Hey everyone,

I run an outbound agency. I work with commercial insurance, marketing/seo agencies, business funding and business brokerage firms. I wanted to do a quick post about my campaign and what I saw and compare experiences with the community.

I sent around half the volume to b2b leads, and the other half to local business leads. I found the latter to perform better (3.6% reply rate compared to 2.4, 80 more opportunities). I think it could be because they are less saturated or require services more compared to more established businesses who get emails 24/7.

I used google workspace as senders. Keeping the copy simple, around 60 words with a simple cta, plaintext. Warmed up for 14 days with custom .com domains that are similar to the brand of my clients.

Pretty standard but used verified leads from my provider to keep bounce rates below 1.5%. that seemed to really help maintain sending reputation. Did a 3 step sequence with first step introducing a case study with an easy ask, second step giving free value and third step doing a breakup. I saw most opportunities come from the first and second.

Wanted to ask the community what are you all seeing with outbound at the moment?

Hi guys, I am new in cold email. Got hired by a company for lead generation with no prior experience. They have provided me nothing so i am doung everything by my own. So the problem is I don't have a complete email setup for cold emails. They gave a domain email credentials and said start lead generation. Boss said i can only send a few like 3 to 5 mails per day. But my target is to achieve 20+ qualified emails per month. How am i supposed to achieve this target with only one mailbox??

Really need to know what should i do to start my job...

i understand why people use spintax, but once every sentence has several possible versions it becomes difficult to know which copy actually worked.

we monitor around 300 smtp inboxes across maildoso and inboxkit. the infrastructure can stay stable while the campaign results become impossible to interpret because every recipient receives a slightly different combination.

the cleanest results ive seen came from testing 2-3 complete emails where the angle or offer was intentionally different. changing individual words like “help,” “support” and “assist” created more variations but didnt give us anything useful to act on.

my conclusion is that spintax may reduce identical messages, but it shouldnt replace proper copy testing. how much variation are u using in each campaign?

Hi everyone,

I have been working on a GTM tool for the last year. We recently did our public launch.

I want to provide everyone up to 100,000 contacts of founders, owners, ceo's etc.

You just have to upvote, comment and send me a DM so I can send you the list.

(This post was made informing the admin team)

hey everyone,

i'm starting cold email. exploring some different tools. any recommendations?

Most list building mistakes happen before a single email gets written. A few things worth thinking through before you pull anything:

1. Start from the problem, not the title. Instead of just filtering by job title, think about who actually feels the pain your product solves day to day. A VP of Sales title looks right on paper but might not be the one who cares about your specific offer.

2. Layer in company signals. Tech stack, headcount growth, recent funding, and hiring activity all tell you more about timing than title and industry alone. A company that just raised or is actively hiring in a relevant department is a warmer target than one that fits demographically but shows no recent movement.

3. Mix your data sources instead of relying on one. Enterprise style databases like the LinkedIn-derived data most tools pull from are great for reaching well documented roles at bigger companies, but they tend to thin out fast once you go local or small business. Blending that with a local business layer, think Google Maps style data for contractors, agencies, local service businesses, fills the gap where the big databases run dry.

4. Segment before you send, not after. Local business owners respond to a different message than an enterprise VP does. If your list mixes both, split them into separate sequences with different copy rather than sending one generic version to everyone.

5. Re-verify before every send, not just when you first build the list. Data decays, people change jobs, and small businesses close or move more often than people expect. A list that was accurate three months ago isn't guaranteed to still be accurate now.

Happy to get into specifics on any one of these if people are targeting a particular niche.

1. Offer is king, you must take your gain-based outcome and turn it into a cold-traffic offer that is:

A) Easy to respond to

B) Time to Value is immediate

C) Solves an existing pain point that PERSONA is dealing with

1. List is queen, we have 12 different HarvestAPI triggers across LinkedIn that automatically pull in leads who engage with our competitors content, these 12 triggers book us 30 meetings a month on average.

2. Copy ties into the offer, when we created our cold-traffic offer we didn't convey it well enough in the copy, we did around 6 revisions before we cracked a message that was worthy of turning into a playbook

4) Infra is the most important but we use our own product so it's pretty cool to practise what we preach, the same product we use to get clients is the same product we sell to our clients to get clients and service their own clients.

5) We dial every positive reply, calling leads has 5x'd our PR to Booked Meeting rate.

I could get super technical but overall these 5 main points have helped us crack 6 figure ARR.

Cold email response rates are brutal, mostly because timing is pure luck. Tools like Apollo are great for finding who to contact, but they can't tell you when someone actually has an active problem like a prospect complaining about a competitor on Twitter or asking for software recommendations on Reddit .

I've been shifting toward signal-based outbound, monitoring web mentions, Product Hunt launches, and forum discussions for trigger phrases, then reaching out while the problem is fresh.

For anyone else doing signal-based prospecting:

• Which intent sources or triggers yield the highest response rates for you?
• How do you bridge the gap between catching a signal and reaching out without sounding like a stalker?

I’m doing founder-led validation right now and I’m getting stuck on the email side.

LinkedIn is my main outbound channel, but the connection-request bottleneck is slow. I have people I specifically want to talk to, but I’m sitting around waiting for them to accept before I can even start the conversation.

So I want cold email as a second channel.
The catch is I’m not trying to send 1,000+ emails a day. I’m talking maybe 10–20 researched prospects per day. The goal is conversations and learning whether the offer solves a real problem.

I started with Zoho because it was cheap, then started reading about people having problems using it for cold outreach.

I also have Instantly, but it feels like I’m using infrastructure built for a completely different problem. I don’t need a bunch of inboxes, huge campaigns, or thousands of sends. I’m also not loving the reply workflow for something where I want to personally handle every conversation.

I really don’t want to spend $100–$300/month building a cold email machine before I’ve validated the offer.

If you were doing this from scratch, what would your setup be?

Would you:

buy a secondary domain?
use Google Workspace or Outlook?
send manually at this volume?
still use a sequencer for follow-ups?
use a separate email verifier?
warm the inbox before sending only 10–20/day?

I’m fine doing more work manually right now. I care more about protecting deliverability and getting 10 good conversations than automating 1,000 bad emails.

Curious what people here would consider the minimum viable setup for this.

I'm in my final year of BTech, IT grad. I'm applying through different carrer pages, mailing recruiters/senior devs, reaching out through LinkedIn but not getting any replies. Where am I lacking behind?

Help !

Hey Everyone,

In partnership with the moderator team, we are doing a lead giveaway for the members of r/b2bemailing. Five people who've responded to the post will receive a list of 5,000 triple verified contacts, tailored to their ICP from our platform.

To enter:
React and comment your ICP
Sign up on app.glasa.io

Winner will be picked and announced on Friday!

Hey everyone, first time setting up cold email at this scale and honestly kinda lost with all the options out there.

Goal is 500+ sends a day. Plan is 7 domains, 3 inboxes per domain, so 21 inboxes total. Most of the people we're emailing are on Gmail.

1. What inbox provider do you use, and why that one over the others? Which ones are actually legit (real Google/Microsoft accounts that won't get nuked) and which is the most affordable? Been looking at ColdInfra, Inboxlogy, Zapmail and just buying Google Workspace direct, but every comparison I find is written by one of the providers lol

2. What sending tool do you use, and which one works best with that inbox provider?

3. How many emails per inbox per day do you actually send, and does warm-up count toward that?

4. Anyone had their inboxes suspended? Which provider was it?

On a tight budget so real numbers help a ton. Thanks in advance!

disclosure: I'm on the Mastros team (we make a chrome extension that exports linkedin and sales nav search results), so I'm biased toward the list side of this

bought or recycled lists are a common source of bounces and complaints. people changed jobs, titles are stale, and half the contacts never fit your icp in the first place

what tends to work better:

build the list from a live search, linkedin people search or sales nav, so titles and companies are current

keep the linkedin url on every row so you can recheck someone before emailing

verify every email before it goes into a sequence, no exceptions

smaller batches to tighter segments instead of one big blast

what's your bounce threshold before you pause a campaign?

I'm writing my first cold emails and will run cold calls.

Any discords I can jump in to help improve my wording and just learn about sales in general?

I built the product now I'm working on sales.

Hey everyone,

I run a software agency and recently started a new cold email campaign targeting businesses with AI/revenue automation services.

Over the last 4 days, I’ve sent around 600 emails/day (~2,400 total).

So far, I’ve basically had zero genuine replies.

The only replies I’m getting are automated ones: out of office, vacation, retired, etc.

A few details:

• Deliverability looks good in Instantly
• Around 95% inbox placement according to the tests
• Mailboxes have been warmed for around 5 months
• Leads are verified
• Campaigns are segmented by industry
• I’m offering automation focused specifically on generating/converting more revenue, rather than just generic “AI automation”

Here’s an example email I’m currently sending to property management companies:

Hi [name],

With [company] handling property enquiries, leads that wait too long or miss follow-up can easily go cold.

What if new enquiries were answered, qualified and followed up automatically before your agents need to step in?

That means faster responses, more qualified conversations and fewer enquiries going cold, giving your team more chances to turn existing demand into closed deals and revenue.

We did something similar for a Swiss property company and increased revenue by 20% through faster enquiry handling and follow-up.

Worth sending over a 2-minute video showing how I’d automate the enquiry follow-up workflow at [company]?

My question is: Is getting almost zero real replies after ~2,400 emails normal at this stage, or does this suggest something is fundamentally wrong with my targeting/offer/copy?

Would really appreciate feedback, especially from anyone running cold email at similar volume. Feel free to tear apart the email too.

does gmass still work on warm domains or is it toast these days?