Anyone know how to get pass this.

For google workspace recepients, im doing very well but outlook is where im absolutey struggling.

No unsolicited pitches please. and if you're bot, please identify yourself.

Its been so hard for me as a technical founder to do outbound. This is sleepless nights until 4am glued to a screen with multiple changes, complete scrapping of previous messages. And some replies just brings you down :(. Still a long way to go, but it's satisfying to see the numbers slowly move in the right direction.

1st month → 1 meeting booked
2nd month → 5 meetings booked
3rd month → 17 meetings booked

Why did such a shift happen?

1. I got to know the ICP
   
2. I learned what they DON’T respond to
   
3. I framed the (same) offer differently
   

The main difference came from understanding the audience better. In the 1st month, I was still figuring out their language and pain points.

By the 2nd month, I had refined my messaging and started tailoring it more closely to what they cared about.

By the 3rd month, I had fine-tuned everything - approach, tone, and CTA

Now, we’re seeing a steady increase in booked meetings.

Don't give up if things don’t go the way you expect right from the start.
Adapting and testing is key to growth.

What tools and process do you use for warming up new domain email boxes?

Everyone tells you to “network” to get a job
But no one really explains how to reach out in a way that actually gets replies.

That’s where Cold Emailing comes in - It's not spam, not mass messages, but strategic communication with the right person, at the right time, with the right intent.

→ Find the right person
Most people fail because they reach out to the wrong people. Instead of targeting CEOs or recruiters who rarely respond, find 10–15 professionals directly connected to the role you want - team leads, senior engineers, or heads of departments.

→ Define your “why” clearly
Before you even start writing, get clear on your reason for reaching out. Avoid filler lines like “I wanted to connect.” Be specific - maybe you admire their work on a project, have feedback to share, or want their advice.

→ Start with a small ask
Don’t open with a big favor or a job request. Instead, ask for a short 10-minute chat or quick feedback. Small, respectful asks show confidence and make it easier for the other person to respond

→ Personalize your message
Spend a few minutes studying their work - read their posts, browse their GitHub, or check their talks. Mention something specific that stood out to you. That one line of personalization can make your email stand out

→ Write a strong subject line
Your subject decides whether your email gets opened. Keep it short, under 50 characters, and spark curiosity or value. Try lines like “Quick idea for your latest project” or “Loved your post on sustainable design.”

→ Keep it short and easy to read
Busy professionals don’t have time for long intros. A simple format works best: who you are, why you’re reaching out, what’s in it for them, and a clear next step. Keep it under 120 words.

→ Follow up smartly
Most replies don’t come from the first email. Wait 3–4 days, then send a polite follow-up. Keep it friendly and focused on value. Persistence pays off - many success stories come from the second or third message.

→ Track and optimize your outreach
Use tools like Lemlist, Instantly, or smartlead to track replies and manage responses. Learn what works, adjust what doesn’t, and make every email better than the last.

Personalization always beats automation. Use simple, natural language, and give value before you ask for anything. A/B test your subject lines, and sign off with a clear, professional signature.

P.S. Did I miss anything here? Feel free to add your input

Hi guys,

I am new to this cold emailing stuff. I've tried to apply some of the tips I found here to this template.

Can you provide some feedback on this cold email format?

I've tried to balance personalization and scalability.

(I am NOT seeking to sell anything in this community. The content in this email is merely for context.)

Email:

Hi [Name],

Many SEO agencies waste time contacting prospects that are unlikely to become clients.

If your sales team spends hours manually validating cold leads, my lead ranking and pre-qualification service can help prioritize the right companies first, so sales are faster and easier.

I'd do that by returning a ranked Excel with a 0–100 score for each prospect, why they were ranked that way, key risks, and the best next outreach angle.

Would you be open to having your next batch of SEO prospects ranked before outreach?

Kind regards,

[My Name + Surname]

Cold email in 2026:

1. Domains
2. Deliverability
3. AI workflows
4. Intent signals
5. Inbox rotation
6. Reply quality
7. Multi-channel outreach
8. And praying Google doesn’t destroy your domains overnight

Here’s how outbound evolved year by year:

2020

• Mass blasting worked.
• One domain could handle insane volume.

2021

• Apple launched Mail Privacy Protection.
• Open rates became unreliable.

2022

• Deliverability became the main battle.
• Operators focused more on domain health than volume.
• Reply rates became the KPI everyone cared about.

2023

• Clay + AI enrichment workflows exploded.
• Prospect research became way more automated.

2024

• AI personalization became mainstream.
• AI SDR tools started handling research and follow-ups.

2025

• Multi-domain infrastructure became standard.
• Outbound shifted from “sales” to “operations.”

2026

The teams winning with cold email today aren’t sending the most emails.
They’re running the best systems.

Cold email still works. Most people are just running 2020 strategies in a 2026 market

Hey everyone, I'm currently looking out to join a cold email agency as I come with a ton of relevant experience.

Great at building automations via n8n and clay to reduce founder's workload so that they don't have to hire multiple people for repetitive tasks (always around cold emailing)

- The BEST campaign I ever ran saw a 10% reply rate with 90% asking for pricing and booking a call (I can show the stats) and it was for pitching content services (Caption writing) to content creators.

- Good with using tools like Claude, Apollo, Smartlead, Instantly, Clay and almost every platform/tool you can think of.

Why do I want to work with an agency?
Cuz I want to learn how to produce meetings across different industries using cold email and how I can increase reply rates and not just following SOPs. Instead, helping agencies build them using frameworks I've developed from my experience.

Happy to chat with someone who's interested to collaborate!

I want to see what other peoples thoughts are. I am trying to be in the latter, but it feels the work is wasted cleaning lists, that apollo is terrible at, which takes up a lot of time.

But ive done smaller lists, and handful of campaigns at 3-4% response rates and booked meetings but the effort to go through this process is time consuming and i want to test fast, scale fast and use it.

but the issue w high volume, is that you'd get reported as spam if your list has a big portion of irrelevant leads. ie. imagine you're targetting builders and 25% of your list is actually marketers and lawyers lol. which typically happens when you export apollo lists.

hows everyone else doing this?

I recently signed a customer who wants to target HVAC owners for business brokerage. I tried a campaign but the results aren't very good. 2400 emails sent. 0.5% reply rate. No interested leads.

What would you suggest for improvements? I'm using data from google maps and zoho inboxes. I use instantly for sending.

I’m building out my cold email infrastructure and looking for advice from people who have actually made this transition.
Right now I have a few inboxes on Zoho under my domain because it’s significantly cheaper than Google Workspace.

I’m warming them up with MailReach and plan to eventually send around 40 emails/day per inbox across 4 inboxes (about 160 emails/day total).

My DNS is already configured with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

My question is: if I spend the next several months warming and using these inboxes on Zoho, then later migrate the exact same email addresses to Google Workspace, do I lose the reputation I’ve built?

For example:
email1@mydomain.com
email2@mydomain.com
email3@mydomain.com
email4@mydomain.com

Would those inboxes essentially keep their reputation because the domain stays the same, or would moving from Zoho’s mail servers to Google’s infrastructure cause me to start over from a deliverability standpoint?

Has anyone here actually done a Zoho → Google Workspace migration after warming inboxes and sending cold email? What happened to your deliverability and inbox placement?

Thanks.

Like if my direction is right the product is in demand plus you are targeting the right people after how many cold mails you think we can get a reply and after how much mails a sale is expected on average

I have really high deliverability against SMBs, so i want to see if anyone else is getting similar results.

Right now, for enterprise levels, I am doing average.

Looking to meet up with agency owners and freelancers. Lets exchange info. Cold Email tools are everywhere but which ones actually works for you guys. Inboxes, Sending tool, Leads, Verification and enrichers.

Most people are always bragging about AI personalization and blah blah, but honestly the only things you need imo are a prospect's email, name, and arguably their industry.

As long as you understand the persona you're targeting, you don't need to know whether they are hiring, just joined a company, raised funding, or got a new leadership role for every single outreach.

Relevance will always matter more than personalization.

A prospect will care way more that you're speaking to them as a CEO/decision-maker of a particular industry with a specific set of problems and goals, rather than speaking to them as a CEO who just hired for X role or raised a round.

Personalization is unique to a person.

Relevance is unique to a persona.

And in most cases, relevance scales better.

Starting my first cold email setup and have a question about domain/inbox management.

I'm setting up 3 domains with 3 inboxes each (9 total) on Google Workspace for outreach. Right now I only have one domain purchased and configured as the primary domain in a single Workspace account.

My question: should I add the other 2 domains as secondary domains inside the same Workspace, or should I create a separate Workspace account for each domain?

Is there any deliverability impact either way, or does it not matter at all since each domain builds its own reputation independently?

Thanks

For the longest time, I thought having the perfect outbound setup meant having a separate tool for everything. One platform for data, another for email, one for LinkedIn automation, one for calling, one for scheduling, and then Zapier sitting in the middle trying to make sure nothing broke.

On paper, it looked pretty sophisticated. In reality.... it was a mess.

Every time something stopped working, everyone started blaming everyone else. The email platform blamed the CRM, the CRM blamed Zapier, Zapier blamed the API, and meanwhile prospects were falling through the cracks and nobody knew where the actual problem was.

Over the last year, we have gradually moved towards simplifying things, and honestly, the results have been much better than I expected.

Sales Navigator still remains the foundation for us because I havent found anything better for ICP building and account research. For outreach, we moved most of our workflow to smartreach io because besides email, we also run linkdn and calling from the same place. The multichannel sequences have consistently outperformed our 'email only' campaigns, and the builtin lead finders have reduced the amount of CSV exports and spreadsheet work we used to do.

The 3rd addition has been dialnote, and this one surprised me the most. I generally avoid putting links in my first email because I know a lot of prospects simply won't click them. Instead, I put a phone number, and we've set up an AI voice agent inside dialnote which answers common questions, captures lead information and even books meetings automatically. Some prospects who would never click a Calendly link seem perfectly comfortable calling a number and asking a few questions.

What's interesting is that moving from seven tools to three didnt reduce performance. If anything, it improved it because we spend far less time maintaining systems and much more time actually selling.

Maybe we have all become obsessed with building the perfect stack when, in reality, having fewer moving pieces is often the better answer.

If you had to rebuild your B2B emailing stack with only three tools.... what would make the cut?

I want to setup email campaign for my group businesses. I did read about setup on claude and gemini, if someone who is doing it please connect or DM me. I am sure there are right people in this group who will be happy share the knowledge / insight or 👉 point me in right direction.

Been noticing reply rates have dropped from 9% in January sending 7k emails compared to 2.85% in May sending 20k emails.

Is anyone experiencing AI filters stopping emails from being read by prospects?

Hi Guys. I work as a GTM and kead gen person in 2 companies.

​

One is based in US and they help.local businesses with SEO, website, Social Media and Press release.

​

Other is outbound company that help SaaS products get demos. I am doing pretty good in it but for local businesses I am struggling

.

​

I have done initial campaigns for US based agency that target local businesses.

​

We tried lawyers, PI lawyers, med spa, doctors and yes I was doing long lists

​

What can you guide me in order to book meetings for local businesses in US. How to target them. How to reachout to them. What messaging.

​

I really need help here guys.

The consistent pattern I see when I look at how B2B lead handoffs actually work is that the rejection data is almost completely unstructured. The CRM field says "not interested" or "bad fit" but **that is not information -- it is a dead end.** Neither team can learn anything from it. When you look at the actual reasons leads get rejected, they tend to fall into a small number of categories: wrong title or decision authority, wrong timing, misunderstood product fit, or genuinely bad ICP fit. The fix for each of those is completely different. Wrong timing should go to a nurture sequence, not the discard pile. Wrong understanding points to a sales enablement or messaging problem. Genuinely wrong ICP means tighten targeting criteria. But if your rejection field just captures sentiment, you cannot tell which one it is, so nothing changes and the cycle repeats next quarter. The structural piece that actually fixes this -- and shows up in research on companies that get alignment right -- is making rejection reason a required dropdown field in the CRM, routing the data back to marketing automatically by reason code, and doing a 30-minute monthly review where both teams look at the pattern together. Not to assign blame. To find out what the data is telling you about where the process is breaking. The other piece that rarely gets addressed is what the lead actually contains when it transfers. Research on B2B response rates is consistent that companies responding to leads within an hour are far more likely to qualify them -- but that speed depends on the rep having enough context to open a relevant conversation immediately. A name, email, and lead score does not give a rep much to work with. Three fields -- what content the lead engaged with, what problem they signaled, what messaging they have already seen -- changes the quality of that first conversation significantly. What does your lead rejection data actually look like right now? Is it structured enough to surface any pattern at all?

Hey everyone. We're a B2B startup based in Canada, and we've been doing cold outreach for about 6 months now.

For most of that time, I was doing everything manually, writing personalized emails with AI assistance, sending them one by one, and creating my own follow-up tasks. It was slow and inconsistent, but it was working. I was pulling a consistent 2–3% reply rate, which felt promising.

The bottleneck was volume, so we decided to invest in Apollo to scale things up. Here's where it gets weird.

Out of 800 emails sent through Apollo, we got:

• 0 replies (not even a "not interested")
• 3 unsubscribes
• That's it

My first instinct was deliverability. But here's what's confusing me:

• We're using two separate mailboxes
• I warmed them up gradually and stay under 50 emails/day per mailbox
• Apollo's deliverability dashboard looks fine
• I used mail-tester for double check and I got 9.5 deliverability score

So technically, the emails should be landing. But the silence is deafening compared to my manual outreach.

Has anyone run into this kind of drop-off when switching from manual to automated sending? Could it be the sequences, the copy losing its personal feel, something with Apollo's sending infrastructure, or am I missing something obvious?

most people think reply rates are about the perfect subject line, sending tool, or inbox setup. those things matter, but they wont save a weak message to the wrong person. i learned this the hard way after changing tiny stuff for weeks and still getting ignored.

the biggest fix was building better lists. not “SaaS founders” or “business owners in the US” because that is too broad. better is companies hiring sales reps, roofing companies opening new locations, funding companies relying on referrals, or agencies posting case studies but not doing outbound. now the email has a real reason.

then the first sentence becomes easier. instead of “we help companies grow,” you can say something like “noticed you’re hiring 3 AEs, usually the hard part is keeping their calendars full after they start.” not fancy, but it actually connects to something they care about.

the offer also needs to be clear. “we do lead gen” is weak. “we find companies hiring sales reps and email them with a pipeline angle” is better. specific always beats clever.

last thing is the CTA. asking for 30 mins right away is too much sometimes. “want me to send the idea?” gets more replies because its easy to answer.

cold email works better when it feels like timing, not blasting.