u/TeamGlasaio

Disclosure: I run sales at Glasa, we have a AI GTM tool.

1. Your DMARC record. Free checker, ninety seconds. Google and Microsoft now reject unauthenticated mail outright rather than filing it under spam, so nothing bounces back looking alarming. Roughly a third of the accounts I audit have something broken here.

2. Your actual delivered number. Not sends delivered. Plenty of tools count policy rejections as delivered. Get the real figure before you draw any conclusion about your copy.

3. Your bounce rate. Over 2% and your domain is degrading. Over 5% and you're rebuilding from scratch. Verify every address before it goes anywhere.

4. Where your replies actually come from. About 58% come from the first email. If steps four through seven are producing nothing, they aren't neutral they're adding complaint risk for free.

5. Whether anything happened. Emails sent within 48 hours of a funding round, an exec hire, or a telling job posting do 3-5x better. Not because the writing improved. Because the email has a reason to exist.

And the math, so your expectations are calibrated: 100 positive replies takes around 5,000 verified prospects if you're dialed in, 20,000 if you're average. Nobody is getting 100 leads out of 500 sends.

Happy to go deep on any of these in the comments.

full disclosure up front, i am the head of sales at glasa so obviously i have skin in this game.

but our platform tracks somewhere around 50 million cold emails every month, and after staring at that data long enough, you start seeing the same patterns repeat over and over.

so i am not going to link anything or pitch you. i am just tired of watching the same questions get answered with pure vibes like "just personalize bro" or "follow up 9 times" when the whole thing is literally arithmetic.

so let me ruin your day with it.

1. first, understand the math

a lead means a positive reply. someone who is interested, asks a question, or books a call.

the average reply rate right now sits around 3.43%, with top performers clearing 10%.

and only about a third of those replies are actually positive.

which means:

• average: ~20,000+ verified prospects for 100 leads
• good: ~8,000
• really dialed in, tight niche + strong triggers: ~5,000

so nobody is getting 100 leads from 500 emails.

we see this across millions of sends every month.

the math does not care about anyone's feelings.

2. infrastructure comes before copy

this volume cannot come from your main domain.

dont even think about it.

the standard setup now is roughly 3-8 separate sending domains away from your brand domain, with 2-3 inboxes per domain doing around 15 sends a day max.

and every one of them needs warming.

start around 5-10 emails a day and ramp over 4-6 weeks.

i know weeks sounds boring, but here is the stat that should scare you:

a properly warmed domain lands in the inbox around 87% of the time.

the same exact emails from a fresh domain land around 12% of the time.

same emails.

7x difference.

that gap right there is the entire reason the "cold email doesnt work" posts on this sub exist.

3. authentication is not optional

spf, dkim and dmarc on everything.

google, yahoo and microsoft all enforce this now.

and failing does not just mean the spam folder anymore. it can mean straight-up rejection where the mail does not arrive anywhere.

you wont even know it is happening.

i cannot tell you how many accounts we see come in convinced the channel is dead when it was literally three missing dns records the whole time.

4. your list is probably killing you

verify every single address before sending.

high bounce rates are a huge signal that your data is bad, and anything over roughly 2% starts putting you in a very bad place.

bad data does not just waste sends.

it takes your whole domain down with it.

and segment tightly.

one bad segment can drag you over the complaint threshold and hurt every other sequence you have running.

ten lists of 300 similar people beats one list of 3,000 randoms every single time.

5. triggers are the closest thing to a cheat code

email someone within 24-48 hours of:

• a funding round
• an executive hire
• a relevant job posting
• a technology change
• another event that creates an actual reason to reach out

and you can see 3-5x higher replies.

because a boring email with a real reason to exist beats a clever email with no reason every day of the week.

set up alerts for funding and job postings in your niche.

then work those people before everyone else does.

6. put your best stuff in email one

58% of all replies come from the very first email.

so your seven-step sequence of

"just circling back :)"

is probably not doing what you think it is doing.

your first email needs to do the heavy lifting.

and one more thing:

half of outbound seems to run through chatgpt now.

robotic ai personalization is getting detected and it can hurt inbox rates.

one true sentence about the person beats three paragraphs of generated flattery.

the filters adapted.

sorry.

tl;dr

100 leads means roughly 2,500-6,000 verified prospects, sent from 4+ warmed domains at around 200 sends a day, into tight segments, with triggers first and a short human first email.

from zero, think roughly 10-12 weeks.

there is no hack.

there are just the people who did the setup and the people asking if cold email is dead every month.

ask me anything below.

i see this stuff at scale every single day and i am happy to get into the weeds.

and no, i will not dm you a pitch.

citation tags out before posting as always.

I'm on the team at Glasa and we send millions of cold emails a month across our clients. I see the same questions here every week, so figured I'd do a full writeup of what actually works at that scale. None of this is theory, it's all stuff we've tested.

1. Fix your deliverability before you touch copy

This is the boring one nobody wants to hear but if you're landing in spam nothing else matters. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Use a separate domain from your main one (like getcompany.com instead of company.com). Warm it up for 2-3 weeks before sending anything. Keep it under 15 emails per inbox per day. Half the people complaining about low reply rates are just in spam folders.

2. Shorter than you think, then shorter again

My best performing emails are 50-75 words. If someone has to scroll on mobile you already lost. Every sentence has to earn its place. I literally read my drafts out loud and cut anything that sounds like filler.

3. The first line is the whole game

Nobody cares that you "hope this email finds them well." Open with something about THEM. Not fake flattery about their LinkedIn post from 2023. Something real, like a specific problem companies like theirs have, or something they actually did recently that connects to why you're reaching out. If your first line could be sent to 500 other people, rewrite it.

4. One CTA and make it low friction

"Do you have 30 minutes for a call this week" is asking a stranger for a favor. "Worth exploring?" or "Open to seeing an example?" gets way more replies. You're not trying to close them in email one, you're trying to start a conversation. Interest based CTAs beat meeting requests every time in my testing.

5. Talk about their problem, not your product

Nobody cares about your features. They care about the thing keeping them up at night. My template is basically: relevant observation, the problem it usually causes, one line of proof we can fix it, soft CTA. That's it.

6. Follow up but don't be a robot

Around half my replies come from follow ups. I do 3-4 total touches spaced a few days apart. Each one adds something new, a different angle, a quick case study, a relevant resource. "Just bumping this up" adds nothing and everyone can smell it.

7. Your list matters more than your copy

You can write the best email in the world and it dies if you're sending it to the wrong people. Tighter targeting with a smaller list beats spraying 10k contacts. When I niched down to one specific industry and personalized around their specific problems, replies noticeably jumped.

8. Send from a person, not a brand

Plain text, no images, no fancy signatures with banners, no tracking-heavy templates that look like marketing. It should look like an email a real human typed. Because it should be.

Quick things that also helped:

• Sending Tuesday to Thursday mornings worked best for me, but test your own audience
• Spintax or slight variations between emails helps deliverability at volume
• A P.S. line gets read more than the body, put something good there
• Reply to your own thread when following up so they see the context

Hey everyone,

We've done testing for the last couple months across a couple major tools and have seen an increased concentration of Outlook recipients in warmup networks across popular tools. We've seen between 60-70% Outlook recipients depending on the tool, possibly due to the cost effectiveness and popularity of the Outlook/Azure 100 emails per domain setup.

This can impact warmup behavior as it means you cant really build reputation with certain ESP's as fast, for example Google to Google connections, and the warmup patterns may not resemble your actual outbound traffic.

Has anyone else noticed the same thing? Would be interested to hear what percentages you’re seeing across different providers.