He Sends 1.5M Cold Emails Per MONTH, here's what works in 2025

1.5 million cold emails. That's how much this episode's guest is sending every single month across his 200 agency clients. Nick Abraham runs a cold outbound agency as well as a few B2B software companies. And in this video, he's going to walk us through what's working for cold email in 2025, how he's thinking about deliverability so his emails can land in the primary inbox more often, and how he's approaching his tech stack when often it can feel you need a PhD even to understand how to do cold email in today's market. So, let's jump into the episode. All right, sweet. Okay, let's talk some cold email. So, um, let's do it, Nick. I think, uh, a good place to start is why why why should people listen to you, right? Like, you know, we're going to talk through cold email. Um, I of course know, you know, what what you're doing in that space, but for those who might not have heard of you, like what what are you doing currently related to cold email? Yeah, I mean, I've been in the space for for quite some time. I feel like even though I'm young, people consider me like an uncle in this space.

But I mean, like quick background on me, like 200 plus active clients at our lead gen agency. We send well over, I think, 1.5 million cold emails a month right now. Um, we're grabbing over, you know, 10 million contacts a month across all our companies when it comes to lead scraping. Um, you know, currently in my smart lead account, I have over 90,000 inboxes that we're cold emailing from. So, yeah, just been in the space. I mean, we've built a lot of tech in the space as well. So like we run like you know a couple SAS companies like Scrubby which does was like the first catch all validator in the entire market. Um you know I've even tried to build my own email platform uh way back in the day even before instantly and smart lead came out funny enough. We had a lot of the features that they had. Uh but that was a total failure. It was like my first SAS I ever created which was super hard. Uh but yeah like yeah it's been in the space forever. Been working on cool email stuff forever. A lot of the strategies you see people do and implement they've come from my content from way back in the day. Uh, so yeah, just just been around the block when it comes to cold. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And you like I think I saw on your social recently and this is going to be bad if it wasn't you, but um I think I saw you got rewards from I don't know if it was Smart Lead or who else like you you actually get results, right? Like Oh, yeah. Dude, you know, it's funny. I actually I'm not a good marketer by any means and we just started building out like our nurture newsletter flows and stuff like that and in uh one of the emails it's uh a message from V and he told us in this last year we were the second most replied to account in all of his smart lead users and they have like you know well over 90,000 users they're sending and I actually just spoke to you today morning he has over 10.5 million inboxes inside of smart lead and so yeah we were we're the second most reply I2 account and probably arguably one of the biggest email platforms in the world right now. Yeah. Crazy. That's crazy stuff. Okay. All right. Well, I think I think yeah, with all that information, pe people are definitely going to listen to you when it comes to cold emailing.

So, obviously you're you're still getting results for your clients. It's it's still working well. What What is the current state of cold email in 2025? Like what's working? Yeah. And and you know, like everyone thinks like and you'll see this every year. You know, there'll be a period where cold email is definitely harder. or like the spam filters kind of do catch up and people just consider the channel dead. It definitely takes a little bit more work than it used to. Um it definitely costs a little bit more than it used to, but it's still the the the channel that you're going to get the lowest CAC easily, you know. Um and the number one thing that correlates to the result of your campaign is just the offer and and product market fit. If if you don't have those two things, like it doesn't even matter if it's cold email or if you're running ads, like you're just going to have a lot or a much harder time to get results. Your CA's going to get higher. It's going to require you to send more emails to get a lead. Uh things of that sort. So, I think like whenever people say that this channel is dead or it's it's harder, it's it's really more a reflection that like, you know, they're just operating a much harder offer and they just don't have like a cold ready offer that's like piercing through the market when it comes to actually, you know, running the campaigns. Yeah, for sure. And there's a lot of like projecting as well, particularly on like LinkedIn. I know some people give your posts a hard time.

Um, but I don't know. I think people are just people are just I don't know their natural reaction to anything sales is just to uh to doubt it, but like I mean the numbers speak for themselves, right? Um, do you because you've worked with so many clients, I know you you you coach like hundreds of agency owners as well. Are there certain businesses where you've just noticed that like it's just really hard to to get cold email to work? And and I guess in contrast, are there businesses where it tends to work better? Yeah. So, I think like the the way I always think about it is like, okay, is your offer more of a demand genen offer or more of a demand capture offer? And if you have more of a demand genen offer, you're you're pretty much in uh a good spot because you can run the most basic campaign to a raw list and you'll get good results. But when you run a demand capture offer, you know, something that just requires uh to find the right person that's searching for your solution in that market, like you kind of have to get creative with how you run the campaign. And that's where you have to implement a lot of the clay strategies and things of that sort to actually get results. And so that's like the thing I think about. But like just off of general themes I've seen, most people that are targeting any kind of IT leader for the most part, they just hate any kind of outbound sales, they will most likely not respond to you. Doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means that you had to come at it a little bit differently. But your chance of getting success by just being super straightforward like you would with, you know, most other industries and most other target markets is is probably not going to work. Um, and so yeah, I think like that's that's kind of how I think about like what kind of clients are going to see success or not. And and I think like if you have a demand capture offer, you just really need to think holistically about okay, how can I make this more of a demand genen offer and and how can I like really translate that? And I think if you can kind of get into that mindset and and it requires a lot of testing, a lot of like validating, running a ton of different campaigns and different industries, pitching different solutions and everything of that sort, but once you figure that out, it's going to make it easier for your cold email campaigns to work, but it's also going to make all your marketing efforts work way better as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like just uh for those who might not have heard of those terms before. So by by demand capture essentially what you're saying is like someone has to be proactively looking for that thing like so for cyber security it's it's it's not like a sexy topic for a lot of people. Like usually people um look at cyber security when something's gone wrong or you know they're trying to move up market and they need a certain certification otherwise enterprise clients won't work with them. That's when they go to market and look for cyber security solutions. It's it's really hard to try convince somebody that that's worth doing in the first place. And so that's what you mean by demand capture, right? Yeah. Exactly.

And and and it's another one is like websites for example, right? Like if you hit an entire list of people, there's only 3% of the market that's really looking for your solution. And in this example, it would be websites, right? So it's like it's really hard to convert the other 97% to think that they need your solution. And so you kind of have to think about like, okay, how can I make what I sell, which is like websites, like attractive to the other 97%. And in most cases, it's like, okay, let's make a specific solution and make a specific claim to a specific industry and solve a specific painoint. And that's really hard to identify and do until you do a lot of testing in a ton of different industries, pitching a ton of different things or running like some heavy split tests. But that's that's how you come to go from demand capture to demand jet. Yeah. Yeah. And like basically how I describe what you're saying there is you you need to create a cold friendly offer, right? Where it again, yeah, it's it's really hard to convince someone they need a new website, but if you um offered to audit their current website or if you offered to do a split test against their current one versus, you know, the new one, um like some some offer that's irresistible and and aligns with their desires.

you're going to have a far better chance of like people saying yes. And then once you got that yes, then you can maybe upsell them to a retainer service or something like that. I think that's a really hard um you know, it might not seem like to you, but I think these are actually quite advanced sales and marketing tactics and I think it's really hard for people to cross that bridge of oh, I can't just send emails to people asking them to have a meeting with me. like I have to actually like structure an entire offer that is suitable for cold outbound. Like some people just really struggle with that. And I think a lot of Yeah, it's just it's it's just you need to understand the concepts of like warm traffic, cold traffic, what even is an offer? Like, oh, I can't just people aren't just going to buy my product or buy my service. They actually want to get something out of it. Like it's it's it's quite an advanced conversation for some. Yeah. No, I agree. I think like I always I I always tell a lot of our clients, people that are in our sales pipeline and everything of that sort. I'm like if you have no budget to test and you're you're kind of like, you know, on the risk of, you know, maybe going under or you're in any kind of like, you know, kind of like in that scarcity mindset, like do the campaigns yourself. Do the testing yourself. Try to see if you can validate it a little bit before you even hire me or any other agency owner in the space. like try to validate that it can work a little bit on your own because all the other agency owners are going to do is just amplify your efforts, right?

But if you have no budget, it's going to be, you know, 60 90 days before we figure out if we can get a campaign working, if at all. And I think that's like the misconception a lot of people have is like they think that an agency owner can sell a bad product or sell a bad offer and they can't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where things go wrong. Like I I've I experienced this as a an agency and I've also been on the other side like I when I speak with founders all the time I I say you don't hire an agency until you're I I say doing tens of thousands a month like maybe 20 30k a month because then you know you actually have something people want. You probably have some idea of who you're targeting what message those people care about and you've got some sort of uh process and then an agency can just like take that and run with it. But if you're expecting an agency to come into your business and figure those things out for you from the ground up, like you're it's going to be an expensive mistake that you know you're going to work with them for 90 days. You're going to pay 2 3k a month and you know you're going to churn afterwards and it's just going to leave a sad taste in everyone's mouth.

Seriously, so many times. And I think like if you have the expectation of like, okay, I'm going to give them three months to figure it out and test and learn and I'm okay with burning capital for three months, but I know that, hey, like I'm investing in the long term, then then it can work out. But yeah, I think like a lot of customers come in and they're like, hey, like it's, you know, you know, 3 days into this campaign, I haven't seen anything yet. What's up? It's like, come on, man. So yeah, I think I think that's how I think about cold email campaigns in general, though. Cool. So, what what are you seeing from like um an infrastructure perspective? Because I look, I'll be honest, I've been out of the cold email game for for a little while now. I've been mainly focused on um inbound. It does get to the point where like it things just seem so complex and I don't know if that's because people are over complicating it or that's just the current state of cold email. Like what are you seeing from your side? Like what's the best way to ensure that people are actually landing in the primary inbox? Yeah. And I think it's it's kind of a mix of both those things, right? Like, you know, it's the it's like the so you know, you have all these cool email content creators like myself.

You know, we're going to make it seem a lot more complex because that does help us on the inbound side, right? But it also is true to a certain aspect. Like, you know, we're sending millions of emails. If you're an individual contributor and you're only sending, let's say, 10,000 emails, it's not as complex. You don't really need to run all the heavy automations and infro stuff that we do. Like you could get results with just using instantly using smart lead. They both have the ability to buy and set up inboxes through Google and Microsoft. And you just do that and that's all you really need. You get Apollo leads which is easy and cheap. Um use million verifier validate. You get your infrastructure set up through smart lead and instantly and use their sequencers and you just write copy with under 100 words. you know, casual, conversational, uh, short, sweet, right to the point, and you have a cold, ready offer. Like, you can make a campaign work easily. But, you know, it starts to get a little bit more difficult once you start to scale the volume. And that's where you have to figure out how to get all these like different backup systems in place, figure out these different ways to enrich the list and all these crazy things. But like sometimes people jump way too ahead. Like they try to figure out all those different things before they even have the fundamentals in place. And I like I cold email for sure has gotten a lot more complex but at the end of the day like you have to have those fundamentals in place otherwise all the fancy gimmicks that you see everyone talk about just don't work. Um and it and it just falls short. So yeah I think like fundamentals over everything and just like when you're running your first cold email campaign just get a minimal viable campaign up and and it's just using that tech stack that I mentioned earlier and you will get results and then from there you'll figure out like what I need to do to scale it. Yeah. Do do you have like certain metrics you're looking to achieve? Like do you have like a baseline where you know, right, yeah, we've we found a winning angle here or no, we we actually need to change something. Yeah. Yeah. Great question.

So, um it's funny because like you'll see on Smartly or not Smartly, but you'll see on like uh LinkedIn and stuff, people will post like these crazy screenshots where, you know, the reply rate is like, you know, 10% plus and the the positive reply rate is maybe like 60%. And and I talk about this all the time because I'm like, if they don't ever explain what the offer is and who they're selling to and and what the copy says, like that stuff is so easy to gimmick. Like if I if I wrote in the in a cold email campaign, hey, I will generate leads for you for completely free. No upfront fee. You could pay me after I close or after you close a deal. Let me know if you're interested. Like my reply rate is going to be 10% and my positive reply rate is going to be 60%. Right? And and so I think that's where a lot of people mess things up. But I think like for an average campaign, you should always look for above a 1% reply rate. If it's below 1%, there's usually some level of deliverability issues that you have to kind of solve for. Um but you want to optimally get into like the I would say 2 to 4% reply rate. That's a good place to be. That means you're inboxing well. You're actually getting conversations going. And then depending on the offer, the positive reply rate is going to vary. I would say anything in that 20 to 40% positive reply rate is is a solid space to be. My ideal place to get to is like one lead per every 350 to 500 uh contacts. So that means like for every 350 to 500 people that you're reaching out to, you're getting someone saying, "This sounds really interesting.

I'd love to set up a call." Yeah. Yeah. And have you seen cuz um when I was doing like outbound for my agency and other businesses like you could different call to action calls to actions and and offers would like fluctuate the reply rate. Like for example if you offered someone like a lead magnet and it's very low friction. It's just like you know say yes if you want to receive it you get a higher reply rate but trying to convert those to meetings booked would be tough. whereas given that hard call to action of asking for the meeting up front, you'd get a lower reply rate um but more of those would um convert to meetings. But do you do you have any preference with regards to that? Yeah. So I think when you're working with an a agency and they're uh so like yeah, you got to kind of think about it like the full funnel. Um, I I think like, okay, if you're working with an agency and they're billing you for every positive response and they're pushing you to do a Loom strategy or a lead magnet strategy, it's not in your benefit because like you said, it's you're going to get a ton of positive replies, but it's extremely hard to take those lead magnet positive replies to a booked meeting, you know? Uh, I I think if you're if you're paying for booked meetings, then it's, you know, completely different, right? So, like, you know, if they want to do the lead magnet, it's kind of making their life a little harder, which is fine. Um, I I prefer to to try to always start my first campaign with just uh like a simple direct response ETA that isn't too hard and it's a little bit more conversational. So, my favorite ones is like, "Is that something you'd be interested in?" Simply, just like that, right? And you get people saying, "Yeah, I'd love to see more info." Or, "Yes, that sounds great. Like, let's set up a call." Things of that sort. I love that CTA. That's like been my highest performing CTA. And I think it's kind of a little bit overused nowadays, but you know, it's still doing pretty well in a lot of markets. But you also just kind of have to think about it, right? Like if you're in a very competitive space, let's say you're selling website design or websites to uh local businesses, you know, they're getting probably five to 10 of those emails a day. If you put your CTA as, you know, uh is this something you're you'd be interested in, like getting a new website, your reply rate's going to be pretty low versus like if your CTA was like, "Hey, I'd love to to send you a free mockup of your site." And you know, you kind of have to just do the full math of like, okay, if I get a ton of responses and I get a ton of conversations going, do those eventually turn into sales versus like if I get no replies, but you know, maybe get that one per every 1500 contacts that responds with interest because I'm kind of like, you know, shooting in the dark, finding that one person that's looking for it in that market. Does that actually work for me?

you know, so it's kind of like just looking at the full stack of like, okay, what's leading to appointments and then what's actually leading and converting into sales. Uh, and so that's kind of how I think about it. But yeah, you kind of like the first thing obviously to solve is just getting replies and then getting appointments and then getting sales. U but then like you want to start testing and seeing like okay, what can I do that requires the least amount of work to be able to actually get that sale. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, are you mostly using the standard like Apollo and the various tools that work around that for your leads or are you also using things like signals and and intent signals and stuff like that, right? Which is probably the hottest topic in like sales tech at the moment. Again, I think it's something that people can over complicate a bit, but I'm just I'm I'm interested to hear if you've seen value in in using them. Yeah, I think there's certain signals that are better than others. Um I don't like signals that come at such low frequency unless it's so like let me give an example, right? Like some people will use like the site visitor as a as a good measure of a signal and like yeah sure absolutely it's a good signal for sure but if you get like no traffic at all and you're using that as your entire GTM strategy and you get like maybe six enrichments from or B2B like you could have the best most personalized cold email in the world but you're still only going to book one to three meetings a month right and so like I prefer for like and here's the other thing too.

It's like if you have a demand genen offer, you really don't need signals. Like you should just be running volume and running like you know pretty broad just like Apollo leadless with a direct response offer and just kind of go at it because you will just generate more results with volume. But I think when you're running any kind of demand capture offers, signals definitely out uh for sure. And so I I think it just also comes down to like the type of signal. Like my favorite signal right now is like uh someone that's following a company page on LinkedIn. So there's a lot of new guys that will and we actually originated this funny enough. The LinkedIn company follower scrape. That one is I' I've tried that. Yeah, that one is uh such a good angle. Uh people are kind of renting it now, but like in certain industries like they're they're really really good. I remember we did this. We scraped all our biggest agency and this is like when we first started. We scraped all the biggest legion agencies followers and we run cold emails to them and uh we were signing clients like left and right like within seven days like this was like the shortest sales cycle we've ever seen at our agency. Um and this is like when we first did it maybe two years ago. The other like the other signal right now that I really like. So it's actually new. One of my uh good friends, he's kind of like a mentor to me. He's actually the one who taught me how to do the company followers scrape. uh he has this new signal that he's built which basically it will monitor your competitor's sales reps and so if you're selling like a high ticket B2B service right he will be able to send you a list of all like your competitor's uh connections that they're making on LinkedIn right and and if you look at like even with our sales reps like our part like our part of our process with our account executives is like once you have that first call go connect with them on LinkedIn right so you could see everyone who's pretty much actively in their ICP as well as in their pipeline and you can engage them and I think that signal right there is is something that not many people are using right now and it is kind of like a lightning in a bottle thing. Um you sometimes won't get as much like activity. It's once again like one of those like low signal things like let's say you operate in a very niche industry and there's not that many competitors like you know you may only get like 10 to 15 people that are um you know in their pipelines or whatnot and that fit your ICP. But if you're in a pretty big industry with a ton of way bigger competitors, like it's a really good one. Uh, and so that's one of our favorite signals that not many people are talking about, but it is pretty nuts. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I think I mean interested to hear your thoughts on this. I think um for say high ticket software I think signals could be more important just because like you no nobody wakes up on the day and says you know I want to spend 50k on on software um you know they they move in market maybe there's some kind of trigger event they're searching on Google uh they're jumping on calls they're visiting websites maybe there's a big a big initiative and they're hiring people that need to support that initiative I think in that case those signals can be used to suggest that oh okay this person has moved in market maybe now is like a good time to reach out to them. Um, I think and that's where I see most of the hype to be honest is a lot of these like mid-market enterprise software companies that are just historically used such like legacy data that now with all of these new tools and um just how like outbound has has just been disrupted. I think they're going crazy over like all of this data. Yeah. And I think like what a lot of people mess up with is on the signal specifically like they just try to run it through a like a a smart lead or instantly clay campaign. So like you know they'll have like some kind of monitoring kind of function inside of clay. It'll you know send the data into a smart lead campaign and then just kind of have that run in autopilot. I feel like for most signals that's like the level one way of doing it. And I think the better way to do it is actually identify these signals and then assign it to a rapid SDR or an AE if you're doing full cycle sales um and have them actually work and engage the lead manually because those those signal leads they have a lot more intent. So like for example and and the way I came to this conclusion was like with uh with Eric like his his uh his thing is called CAM.

It's kind of cool because it's like camera, you know, you can monitor people. But basically, we would take his signals and we would just throw them into a cold email campaign and like we didn't get any results at all. And I was like, dude, this signal like it, you know, it's not that good to be completely honest. And then we did the opposite where we're assigning it to our AES and we're having them go in and, you know, do full cycle sales and engage with the people and then we started seeing sales come through the door, you know, and and I think that's another thing a lot of people mess up with on the signal side. And it's it you can kind of see this in the market as well because like RB2B for example they are now making it to where it integrates the the CRM and then it like assigns and pushes to like an SDR and assigns the SDR to work a workflow and you know do all that stuff and and I think that's how most signals for the most part should be leveraged unless it's like a high activity signal like let's say you're monitoring a keyword on Reddit and that keyword is mentioned hundreds of times a day. You could score the leads and put the most priority accounts to be assigned to an SDR or an AE to work manually and then you could take like the low quality leads or the ones that's got scored lower to just be put into an instantly and smart lead campaign. Um, and I think that's the better solution. But yeah, I think like most people they just go from signal just to a smart lead instantly campaign and hope for the best. Yeah, for sure. I mean, look to I I come from the the the background of like never worked really at a mid-market or enterprise company.

And so, you know, when tools like Instantly and Smart Lead came around, I could just rip them and I I'd be pretty, you know, I'd be good. Um, but I have realized, you know, there's um a guy I've spoken to a few times called Scott. I can't remember his surname, but he runs like a like a sales/outbound consultancy and you know he works with mid-market enterprise companies and it's a completely different beast. Like they're not Yeah. they're not just going, "Hey, this person visited your website. Let's send them like a a cold email straight away. It's more ABM focused. You know, there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of like RevOps work going on uh enriching their CRM. Um you know, some of these deals are worth tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. like you're not just going to um just instantly send do like automated outbound. You're going to be a bit more sp smart and strategic around it. So I think it's just like a completely different game to say SMB where you might be like a small agency or even like a small software startup where it's probably just you and maybe a couple of others. Yeah. No, I agree. And I think like a good example of this is like RAMP for example. They they send you know well over a million cold emails a month. Um, and and they're they're they're pretty heavy on it. And they run some great campaigns, too. Uh, but they also do have, I believe, like a team dedicated to like breaking into like really, you know, high value accounts in the enterprise market. Um, and so they kind of run both simultaneously, which I think is is also a good idea for for a lot of these like enterprise type companies if if they do have an offering for kind of that SMB maybe midm market.

Uh, running both in tangent. Yeah. What what I find so uh funny is um you know there's a there's a bit of outrage with like the automated outbound scene um but literally companies like RAMP and I think um I think they're pronounced gorgeous or or gorgeous it's like the uh ecom CX platform those guys have been ripping like programmatic outbound for a minute like you know custom where before tools like instantly I think even before like play was was popular they've been running these programs just sort of un under the under the hood. I mean, they've got some blog posts out on the internet, but it's so funny like these guys have been this this playbook has been around for a minute. It's only in the last couple of years has it been democratize the buzzword because of tools like Smart Lead and Clay and and Instantly. Yeah. No, absolutely. I Yeah, I think like what Clay has done for the space is is is is amazing. Like they've built like a phenomenal product and and dude, if I had to put my money on it, I think in the next 10 years they're going to be bigger than anybody else in the space. like they they own they're going to build a sequencer on top of the data.

They're going to they're going to build the entire full endtoend function like I bet you they build a CRM into their product eventually so that you could just run everything from clay and and they're they're set up to do so like perfectly. They've raised you know ton of capital so they'll be able to do the product development at another level and uh you know they bought themselves even with the massive overhead like you know years of runway u and so yeah I think like they're they're geared up to to really own this space in the next like five to 10 years which is awesome to see. Yeah, sure. I mean, you raise that type of money, you need to go big. Like, everyone's everyone's expecting their return. On on the topic of clay, do do you do you use clay much at the the agency? Like, is it is it a product you personally get value from or again, is it is it Okay, so what sort of like use cases are you using it for? Yeah, I'll tell you a funny story. So this is like where like I I constantly reinvent things uh when I shouldn't and and so we built like our own internal version of Clay and it was doing a lot of the stuff that Clay agent does and things of that sort and that thing was breaking like you know almost like once a week and so you know we're running all these like crazy cool plays but we just can't do it enough scale and volume for our clients cuz like what we were building internally just kept breaking all the time and so I was like dude you know this like we are getting on to clay and we're using clay at a high level.

And so, yeah, we started really good on Clay in like the last two months. Uh, phenomenal product all the way. Like I mentioned, the the things I like doing, uh, I mean, there's so many playbooks you can run. Um, so one of my favorites that and and I'll talk I'll talk about the generic ones that anybody can run regardless of their offer. And those are the ones that we usually run for our clients. It the goal here is like you don't want to use Clay to create the entire email. You want it to be able to either filter your lead list. So you can just reach out to like perfectly accurate accounts to whatever you're selling or you use it to basically identify a singular variable that you're able to include in the email that helps it seem more personalized. Those are the best two use cases. I see a lot of people that have or they use Clay to create like entirely unique emails all the way through. It's like doing a lot of AI analysis and input and things of that sort. And it the emails are just junk. Like they just straight up are right. Like it may look really personalized, but it just doesn't sound human at all. And and like it's really hard to QA that stuff at scale whenever you let AI just spin out a ton of stuff.

And like I bet you if you look in your inbox and you had to to make a guess of like which email in here was written with a ton of AI, you'd be able to find it pretty quickly. Oh yeah. It's just like Yeah. the the personalization is I won't call it creepy because I don't get creeped out by cold emails but you're like yeah like a normal person wouldn't say that because like the level of detail they've gone into and you know they're overly enthusiastic and there's there's like a bunch of red flags where they've kind of gone like too far into AI personalization. So I'll tell you the favorite ones I like to run that you can run on like any offer and it's not too much. So, uh, one easy one is finding someone's colleague in the same department. So, like if you have a co-founder or just someone that works under you, like grabbing their name and putting into the cold email campaign. So, you could say, "Hey, I wasn't sure if I should reach out to you or Liam." Like, that works so good. And you could put that on any offer. Uh, other ones that I like is like finding what the the company on the lead list, they're ICP. So, let's say you're working with or you're targeting like uh or like like let's say your lead list is e-commerce brands. It'll find who they sell what product to and who to. So, it'll say like, you know, it'll identify uh you know, the they sell purses to old ladies for whatever reason, right? Then you can kind of like put that into your cold email campaign was like, "Hey, you know, I noticed that you guys are in the market to sell purses to old ladies." And then, you know, there those are like some of our favorite ones. So I call that one like uh the identify ICP. The other ones is like finding competitors.

That one's also really good. So like for every lead on your lead list, you're identifying like competitors. So like you know if let's say RAM was on your lead list, you'll find CapChase and I don't know who else is who else is in their space, but just like you know be able to mention them in the cold email. And yeah, there's just like tons of different like things you could do like that. And sometimes you could just get really creative with like how you could structure and put together the data on the campaign. So like funny enough like I was talking to to Eric and and his product, right? It does like the sales reply had a product by the way. I think Yeah. Yeah. So this is Eric Nok or this is Eric Pollson, not Noki. You're probably thinking about Okay. Yeah. Yeah. different guy, but shout out Eric. Shout out both Erics. They're both cool. Uh but so yeah, like I mentioned, right, his product can monitor sales reps. So the cold email campaign I told them to build and clay is like hey first name um if I could help you monitor some of your competitors sales reps like competitor one two and three would that be of interest and then in your follow-up email you could say like you could pull in the actual sales like sales people on those companies and be like hey first name um here's some recent connections that competitor or sales rep one two and three uh have you know and it's like that would be a banger your campaign because it's like if I got that cold email and I'm like, "Oh, here's recent connections that science sales rep had." Like I'm like, "Dude, I got to reply to this." Like this is this is gold because this is a lead right here. Um, so yeah, I think like you could use Clay to really get creative and create some like super nifty campaigns like that. But I would say for the average person, you know, stick to the basics. Just grab colleagues, grab, you know, competitors, grab ICPS, and and figure out how to bake it into your campaign. Yeah, for sure. I think it's worth understanding like what game you're personally playing. Like again, I I look at people who are sort of targeting mid-market enterprise and they're they're using everything every tool. I think there's a tool called like I think it's Octave, which I think helps you um build ICPS and personalized messages to them and different market segments. I've I've come across different AI writers all the time. And I think these tools can be like really useful. I think particularly if you're if you have a large sales org and where you know everyone everyone on your team probably isn't like super passionate about cold email or you know isn't willing to invest hours in watching YouTube content about cold email or learning play. I think these tools can help like replicate winning playbooks internally. But I think if you're just getting started or if you target sort of the the bottom end of the market, which most people do, right? I think um you don't need to over complicate. I think your your effort is much better spent on like the foundations like you product market fit.

Do you actually know who you're targeting? Do you actually know what they care about? Um do you actually have like an attractive offer? I think those things are far more uh like higher leverage. Yeah. No, I agree. And I think like a lot of the AI writers out there too, they they do really well on very simple offers, right? Like they can write good cold emails, they explain it, they can figure out pain points and stuff like that. Um, but it's just not there yet when it's like a kind of complex offer that has a couple, you know, different steps to it. Um, and maybe maybe new into the world as well. And so I think that's where a lot of people mess up in the cold email space because like a lot of these agency owners like they'll just put their offer into whatever the AI writer is and it's like oh dude this thing pitches B2B Legion really good just as good as me but then you start to put your customers offers in there and you're like oh this is this is not good you know. Um and I think I think that's why a lot of the AI writers get a lot more hype than they should. I haven't found any that I'm like dude this is way better than a human. Interesting. Maybe they're built for certain like maybe they work really well for like martekch and saltec where you you're basically selling some kind of pipeline outcome or or um revenue outcome or it's it's a very common language but maybe if you go to other verticals it's a bit tougher to sell. Um yeah absolutely the a while back you mentioned about just uh for the sending infrastructure just using like whatever instantly a smart lead offer outside the box. At what stage do you start looking elsewhere because there's so many products that have um popped up where it's like private infrastructure all these different inboxes from different vendors like there's a lot going on there. At what stage do you s start to like explore that? Yeah. And my my thesis on infrastructure has has always been uh been been the pretty much the same across, you know, the years I've been doing this. It's like Google and Microsoft, their IPs are always going to be better than any SMTP or really any other provider in the space because they pretty much own the entire network of emails, right? And so you want a majority of your sending to come from Google or Microsoft, preferably both because sometimes Google does better than Microsoft. Um, the other thing I keep in mind is you still do want to have some type of SMTP on the back end because like and and maybe that's me speaking as an agency owner because there are going to be times when like you know all your accounts get nuked by like Google and Microsoft. you know, that's happened to us before and you never want to like like the SMTP may not deliver better, but I would take a 8% reply rate versus a 0% reply rate when your accounts are nuked. And so the way I think about it is like you want to have like probably 40% of your infrastructure in Google, the other 40% in Microsoft, and then about 20% of your infrastructure with an SMTP. Um, and then whenever you're starting to scale past like I would say 40 to 50,000 emails a month is whenever you want to invest in some of these like premium infrastructures like like the one we use is Hyper Tide. There's other guys out there that do it like Scaled Mail and um I see a couple other people pop up Super Wave. Um, the thing that's really good about these guys is their entire ball game is infrastructure. And so they will be able to get you accounts quicker than anybody else. They'll be able to help you solve things like whenever your tenants run into threshold errors like don't like you could, you know, get your orders delivered in roughly 4 hours. And so whenever you're needing to scale up a ton of volume, like you constantly just need more inboxes. And being able to rely on a vendor like that to be able to, you know, one-click order, get your Google inboxes and your Microsoft inboxes added to your account is so worth it. Um, and it's worth the investment. And typically they're cheaper than list pricing as well. And so that's why I like using vendors like that to to really be able to scale all of our clients outreach and volume.

Nice. Sweet. Yeah. Okay. So basically start off with the whatever the products offer natively. Um and then once you hit that sort of I think you said 30 to 50k a month volume that's when you start looking for these other providers. Do do you have some sort of because I know like from your coaching you're you're a systems guy. I mean you have to in an agency when I I don't know how many clients you have. I think you have well over a hundred. Um we're at 200 right now. 200. Yeah, that's insane. Um, do you have some like sort of redundancy or fail safees built in? Like are you monitoring inbox health and swapping inboxes out and stuff like that? Yeah. Yeah. And like here's the thing too, right? Like when you start to send a ton of volume and you validated that this is a great channel for you. That's whenever you want to start building like a lot of the crazy systems and automations and stuff that we have. So like I can kind of walk you through some of the things that we do. So we'll just stick on infra and and not even talk about like all the campaign related items that we'll do.

But on just the infra side, right? So like I mentioned, we always diversify. So we always buy uh or we we put about 40% of our sender allocation in Microsoft, 40% in Google, and then about 20% in an SMTP. For SMTP, we're using uh Mail Reef. They're pretty solid. I mean, I do definitely want to test different things in the market, but pretty good to go with right now. And then um what you want to do is always buy two sets, right? So let's say you know you have enough inboxes to send a 100 emails per month. Just making up numbers. Um you want to buy two sets of that. So you have the ability to send 200 emails. And what you want to do is rotate it month on month off. And that has been a huge help for us because you know if you use you know in campaign one the first 100 inboxes right the second set of inboxes won't be used until months two. But now they've gone through a 30-day warm-up or or actually a 45day warm-up compared to the 30 and like it just rotates on and off and then like you're basically putting inboxes back on ice and ice warm-up and then the warm-up is just going to naturally kind of heal it in a lot of cases. So that's been one thing that's really helped us. It's kind of hard to do natively inside the platform.

You have to run like a pretty heavy automation that can kind of keep track of it all. Um so I would say that's the first thing. The second thing that we're doing is all your deliverability concerns can be found inside of the bounces, right? And so if you an analyze your bounce messages, you can kind of figure out what you need to do to solve your your issues. And so, for example, uh if you get marked as spam a lot, Google will eventually and marked as spam by a lot of Google users, Google will eventually start to reject every email from your domain. And so that, you know, reply message or that bounce message is always going to say, um, you know, domain name suspects you as spam, right? And if you get a ton of those in a in a short amount of period, just consider that domain cooked, kill it, go get another one to, you know, reset it to the to the the setup and then keep running. And then um one thing that we've been doing as well is like inside of Smart Lead, what's really cool is in their global block list, they put every bounce and the reason code in there uh automatically, right? And so when you're running your campaigns, you can you can see every single bounce there. And so we actually monitor and grab that data and then we'll basically align it with each domain. So we could see each domain what is the bounce rate that it's getting and and then we'll separate the bounces to say is it a sender bounce or is it a hard bounce or is it a soft bounce and so then we're able to kind of keep track of those stats to identify like you know if the sender balance starts to increase above you know 1 to 3%. We know that hey like this is you know pretty much cooked let's kill it. Um and then there's just like different things you got to do as well. So like for example, you analyze your lead list. You basically want to score your lead list to your best accounts at the top and then your worst accounts at the bottom so you have a higher chance of getting initial engagement. So that's one thing that we've done that's really helped improve reply rates. The other side to that as well is like you can analyze the MX records of everybody on your lead list and see if they're using Barracuda, Proof Point, Mcast, any of these email deliverability softwares. And you can well I don't always recommend to just remove them because sometimes like you know you're hitting an ICP that like if you hit software companies in general like large ones they all have Barracuda Mcast and proof point set up across their their infrastructure. So, it's like, yeah, you could just remove them, but what I recommend is just put them at the bottom of your lead list because that means that because like the number one thing that they look at is domain age. And so, you know, by the end of your campaign, your domain will have a little bit more age than it did obviously at the beginning of the lead list. And so, then you have a better chance of delivering, not confirmed for sure, but that's kind of how I think about that as well. Either remove them from your lead list or put them at the bottom um so you have a better chance of inboxing. And yeah, the rest of the stuff I would say is like the basic stuff that a lot of people miss out on.

Like here's the thing. If you send spam, you're going to get market spam. So if you have emails that are coming out saying Leapird LLC or RAMP LLC or, you know, Capchase Incorporated, people are going to know that this is a cold email and they're it's automated and they're going to mark USBF. So like clean the emails, make them short, make them direct. Copy fatigue is a big thing nowadays. So people they want to, you know, put a whole entire poem in their emails and explain everything and it's just like, dude, the copy gets fatigued way quicker whenever it's above 120 words. So like we ideally want the word count to be below 100 and you know, no open tracking, um, send to only valid emails, run your catchalls in a separate campaign. There's just like a ton of different things that you have to kind of think about. But truthfully, unless you want to really ramp up to what ramp is doing, funny enough, ramped up to ramp. Um, you don't really need all these systems and I would hire an agency because it'll probably save you a lot of life time or yeah, just a lot of time because it's not it's not like mission critical to your business to be able to run this like cold email thing as well as like a legion agency can in my opinion. And and if you haven't validated the channel is like, you know, something that's going to get you as big as ramp, it's not going to make sense to build like the the amount of automations we have. And like, you know, I just rambled for a good amount on some of the amount of automations we have. There's probably a good like, you know, an extra 10 to 15 things that I could talk about there um on on the stuff that we do to kind of perfect our deliverability and perfect our results there. Yeah, that's crazy. Do do you have It's a bit cheeky of me, but do you have like a resource or like an SOP you have to to go like that has this stuff within it? Uh yeah, kind of I do. I mean like we don't really show too much of like how to build a lot of the things um because it just depends on your setup and how you know you configure everything. But uh yeah, our LinkedIn, our YouTube like I talk about all the strategies that we implement. Yeah. Um and I have for like the last four years just because it's like good content to put out there. But yeah, like for the most part, all of our content that shows like a lot of the unique strategies. We do simplify it a little bit just because it's easier to digest, but yeah, all of our contents out there for sure. That's crazy. Yeah.

Well, there you have it. Let's wrap it there cuz we're over time there and you know got 200 clients to manage.