r/EmailProspecting

Been doing cold outreach, sending around 20-30 emails a day to people who match our ICP pretty well, and I'm sitting at zero replies.

Some context since I think it matters here, I'm a founder doing all our outreach myself, we build planning software for construction companies, targeting project managers and ops leads at mid-size firms, and I built the list manually so I thought the quality was at least decent going in.

For setup, I got lemlist running with domain warm-up through Lemwarm for a couple of weeks before the first send, used their AI personalization pulling from LinkedIn activity, but I can't tell if the personalization isn't landing or if the deliverability is off and I'm sitting in spam across every inbox.

At this point I'm stuck between going back to check deliverability first (mail-tester or something) and rebuilding the copy from scratch.

So if you've been through a dead stretch like this, where did you start?

4 person support team. Our customers contact us everywhere.

Right now each channel is its own thing. One person checks Instagram. Another monitors WhatsApp. Email goes through a shared Gmail. Website chat is on Tidio but nobody checks it consistently because it's yet another tab.

The result, messages get missed constantly.

Is there something that just pulls everything into one inbox?

Our open rates are solid (48%) and click-through rate is decent about 8% of prospects click through to our website from the email. That's ~240 people per month who are interested enough to visit our site, read our pages, sometimes spend 5+ minutes browsing.

But our reply rate is stuck at 1%. What kills me is that some of these visitors are going to our pricing page, reading case studies, checking out integrations, but they disappear into the void because we can't identify them individually and our follow-ups treat the entire list the same way.

Is there a way to see which companies from your email campaigns actually visit your site?

Third time this year. An SDR clicked a link in what looked like a prospect reply, entered their credentials on a fake login page, and within hours the attacker was sending emails from their account to our entire prospect list.

We run annual training and quarterly phishing sims but the sims are generic "claim your prize" emails that look nothing like a real prospect reply. Our reps pass every test and then fall for the real thing because the real thing looks like a meeting link from someone they actually emailed.

How are other outbound teams handling this?

We run outbound email campaigns to about 2,000 prospects per month. Open rates are solid (45-50%), click-through rates on links to our website are decent (8-10%), but reply rates are stuck around 2%. That means roughly 160 people click through to our site every month, spend time on our pages, and then disappear without responding to the email or filling out a form.

These aren't cold strangers they received our email, were interested enough to click, visited our site, and then ghosted. There has to be a way to identify who these people are and follow up specifically with them. Right now we're just sending generic follow-up sequences to the entire list with no idea who actually engaged beyond the click.

Anyone using tools that connect website visits back to email campaign recipients so you can prioritize follow-ups based on actual engagement?

I'm running outbound for a B2B SaaS and the list building process is killing our efficiency. We need accurate contact data, verified emails, direct dials, job titles.

What's the stack for going from "ideal customer profile" to "ready-to-contact list" without it taking a full day per campaign?

I was updating mine recently and realized I have no idea what the “right” amount of information is anymore 😅

Some people have just their name + job title.

Others have the full setup photo, company logo, social links, booking link, banner, disclaimer, etc.

For people who send a lot of business emails, what do you actually include in yours?

And has anyone noticed things like banners, links or CTAs in their signature actually generating clicks/leads, or is that mostly wishful thinking?

I run a tiny online shop from my apartment, mostly emailing a list of ~800 people. Last week a regular customer said my promo landed in her spam for the first time, so I started googling… and now I’m buried in “your emails are doomed unless you pay us” type sites.

A bunch of them talk about inboxally and how they’ll send/engage with emails from my account so Gmail/Outlook think I’m legit, fix my sender reputation, better inbox placement, all that. Some look kind of sketchy, some look polished, but the promises are all super similar and very aggressive.

Maybe I’m overthinking this, but it feels a bit like buying fake engagement for social media, just dressed up as “deliverability.” Is this actually how legit marketers handle new domains/accounts in 2026, or is it basically snake oil with nice dashboards?

Has anyone here paid for this kind of thing and seen real long-term improvement, or did it do nothing / make things worse? What should I watch out for so I don’t get ripped off or accidentally break email provider rules?

Genuinely curious what others are doing. I've been running plain text cold emails for a while and results are decent but I feel like I'm leaving something on the table.

Tried adding videos but nobody watches them. Someone mentioned interactive demos where the prospect clicks through your product instead of watching a video. Sounds interesting but not sure if it's worth the effort for prospecting emails.