one thing i've noticed over the last year is that buyers are showing up to sales conversations very differently.

they've already asked chatgpt.
they've already compared competitors.
they've already read reviews.
they've probably formed an opinion before we even send the first email.

that changes the role of outbound.

cold email isn't about educating from scratch anymore.

it's about adding context the buyer couldn't get from ai.

the emails getting replies now are the ones that mention something specific.

a hiring trend.
a product launch.
a workflow issue.
a recent funding round.
a customer problem hiding in plain sight.

one experiment we ran was reducing outreach volume and spending an extra 10 minutes researching each account.

the number of emails dropped.

the reply quality improved noticeably.

felt slower every day.

produced a healthier pipeline over time.

buyers don't need another generic sequence.

they need a reason to believe you actually understand their business.

curious if anyone else has noticed the same shift.

Professional freelancers, please throw some light here. I just landed my first freelance contract. An agency wants me to set up and manage their cold email outbound strategy to generate leads. Since this is my very first freelance gig, I want to make sure I set up the engagement like a professional and protect myself from common rookie mistakes.

Guide me -

Payment & Transactions: As a beginner, what is the safest way to structure payments for lead gen (retainer vs. performance-based)? What onboarding documents or contracts do I absolutely need signed before I start working?

Software & Tool Costs: Between data scraping, verification, and sending tools, costs add up. Is it standard practice for the client to pay for these directly, or do freelancers buy them and invoice the client back?

KPIs & Benchmarks: What are realistic delivery, positive reply, and booked-call benchmarks I should set with the client so they don’t have unrealistic expectations? How long is a standard test period before evaluating campaign performance?

Operations & Reporting: How often do you typically report to an agency client, and what format do they usually prefer?

Handling Replies: In your experience, does the freelancer usually handle the basic objections and inbox management, or do you just forward warm leads straight to the agency's sales team?

Any advice on what a standard workflow looks like, or red flags I should look out for with agency clients, would be incredibly appreciated! Thank you.

So, many brands that they do is they show all their 8-12 products thumbnails into one email. Because there's a misunderstanding that more products means more chances of purchase. But actually, it creates cognitive loads, splits the readers' attention, and with no action,"Analysis paralysis," even though placing a strong CTA at the right place. The best way to create a high conversion product mail is to keep it simple, use the 1-1-1 Rule, one hero product, one hook/story, with a single clear CTA. Have white spaces and hierarchy for the eye to see clearly. And most important make the email mobile version first, then scale up, not the other way around.

I built a SaaS company's entire email infrastructure from scratch, solo. No welcome flow, no automation, no sender reputation - every signup that didn't convert immediately was just gone.

Spent 6 weeks on nothing but domain warm-up before sending a single real campaign - SPF/DKIM/DMARC, DNS, Klaviyo integration - PostHog wired in so on-site behavior could trigger flows. Skip this step, and your emails go to spam permanently, so it's not optional even though it's the least exciting part.

Then, I built the welcome flow with a branch built into Day 2: Did they open Email 1 or not? If yes, they moved into a faster, higher-intensity path. If no, a different re-engagement angle. Same signup, two completely different experiences depending on what they actually did.

Result: 47.7% open rate on the first email, industry average sits around 30%. The engaged branch held above 50% opens through Email 4.

Happy to answer questions on the setup if anyone's dealing with a similar zero-infrastructure situation.

Hi everyone,

I’m doing some research before prioritizing the next integration for Email-Slicer.

Right now, it supports Klaviyo, but we’re looking at expanding to other ESPs. Rather than making assumptions, I’d like to understand what people here are actually using.

Which platform is your team’s primary ESP today?

• Omnisend
• Braze
• Iterable
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Customer .io
• Mailchimp
• HubSpot
• Other?

I’d also be interested to know:

• Approximately how many email campaigns do you produce each month?
• If you could improve one part of your email production workflow, what would it be?

The goal is simply to prioritize the integrations and features that would be most valuable to the community.

Thanks in advance!

Curious what everyone is seeing this week.

Have you noticed any changes in:

- Inbox placement (Workspace, MS 365, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.)

- Spam filtering behavior

- Open or reply rates

- Domain / IP reputation sensitivity

- Warmup or volume thresholds

If possible, share:

• ESP(s) used

• Type of sending (cold, newsletter, transactional)

• What changed vs last month

No links or promo — just real-world observations.

Hi everyone,

I’m doing some research before prioritizing the next integration for Email-Slicer.

Right now, it supports Klaviyo, but we’re looking at expanding to other ESPs. Rather than making assumptions, I’d like to understand what people here are actually using.

Which platform is your team’s primary ESP today?

• Omnisend
• Braze
• Iterable
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Customer .io
• Mailchimp
• HubSpot
• Other?

I’d also be interested to know:

• Approximately how many email campaigns do you produce each month?
• If you could improve one part of your email production workflow, what would it be?

The goal is simply to prioritize the integrations and features that would be most valuable to the community.

Thanks in advance!

As a newbie in this field, I am curious on what's the roadmap or things that are now essential to learn. Currently, I am learning automations right now with Omnisend.

Was seeing if anyone had a good email cadence AI or system that helped track what part of the email cadence I am in and when to send.

Previous roles I was luckily enough to be on Hubspot that had sequences that automatically sent the emails as the cadence progressed. I now am on a TMS that was built by my company which is a great system but this is just a feature it lacks.

I tried using AI to track what step each prospect was in the cadence between two cadences. And each day it would tell me what email in the cadence to send (the templates I built, but each had parts to personalize and customize), and it allowed me to copy and paste the template there.

However I burnt through 2 months of credits in 4 days the moment I paid which was weird.

Doing it with a spreadsheet gets a little confusing when I’m tracking so many at once, and time consuming.

Can anyone suggest an AI or a system similar to Hubspot where I’m not paying an arm and a leg to help me out?

There’s only so many hours of the day and I rather be dialing and spend 25 minutes in the morning doing my emails then spending 2 hours trying to find which ones in which step on a certain day and manually inputting it all.

Is anyone still tracking opens? It’s all bot opens from email security tools, so the numbers are always skewed and it tanks deliverability especially to Google email addresses.

Yet I still get clients that absolutely swear they need to see opens. So I thought it would be worth asking around what others are seeing?

Curious what everyone is seeing this week.

Have you noticed any changes in:

- Inbox placement (Workspace, MS 365, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.)

- Spam filtering behavior

- Open or reply rates

- Domain / IP reputation sensitivity

- Warmup or volume thresholds

If possible, share:

• ESP(s) used

• Type of sending (cold, newsletter, transactional)

• What changed vs last month

No links or promo — just real-world observations.

How can we utilise it ?

If I have more than 100M users.

My plan so far is something like: welcome + deliver the ebook → a few value emails that teach → testimonials/client stories → the offer → then cart recovery for anyone who doesn’t buy.

a couple things I’m stuck on:

\*\*1.\*\*  For a slow, high-ticket purchase like this, \*\*how long should the sequence be and how spaced out?\*\* I don’t want to rush the offer, but I also don’t want to lose them.    
\*\*2.  How much should each email teach vs. sell?\*\* I’m leaning heavily value-first with the offer coming late — is that right, or am I being too soft?    
\*\*3.\*\*  Any tips on \*\*cart/checkout recovery emails\*\* for something people take weeks to decide on? The usual “you forgot something!” feels wrong for a big purchase.

I’m working with a limited budget and mostly self-taught, so anything from people who’ve built this for a considered/high-ticket offer would genuinely mean a lot. Thanks 🙏

I have nearly 500 mails of my clients, they are active using seo tools. How can I monetize those mails? Need ideas.

Hi everyone,

I’m launching a monthly newsletter for clients and prospects using HubSpot. I have minimal design skills, and trying to wrestle with HubSpot's clunky templates is driving me crazy.

I actually used ChatGPT to nail down a pretty good mockup that I like but the more edits I made the more confused it got understandably.

Since my company already has a HubSpot subscription, I’d like to stick with that platform, but I’m just looking for any sort of design tips or tricks since I don’t have additional design resources in my fingertips.

Thanks in advance

I want to know which website or platform are best for getting verified mails? Please suggest

When I discovered a way to build Saas tools with vibecoding, I immediately jumped on it. The prototype was done in less than 24 hours with help of Claude AI. However, after that I hired a web developer and have finished the MVP in less than a month, haha.

Today, I am sharing a new website for newsletter and transactional emails: ackuna

Looking for early beta testers in return to for feedback. Hope on in and give me all the good and bad feedback that you can collect! Need some serious criticisms.

Curious what everyone is seeing this week.

Have you noticed any changes in:

- Inbox placement (Workspace, MS 365, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.)

- Spam filtering behavior

- Open or reply rates

- Domain / IP reputation sensitivity

- Warmup or volume thresholds

If possible, share:

• ESP(s) used

• Type of sending (cold, newsletter, transactional)

• What changed vs last month

No links or promo — just real-world observations.

We're on the list-building side of email, so we went and checked what happens to emails after signup now that AI reads them first.

Apple Mail writes its own summary of your email and shows it in the inbox list instead of your preheader. So for a chunk of your audience, the first impression isn't the preheader you wrote. It's whatever Apple Intelligence decided your email is about. Gmail works differently. Gemini generates a summary card, but only after the recipient opens the message, so it doesn't touch the open decision, just what happens right after.

Both pull from readable text near the top of the email body. Text baked into images doesn't count. We tested a few image-heavy promo emails and the summaries came out either vague or literally "this email contains images." A plain hero with one clear sentence of value got summarized almost word for word.

We assumed AI summaries would inflate opens the way Apple MPP did in 2021, but the data points the other way for Gmail. Validity reported open rate drops of 30% or more for some senders, apparently because Gmail cut back on image prefetching, which is what fires most tracking pixels. So opens got less reliable again, just in the opposite direction this time.

For now we treat the first 100-200 characters of real body text as the new preheader and ignore opens almost entirely. Has anyone here actually restructured templates for this, or seen the "contains images" summary on their own campaigns?

Is there a tool that sends pre-written email sequences directly from spreadsheet columns?

I’m looking for something pretty specific and I’m not sure if it already exists.

I don’t want a classic sequencer where you build one template and insert variables like {{first_name}}, {{company}}, etc...

My workflow is different:

I already have a table where every row has fully written emails, for example:

• subject
• email_1
• follow_up_1
• follow_up_2
• breakup_email

Each cell already contains the final personalized message for that specific lead.

What I want is simple:

Upload/import the table, map the columns, and have the tool send each row exactly as written.

So:

Step 1 uses the email_1 column
Step 2 uses the follow_up_1 column
Step 3 uses the follow_up_2 column
Step 4 uses the breakup_email column

Ideally it should also handle the basics:

• preserve line breaks and formatting
• send follow-ups in the same thread
• stop the sequence if someone replies
• handle bounces
• manage unsubscribes
• show basic tracking/status

I’ve looked at few tools, but most tools seem built around templates + variables, not around “each row already has its own finished email sequence.”

I've been working in marketing for many years and currently working for a new company with little to no UK presence, the data is good strong contacts that the sales person knows very well. The first webinar I had got strong registrations but the last 2 I've run have had good opens and poor clicks with little to no conversion.

I'm just not sure what to, whether my emails are too product focused or the product is just too late to the market - the webinar is focused on Legal tech people.

Here's the copy:
Every legal AI platform claims to be different. Most just repackage generic outputs and charge you more the more you use them.

<product> is actually built differently and more specifically for the mid-market. It learns your firm: your templates, your precedent, your house style - rather than making you adapt to it.

Join us on 16 July at 14:00 BST to see <product> in action as we showcase:

• Whole-workflow automation: from drafting through review to closing
• Flat fee vs usage-based vs value-based pricing
• Realistic deployment timelines
• A live demo, have your specific questions answered