Zero replies doesn't mean your copy is bad. The order I'd diagnose in, because most people start at the wrong end

Zero replies doesn't mean your copy is bad. The order I'd diagnose in, because most people start at the wrong end

Most people who get zero replies rewrite the email. It's the obvious move and it's usually the last thing that should change, because if nothing is landing in an inbox then the copy was never the variable being tested in the first place.

The order I'd go in.

Number one, are you actually delivering. Send one to mail-tester.com and see what comes back. If SPF, DKIM or DMARC are missing or misaligned then nothing downstream matters. Then run the domain and the IP through MXToolbox for blacklists. This takes about ten minutes and it's where most dead campaigns actually died.

Number two, are you delivering to the inbox or to spam. Those are not the same thing and your open rate won't tell you, especially now that a decent chunk of opens are fired by security scanners rather than people. Send seeds to a handful of real accounts across Google and Outlook and look with your own eyes. Outlook is usually the one quietly eating everything.

Number three, is the list real. Bounces above roughly two percent means the data is stale and you're being punished for it. Verify before sending rather than after. A clean small list beats a big dirty one, and that isn't a moral point, it's that the dirty one damages the domain you'll still need next month.

Number four, is the targeting right. This is the step people skip. If you're emailing people who have no particular reason to care this week, good copy doesn't rescue that. Something needs to be true about them right now. They're hiring for the role your product supports, they just raised, they just switched tools. Without that you're writing to a list rather than to a person.

Number five, now look at the copy. And by this point it's usually a much smaller fix than you expected, because the first four were doing the damage.

The reason the order matters is that each step invalidates the test below it. If you rewrite copy while you're sitting in spam you've learned nothing, and you'll end up concluding the offer doesn't work when you never actually presented it to anybody.

What's the bounce rate on your last send? That's usually the fastest tell for which step you're stuck on.

u/KianosJ — 3 days ago

How to vet a lead generation agency before you sign anything - the questions that expose the bad ones

A founder asked here yesterday where to find a lead gen consultant, and half the replies were vendors saying DM me. So here's the vetting list I wish every buyer used. Full disclosure, I run an outbound agency myself, which is exactly why I know which questions hurt. Use these on us too.

Ask to see the sending infrastructure they'd use for you. The answer should include separate sending domains (never your main one), warmed mailboxes with sane daily limits, and verification before anything sends. If they plan to blast from your primary domain, end the call. They're gambling your domain reputation on their quota.

Ask what their bounce rate is and how they keep it there. Under 2% is the answer. If they don't know the number, they don't measure it, and your domain pays for that.

Ask who reads the replies and how fast. Half the value of outbound dies in slow reply handling - a reply that waits two days is a dead lead. If replies go to a shared inbox nobody owns, walk.

Ask them to walk through one past campaign with real numbers - sends, bounces, replies, meetings. Not screenshots of a dashboard, a walkthrough. Anyone who's actually run campaigns can talk through one in detail without preparation.

Ask what happens when it's not working. The honest ones have a kill process: pause, diagnose deliverability vs list vs message, fix one variable. The bad ones just promise more volume.

And the meta-test: check whether their own outbound is any good. If an agency sells cold email and their cold email to you was generic slop, that's the product.

Most of the horror stories in this space come from buying leads-per-month promises with none of the above checked. The good operators will happily answer all six. The bad ones get uncomfortable at question one.

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u/KianosJ — 3 days ago

Stacked signals beat bigger lists - the outbound targeting approach that changed our reply rates

Most cold outbound targeting is one signal: industry plus company size. That produces the same commodity list every one of your competitors is exporting and emailing this week, and reply rates show it.

What changed things for us was stacking signals until the list gets uncomfortably small. Example stack for selling to B2B service firms:

Hiring signal. The company is running job ads for a role adjacent to what you sell. Someone hiring an SDR has pipeline budget. Someone hiring a reporting analyst has a data mess. Job postings are companies announcing their pain in public with money attached.

Growth signal. Headcount up 10%+ over 12 months. Growing companies buy, flat ones deliberate.

Gap signal. Something visibly missing that your service fixes. No lead magnet on the site, a careers page but no BD hires, ads running but the landing page is the homepage. Takes a minute to check per account, which is fine because the stack already cut the list down.

Each filter cuts volume 3-10x. A 5,000 name industry list becomes 150-300 accounts. Feels wrong the first time. But the first line of the email now references something true and current about them, and it's a different sport - replies come from relevance, and relevance is just information you gathered that competitors didn't bother to.

The operational trick is treating it as a weekly feed, not a one-time build. Signals go stale fast - the job ad closes, the growth stops. Re-pull weekly, contact fresh signals within days of spotting them.

Curious what signals others here stack. Tech installs and funding rounds are the classic ones but I find them weaker than hiring, they're too far from the actual pain.

reddit.com
u/KianosJ — 4 days ago

how we ran out b2b outbound campaigns, vs what we're struggling with.

Hi Everyone,

We've been running email outbound campaigns for different b2b companies, and I wanted to share some recent wins and get some potential ideas on what kind of features/data enrichment would take us from good, to killer.

So what we did in short - We spent 6 months developing a tool for ourselves to run campaigns on, and 2 months into running it for ourself we realized it was working, getting high open rates, decent reply rate, and just kept tweaking and making it better.

Now what went right - Good data quality via 3rd party APIs, multiple validation points working, meetings getting booked (most important metric for us) and lead quality was high.

Now here's what we really want to improve, and want advice on -

  1. How do we make our copy go from 'Good' to great, the level of personalisation is there, but the thing I'm struggling with mainly is how to structure a good offering for a client who's looking to run the same system for them
  2. How can we get better enrichment at lower cost? Clay is quite expensive, so it kills our margins.
  3. How can we send links/personalised landing pages without being flagged as spam with cold outreach, the idea is building complete funnels but this one is something genuinely puzzling us right now.

Any advice is much appreciated.

reddit.com
u/KianosJ — 8 days ago
▲ 2 r/b2bemailing+1 crossposts

Running email outbound what we did right vs what we want to improve.

Hi Everyone,

We've been running email outbound campaigns for different b2b companies, and I wanted to share some recent wins and get some potential ideas on what kind of features/data enrichment would take us from good, to killer.

So what we did in short - We spent 6 months developing a tool for ourselves to run campaigns on, and 2 months into running it for ourself we realized it was working, getting high open rates, decent reply rate, and just kept tweaking and making it better.

Now what went right - Good data quality via 3rd party APIs, multiple validation points working, meetings getting booked (most important metric for us) and lead quality was high.

Now here's what we really want to improve, and want advice on -

  1. How do we make our copy go from 'Good' to great, the level of personalisation is there, but the thing I'm struggling with mainly is how to structure a good offering for a client who's looking to run the same system for them

  2. How can we get better enrichment at lower cost? Clay is quite expensive, so it kills our margins.

  3. How can we send links/personalised landing pages without being flagged as spam with cold outreach, the idea is building complete funnels but this one is something genuinely puzzling us right now.

Any advice is much appreciated.

reddit.com
u/KianosJ — 8 days ago

Built an AI Powered outbound email system @ 2 K MRR

Hi everyone,

built an AI powered email outbound system, that uses various LLMs to research, enrich, and copywrite aswell as scrape leads.

How we got to 2K MRR - we used our own system to do outreach with a personalized P.S aswell as a note that told the lead that it was a fully automated email.

We signed our first client, and took his feedback and basically restructured how our own system worked, so that the system would keep learning from the distribution and existing traffic, sales calls, transcripts, etc.

What started out as a cool project 3 months ago, is bringing us 2K MRR between 4 happy customers who we can see are using it more and more.

I want some help from the community, are there any features that you’d love to have in an email marketing tool?

reddit.com
u/KianosJ — 8 days ago

Quick 50 EUR - Revolut (EU)

Hi -50 EUR to offer rn for sign up on Revolut (EU)

Lmk if you want the details

Edit: Only 8 spots left btw

reddit.com
u/KianosJ — 10 days ago

Revolut 50/75 EUR Bonus

Hi Everyone,

I’m offering 50 EUR for regular sign ups and 75 EUR for business sign ups on Revolut 🙏

Comment and I’ll reach out 🙏

reddit.com
u/KianosJ — 22 days ago