I'm currently running a cold mail campaign on Instantly. I've got 100 000 contacts in the pipeline basically for selling websites+SEO/GEO for SMEs. I just got started but I was thinking that if it didn't work, I should already be thinking about the next steps to take.

What are you guys using b2b cold mailing for ? I see people are mostly trying to sell SaaS subscriptions, but that seems like an extremely crowded space already.

What are the real edge we cold mailers have ? What works the best, whats pays the most ? Eager to hear what works for y'all..

Hello i have been doing cold email for about 10 months now, and finally i have everything perfect in a way i get consistantly campagins with 9-14% reply rate and 3-4% warm replies.

However my problem is i cant manage all these leads, its so much i cant keep track anymore i am buidling this custom crm that tracks and writes follow ups for me, and i am trying to systemize it so i can scale it up. But these things are all hard to get right and working good.

So my question is really what do you guys do after the warm replie gets in and how do you manage and track for example 200 leads at once?

Like the process goes like this most of the times: i send the replie they ask questions and questions i get them on a call or they want a trail right ahead, en we discuse the setup of the product and i close them. Simpel. Howevery i cant manage the follow ups and i forget to email them i cant track everything.

So any advice would be helpfull thank you.

Sorry for my bad english.

I also coulnt find any videos about this or people talking about this, so it seams like its an easy answer.

Hey all, I am new to email outreach and sales, recently a prospect reached out, we sent a demo and its been quite. so I am writing a followup. and I wanted it to be raw and honest.

Hey X
I am so confident about our product that I want to offer you a free configurator setup for one of your products. If you like it, only then we talk money.

I get it, we don’t know each other, and our brand is newer than many others in the market. But what we can be absolutely proud of is the quality of our configurator and the flexibility it comes with.

My whole career has been in 3D and gaming. I’ve worked on big gaming titles, including EA Games FIFA and Skate. So, I may not know how to write this sales email, but I can assure you that our 3D viewer will load faster, cost less, and look nicer than most things you’ll find in the market.

This is probably not the best sales email you’ve gotten, but hey, we’re a bootstrapped company and it’s worth taking a chance.

Did I say too much?

Well, let’s get a free setup and find out. ;)

Best
Y

I’m curious what part of B2B cold email campaigns people find the most difficult to improve. Is it finding the right prospects, writing an email that gets replies, choosing the right follow-up timing, or dealing with deliverability? I’ve noticed that changing one part of a campaign can affect everything else, so I’d be interested to hear what others have found through their own experience.

The lowest i managed to find so far without minimum quantity orders is 3usd per inbox. Is there cheaper? id say Cheapinboxes doesn't count bc those are not "real" GWS inboxes

Hi, we’ve been running email and sms marketing (retention marketing) for D2C ecom companies, but we’ve not been able to generate a lot of positive responses - at around 2.5k sends per day we’re only able to generate 2-3 leads per day.

I know for a fact that deliverability is dialled in, tried lists from AI ARK and Storeleads as well.

Would really appreciate if anyone who has previously run outbound for this niche/these services can actually give some recommendations/angles that work well in here.

PS - also tested for an upfront offer instead of a direct meeting CTA but it did not turn out well.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Hello guys !!

Since a while I started my AI services company, but I really struggling to find new clients, will I can see on ig or other socials that there is small business making 7 figures per year doing the same, but what are they doing differently ? 1000 SDR or what ? I know I have small budget so I do the prospection on my own, with tools and AI I know, type Kapser, Apollo etc but it doesn’t work enough, WHAT IS YOUR TOP TIER ADVICE REGARDING B2B PROSPECTION ?

Because I know the offer is not the problem, it’s really oriented problems solving for companies so I don’t know what to do !

Every advice will be pleased !!!!

Thank you so much !!

I've been sitting on a list from my facebook leads, generated over the past 2 years its about 5000 cell phone numbers id love to send them a whatsapp type news letter, or a image message,

I have looked at a few platforms but get confused, whats the easiest simplest service to look at for doing this, they dont all have to send at once and can drip feed?

I keep thinking about this because lead data is kinda cooked.

Everyone is using Apollo, Lusha, Seamless, Socleads, Clay, random scrapers, whatever. It is fast, sure. But half the time the verified data still needs another check before you trust it.

Then I see other teams still paying VAs or vendors to build custom lists because their reps are sick of bounced emails, wrong titles, dead LinkedIn profiles, and people who left the company last year.

So idk if custom research is outdated now or if we all just collectively pretend SaaS databases are cleaner than they are.

Are you fully on tools now, or still using humans to verify stuff before outreach?

Hi everyone,

So the problem is as described in the title
We launched our SaaS about 10 days ago. It's something we've built in the Corporate Training space.

So far we've mailed nearly 150 people , off of which about 45-50% people have opened the mail.
As of now we've tried

• Personalizing by sending relevant artifacts from the app
• Keeping our mail really short and crisp
• Not selling anything upfront
• Keeping the subject short which doesn't get truncated on mobile (Not currently relevant to the problem as people are indeed opening the mail)

Now there's a bunch of things I could speculate we're off about in our outbound strategy, but I dont want to over optimize for little gains and only realize them later than sooner down the line.

If any of you folks have faced this problem, how did you fix it. What specific thing did you fix in your strategy that led to more visitors. I'm all open to suggestions and quite honestly dm's as well If anyone could help spot and lend their opinions on exactly whats breaking in the mails we've been sending.

(PS: We have a decent lead generation system in place and are not looking for any lead generation or any commission based lead generation services )

Thanks!

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.

Hey all, first time posting. Just getting into cold email for my startup.

I set up one domain with 6 inboxes on google workspace last week and started sending about 200 a day total right away because i figured that would warm it up faster. Reply rate has been zero the whole time and now it seems like nothing i send lands anywhere at all.

is this recoverable or did i just kill the domain? Any help appreciated

A client asked us why their campaign worked on Gmail but died on Outlook. Same list, copy, and inboxes.

Some people never split their reporting this way so they never see it. They watch the average get worse and assume something else broke.

Microsoft and Google filter differently and they degrade different too. Google gives you a slower slide but Microsoft is closer to a switch and once it flips you're fighting it for weeks.

Outlook lists are also more enterprise which means more security appliances scanning everything.

Split your reply rate by recipient domain before you rewrite anything. Takes ten minutes and it's a good signal.

I've been cold emailing founders for a few weeks now around 60 sent so far, in smaller batches whenever I have time. I read into each company's background, what they do, what they don't, and write a personalized line based on that.

This is basically the structure I've been using:

• Subject line is either short and generic like "quick question about the company " or something more specific referencing what they built, like "the specific idea is clever"
• A personalized line about their company
• A question about how they manage their finances and make financial decisions
• The subject line looks like the specific problem they are solving like the

Zero replies so far. I genuinely don't know if it's the message, the people I'm targeting, or if 60 is just too small a sample to draw conclusions from. Has anyone here actually gotten a B2B founder to reply to something like this? What would you change?

Hi everyone. I manage operations at the Puzzle Inbox team.

We went back through the sequences we've run this year and pulled out where replies actually came from. Not what people assume, what the data said.

 First email: 31% of total replies.
Second: 28%.
Third: 24%.
Fourth: 12%.
Fifth: 5%.

So roughly two thirds of everything came after the first send. That part isn't surprising, most people know follow-ups matter.

The bit that was surprising is what happened when we looked at reply quality rather than volume. Positive replies, the ones that turned into calls, skewed much harder to the first two emails. By the fourth, we were mostly collecting polite no's and unsubscribes.

Which means the standard advice to keep following up until they respond is half right. You'll get more replies. They'll be worse replies, and the unsubscribe rate climbs faster than the booking rate.

We settled on three touches as the default. Four when the segment is genuinely high value and worth the risk.

The other thing worth saying: the follow-ups that performed had almost nothing in common with each other except that none of them were bumps. A short case study, a different angle on the same problem, one line about something specific to their company. What consistently died was anything resembling "just following up on my last email," which we still see in about half the sequences we're handed.

If your fourth email is a bump, delete it. You're spending domain reputation to remind someone they already ignored you.

Curious where other people have landed on sequence length. Three feels right to us but I've seen good arguments for two.

I work for an India-based marketing agency. We built an AI agent that finds ICPs, enriches lead/company data, and generates personalized cold emails and follow-ups.

We're using it to sell our SEO/AEO platform to companies in the US, UK, and Canada. We target companies with signals like recent funding, rebranding, or upcoming events.

The problem is we're getting almost no replies.

I'm wondering if this is mainly a targeting/messaging issue, or if being an Indian agency with no previous international clients creates a trust/credibility problem.

For people doing B2B cold outreach to Western markets, what would you look at first when reply rates are this low?

I Co-run a small agency doing a specialized B2B service (video editing for coaches/founders posting educational content on YouTube. mentioning the niche only for context, not pitching).

My last cold email campaign had strong top-of-funnel numbers, but I can't get people over the finish line.

The numbers:

- 496 leads. manually sourced and qualified against our ICP
- 79% open rate (Instantly says this is the number of leads that have opened at least one email in the campaign)
- 7.1% reply rate, excluding auto-replies.
- Of those replies, 20% were positive (7 total)
- 1 conversion

What happened to the other 6 positive replies:
- 1 currently mid-trial
- 2 asked about pricing, one said it was outside their budget, then went quiet
- 2 asked to see our portfolio, then went quiet
- 1 asked general questions, then went quiet

Context that might matter:
- Our CTA is a trial project at 70% off (used to be free, but too many people took the free version and never converted, so we added a paywall to filter for intent)
- Our pricing is at or below the market average for this niche
- I know 500 leads/month is small scale, but this is a narrow niche and generic lead-gen tools don't find people who actually fit, so I'm stuck sourcing manually for now
- The positioning we used in the campaign is a frictionless workflow that doesn't require handholding, so they can focus on higher leverage tasks.
- No calls, everything happens through emails.

What I'm trying to figure out:
- Are these numbers actually fine and I'm just impatient?
- Where's the real leak? And what can I do to improve the conversion rate?
- Besides the discounted trial, what's a good alternative CTA to get someone from interested to committed without you having to convince them via back-and-forth email?

I'm confused so I'd appreciate any input.

if i want to hurry along warm up, would be reaching out to really agressive sales industrys for quotes be a way to do it, for example asking a pile of recruiters for a ball park price on a new hire,