u/msnrqureshi

When I started doing outbound, managing a few mailboxes was pretty easy.

Then the number slowly increased and suddenly I was keeping track of domains, DNS, sending limits, mailbox health, bounces, etc.

At some point it felt like I was spending more time maintaining the setup than actually working on campaigns.

For people running larger outbound setups, do you manage everything yourself or use some kind of managed infrastructure?

I'm curious where other people draw the line.

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For a while I was mainly looking at reply rate.

If it went up, I assumed the campaign was getting better.

I started looking more closely at what those replies actually were.

A campaign can have a decent reply rate and still be terrible if most of the replies are:

Not interested

Wrong person

Remove me

Who are you?

Completely irrelevant

I started paying more attention to positive replies and eventually held meetings instead of just replies.

The numbers looked a lot less impressive, but the campaigns were actually producing more.

Curious what everyone here considers the most useful metric when judging a cold email campaign?