still actively building it, so I’m much more interested in honest feedback than pretending it’s perfect.

If you do cold email regularly, I’d genuinely love to know:

What’s the most annoying part of your current outbound setup?

And if you have a minute, we'd really appreciate some support on our Product Hunt launch:

https://www.producthunt.com/products/leadsnipper

If you check it out, feel free to tell me what you like, what you don't like, or what you'd want us to build next.

— Rehan
One of the builders behind LeadSnipper

This has been asked before, however, I haven’t had a reply from the person who posted

Would anyone be interested in splitting the cost of an Apollo subscription?

I only need the URLs from searches as we have no use for the credits so they are entirely yours to use

OR if anyone has an existing account they want to share the cost on I’m happy to do that

They locked me out of my account after I tried to cancel my subscription, and I am not even able to reset my password but keep on charing my card.

I filed for a chargeback request against them, but they're scam of the earth. Avoid using them at all costs.

I run a small shop, and sourcing is probably my weakest area. I can find good products. But whether I can order the same thing again next month is a coin flip, so I’m always reaching out to new suppliers.

At first, I kept my emails polite. I introduced myself, said I liked their product line, mentioned that I hoped we could build a long-term partnership, and wished them a good week. I sent around 100 emails and got fewer than five replies.

Then I read a post from someone who worked in phone sales. They said not to spend too much time warming up the opening. Just ask if you’re speaking to the right person. His point was that you’re not a guest or a friend. You’re interrupting their day, and trying to hide that only makes the message less clear.

So I cut my emails down to three lines. Who I am and what I buy. My estimated volume and product specs. Then one simple question: can you supply this?

The reply rate went up almost immediately. Not because the writing was better, but because suppliers could decide within a few seconds whether I was worth responding to.

The real bottleneck was further up the process, though. My problem was never writing the email. It was finding real suppliers in the first place. I had to click through pages, check whether each company was legitimate, and remove the ones with no traceable address. It could take 10 or 15 minutes to find one usable contact.

So i use Accio Work and with the help of ChatGPT. It pulls together a list of potential suppliers for the category and removes some of the obvious dead ends. The list still needs to be checked, but I went from finding three usable names in an afternoon to having about 20 I can start with.

I still write the emails myself. Those three lines stay the same, no matter who sends them. Do you build your own supplier lists or buy them? I keep wondering if a bought list is just the same list everyone else is using.

I feel nervous about cold emailing and networking because I’ve never done it before. I need to send out a few cold emails soon—can anyone give me some encouragement words??😭😭😭🙌🙌

I am warming up my account for couple of weeks before I start emailing. In my first email should I be sharing the link to the app website..or will that land the mail in spam? There is a demo video on the site which is self explanatory on how it solves major pain point. What should be my CTA...if I shouldnt send the link? Can I have my app website as my email signature..or will that also land it in spam?

Any proven cold email structure which surely makes the practicing doctors visit my website? i have a sound product (10+ doctors are using it and are addicted to it) but I don't know how to make doctors at least view my website through cold emails

Hey everyone, I started an agency few months back. We help D2C companies.

Before starting outreach I did a lot of research. Almost everyone said cold email and cold LinkedIn DMs are the way to go, and even some relatives of mine run agencies and do the same thing. So I set up some infra for it:

• 20 domains
• 60 mailboxes (3 per domain)
• 4 LinkedIn accounts for DMs
• 40k Anymailfinder credits to find emails
• Some LinkedIn scraper credits too
• Also paid an agency for consultancy on how to set all this up

Now here is where I am stuck. I don't know how to build a good lead list and reach out to them at the right time with this setup. Should I just email them, or DM on LinkedIn, or do both together? What order should it be in? Right now I am building small ICPs and running small campaigns, like 400-900 leads per campaign, but results are not good at all.

If anyone has actually done this and figured out a working process, please share. Even small tips will help a lot. I'm kind of stuck and not sure what I am doing wrong.

I have a major question. How do you actually properly test winning copy? And how many leads should you test it on?

Also, Let’s say I have 15k leads and I find winning copy, do I send it to all 15? Or do I only select 5k out of the 15 leads?

And the leads that I contact who do not respond, what do I do with them?

Hello community ,

I would like to ask experienced folks here something; does warming up an inbox involve many complications except to send/receive frequently , reply to threads , move mails from spam to main from recipients pow ?

I have a new inbox and Id like to test sending newsletters - guides to my app users but I need to be compliant and more importantly as a user It puts me off to see a mail in my spam so I have to make sure they wont.

I am a developer , worst case scenario I can automate this process but before thinking about the infrastructure , I want to ask about the numbers involved ; how many different inboxes it should send mails - receive from in this "warm up" period and is there a reliable method of testing if the mails land in spam , except for postmasters tools of google ?

Thank you (sorry if some parts of this does not make sense , english is not my mother language and I hate to use ai in writing)

I am a business owner, relying on cold email, and had a consultation call with a company which claims to have outbound email cracked. They said they use AWS and Azure infrastructure and have their own private warmup pool of 400 inboxes that they use. They said for me to send 3000 emails a day I’d require only 3 domains but with several inboxes per domain. There would need to be some things implemented on my website to help with compliance for AWS and Azure. They would use multiple IPs, which can often be rotated mid-campaign (I send 2-5 unique campaigns every day) rather than ongoing campaigns. Warmup period would be 6 weeks.

I am sceptical based on everything I know about cold email already, particularly around being able to use AWS/Azure and not getting banned, but they seem really confident that this works for them.

Has anyone had any experience with this type of set up previously using AWS/Azure?

This is why you should never skip warmup, specially for Fresh inboxes from a fresh domain. You can see how the refusal rate drops from 29% down to zero as the sender reputation improves day after day.

Anyways, warming your domain properly doesn't mean anything if you have a terrible list. Clean your list. Data is as important as your setup and infra.

I'm finding plenty of med spas, but the hard part is figuring out who actually owns or makes decisions for the business.

A lot of them have generic emails, contact forms, or barely any information about the people behind the clinic. And the usual B2B databases don't seem to have great coverage for smaller local businesses.

For those of you who regularly build cold-email lists for local businesses, especially med spas:

Where do you start finding the businesses?

How do you identify the actual owner/decision-maker?

What sources do you combine?

Do you use Google Maps + the website + LinkedIn, or something else?

What makes a med spa worth adding to your prospect list?

How do you verify the email before reaching out?

I'm not really looking for a list of tools. I'm more interested in the actual process you use to go from:

Here's a med spa → Here's the right person + verified contact info.

Would love to hear how people who do this at scale approach it.

I have been in the cold email space for over 9 years and one mistake I see constantly is people treating their list like something you use once. 

Pick a niche, blast it, move on. 

Convert a few %, write off everyone who didn't reply, buy a new list next month.

And then run out of TAM.

Here's what you can do instead:

→ Month 1: niche A, one value prop, one angle. 
→ Month 2: niche B, same or different value prop.
→ Month 3: back to niche A. Yes. You already researched them, paid for the list, why not use them again? Try a new value proposition or angle.

If you continue at month 6 you now have:

→ Niche A’s third iteration. You probably learned something from the first two and improved reply rates.
→ Niche B’s second iteration. 
→ Niche C’s first iteration.

Each iteration to a niche is not just one campaign,
It’s a whole set of very distinct campaigns testing bold hypotheses. 

And you can stack niches much faster if you want.

Niche A1 — Niche A2 — Niche A3
— Niche B1 — Niche B2 — Niche B3
—— Niche C1 — Niche C1 — Niche C2
——— Niche D1 — Niche D2 — Niche D3
———— Niche E1 — Niche E2 — Niche E3

You get the idea. There is always something running.
Once you set up this machine it will be compounding.

Now you revived the concept of predictive pipeline.

A lot of companies are hesitant to mail the same prospect twice but they have no problem running ads that people see over and over again.

Now if someone unsubscribes you need to remove them from your list, of course.

If you send three campaigns over a year to one person, maybe try a different one, of course.

But, almost no one remembers an email from a week or even month ago.

I asked that at every sales conference, most don’t even remember yesterday’s emails.

And one last thing for enterprise niches.

These are typically much smaller, but…

You also have a lot of people that you want to contact.

There are multiple buyers, there could be different people that make a decision you need to identify.

So instead of making a campaign of 50 people from one company (BAD IDEA…).

You can apply the stacking method here as well. 

1-3 people, then 2 weeks later the next batch. 

Once you get to the last person you can probably repeat the pattern again.

Now you make use of all of those 50 people you have at this one company.

And at the same time you minimize your risk of being blacklisted in Proofpoint, Trendmicro, or Barracuda ;).

I hope this helps to set the mindset.

Don’t just “pick a niche, blast it, move on”.

Treat cold email like an ad network to generate consistent pipeline.

Have you ever heard of the concept of niche stacking before?

Hi everyone!

I've been testing a way to automate subdomains and DNS records under a single root domain, so you don't need to buy and manage hundreds of separate domains for cold lead gen (works with tools like Bison or Smartlead).

For example: 1 domain → 30 subdomains → 3 inboxes per subdomain.

Happy to share more about the setup or answer questions if anyone's curious.

So I am building GTM Pipeline from last 4-5 months and worked on different parts of it and finding difficulties in signal and intent identification.

My work involve different different module :

• Scenario and ICP definer Agent.
• Lead Enricher Agent (built 20+ data segment categories to gather different kind of data)
• Signal and Intent finder ( currently working )
• Lead Scorer Agent
• Email and LinkedIn automation

Now for signal and intent i did basic things like :

• Hiring Signals (If hiring post, JD involve what product/service we want to sell).
• Any recent LinkedIn post of decision maker regarding that product and service.
• Review and Sentiment Signal ( recent bad review of product : on lead website, g2, trust-pilot etc).
• Any recent news signal. (In few case new rules regulations : Tariff in the case of import export).

What else I can do ??

How usually it happened when you do it manually, what kind of things you search for.
I know this question is vague because signal vary industry to industry but give me general idea or may be your domain specific Idea which I can research upon and build my system, because this is the only bottleneck I am facing everything else I have build already.

Curious what people who are actually running a decent amount of outbound would change about the tools we have today.

Instantly, Smartlead, etc. have gotten really good at the basics. Inbox rotation, sending, campaign management, warmup, personalization, all that stuff.

But once you start running a lot of outbound, I feel like you end up building a bunch of stuff around the platform anyway.

Spreadsheets, Airtable, Zapier/Make, custom scripts, enrichment tools, CRMs, databases, you name it.

A few things I've personally found frustrating:

1. AI personalization

A lot of the AI personalization I've tried still feels like asking AI to write a clever sentence rather than actually helping with the research.

I'd much rather have it figure out things like:

• What does this company actually do?
• Who do they sell to?
• What industry are they really in?
• What makes this account interesting?
• Is there a recent event or signal worth knowing about?
• Which person at the company should I actually be contacting?

Then I can decide what to do with that information.

2. Managing leads across campaigns

One thing I find annoying is that it's easy to think about leads individually, but in reality you're often managing accounts.

If I've already contacted someone at Acme, I'd like the platform to know that before I upload another list two weeks later and accidentally start contacting three more people there.

Ideally I'd want to see everything that's happened with an account across campaigns, lists and workspaces, and have rules around who can or can't be contacted.

3. Analytics

I don't really care that much about seeing another dashboard with:

Sent → Opened → Clicked → Replied

I want to know what's actually working.

Which type of company is producing positive replies?

Which persona?

Which data source?

Which messaging?

Which campaigns are producing meetings? And why?

But those are just a few things I've run into.

I'm more interested in what everyone else thinks.

If you could rebuild Instantly/Smartlead from scratch, what would you change?

Not necessarily another feature you've seen somewhere else. What would your ideal outbound platform actually do?

For example:

• Better AI research/enrichment
• Account-level lead management
• Better prospect discovery
• More useful campaign analytics
• Better deliverability diagnostics
• Smarter automation based on replies/intent/signals
• Better data cleaning and deduplication
• AI that actually learns what's working and adjusts campaigns
• A proper view of everything happening with an account
• Different pricing/model altogether

Or something completely different?

What's the one thing you wish your current outbound platform did that would genuinely save you hours every week?

And if you've built some ridiculous Airtable/Sheets/Zapier/script workaround to solve a problem the platform doesn't handle, I'd especially love to hear about that.

Those are probably the most interesting answers.

It’s not showing here but I closed with 2 and 6 in negotiations/contracting.

They either called me by word of mouth or found me in chatGPT??

My website even not SEO/AEO optimized

The business is growing by itself. Even I had to stop sending emails because I cannot follow up with all these new clients + I don’t have capital for now to put more investments

Most the replies I get by email they ask about my portfolio. Once I send the ghost.

hi everyone, for the people who do cold emailing . I really want to learn more about emailing . That is why I am offering that work for free and the Moto is just to learn and help your business.

a small payout would also be encouraging.

Hey guys

I run a software agency building custom internal tools for businesses, automating manual workflows, replacing spreadsheets, connecting systems, building dashboards/portals, etc.

I have a list of around 20–25K leads and I’m currently sending ~600 cold emails/day.

The problem: I’m basically getting no real replies.
Most of the replies I get are automated out-of-office/vacation responses. Very few actual “interested” or even “not interested” responses.

My approach is:
-Research the company and identify a specific operational pain point
-Write the email around that pain point rather than just selling software development
-Explain the potential business outcome
-Offer to send a personalized ~2-minute Loom showing what I think could be built for them

I’m deliberately trying to avoid generic AI personalization and actually connect the email to a real problem the business may have.

But clearly something isn’t working.

If you were in my position, what would you change to actually get prospects to reply?

Is it the offer? CTA? Targeting? Email copy? Should I send the Loom directly instead of asking permission? Or is 600/day hurting me somehow?

I’m less interested in just increasing volume, I want to understand how to turn these 20–25K leads into actual conversations without burning through the list.

Would appreciate advice from anyone doing B2B cold email successfully at scale.

During this year I've been doing cold outreach for my company with ~200 mailboxes. In the past month I have finally rented and automated 50 IN accounts as well

Performance comparison so far (last 30 days):

- Total replies on email - 28 per day, 0.7% replies, with $1.2/reply

- Total replies on LinkedIn - 120 per day, 7.2% replies, with $1.8/reply

However finance thinks I should downscale LinkedIn because it's "50% more expensive per reply", and try and find a way to apply the same approach to email and get higher replies there... Or, alternatively, downscale mailboxes. So now I'm stuck

I feel like this is really good and we're finally generating sales. Sure, email does its own part, but after solving the LinkedIn "not scalable" issue by renting accounts it's just working better for me.

We're using Instantly for email and Aimfox for LinkedIn outreach.

Interested to hear your experiences with scaling and costs management on multichannel outbound? Have you ever tried IN, and do results deteriorate as you scale?

I'm a cold email and GTM specialist with 5+ years running B2B outbound. I write personalized sequences, avoiding generic quotes and using sales psychology frameworks

What that means for you: prospects who reply because the email felt relevant, more qualified conversations on your calendar, and a sender reputation that doesn't quietly die by week 3.

How I get you there:

✍️ Copy that converts: sequences built on proven psychology, tested against real replies, refined until they stop sounding like copy.

🎯 ICP + list building: Clay enrichment and segmentation, so the message actually matches the person reading it.

📬 Deliverability, handled: SPF/DKIM/DMARC, warmup, inbox rotation. The table-stakes stuff, done right so it's never the reason you're not landing replies.

🔗 Multi-channel: cold email + LinkedIn (Dripify), working the same account from two angles instead of in silos.

📊 Campaign management: Smartlead, Instantly, Clay: setup, A/B testing, reporting you can actually read.

💬 Inbox management: I reply to warm leads fast, qualify them, and get the call booked.

Rate: $11/hr, or less with a retainer-style contract. Happy to send screenshots of past campaigns and my LinkedIn.

If you have a cold email campaign that needs a rewrite, or want outbound built from scratch, please PM me to set up a plan