If I see another LinkedIn post that starts with:
AI JUST KILLED COLD OUTBOUND.
I’m gonna lose my sh*t.
That said, one thing’s for sure:
If you’re sending emails one-by-one and not even trying to experiment with new tech, you’re stuck in the stone ages.
You might’ve seen earlier this week we launched our B2B Enablement Platform, which sales teams are using to train their reps off 30MPC curriculum.
We thought:
“What if we tried to run a huge personalized email campaign to get the word out?”
So I reached out to my friends at Clay and this Youtube video was the result.
Here’s my honest assessment of how things went and what I learned for the next one.
Prefer video? Watch the breakdown here.
(1) The money is in the filtering
I still personally think AI struggles with the “art” of writing phenomenal cold emails in most times.
That said, I don’t know what you’re doing if you’re not using AI for research / to drill down to your A tier accounts.
We took a list of 224,000 contacts and filtered out:
- All duplicates
- Sales leaders
- With 10+ reps in their org
- With 3+ reps who’d consumed 30MPC content
That would’ve taken multiple working weeks (that probably would’ve made someone quite) to do manually.
We did it in minutes with the Clay team who basically added a column for each of these filters (see photo above).
(2) That said, AI can write a solid first draft if you prompt it right
We built an AI prompt that included 4 things:
- Multiple 30MPC newsletters on cold email
- Everything about our product
- Examples of how to use personalization triggers
- 2-3 finished cold email examples
The email above is one example of how it “tied together” two separate personalization triggers:
- There were multiple reps on the same team
- And the leader themselves had downloaded our Cold Email Data Report.
And yeah! There are a few “AI-tells” in a few too many em-dashes and the ending question.
But honestly compared to a lot of feature-dumpy emails, it’s solid.
(especially if you plan to red pen edit it after)
(3) You can still bypass the spam filter if you’re smart on deliverability
We created 20+ email domains and followed the deliverability guidelines from this article.
TLDR:
- Buy a lot of domains
- Warm up emails for two weeks (20-40 emails per day)
- Send no more than 50 emails per domain once you’re ready
Our reply rate was actually 1.9% at the end of the campaign (1.1% at the time I recorded the video outro) with is well above the 1% benchmark.
(Note: Open rate tracking is very unreliable today due to tracking pixel blockers so we typically use reply rate to track cold email success even though I wish opens were still accurate!)
If you’re doing any high volume outreach… rotate your email domains.
There is nothing more demoralizing than a 0.01% reply rate.
(4) Start small then expand
I had the idea to reference people on the account who’d consumed 30MPC content, which is a very common groundswell motion.
Problem is: a lot of those people had moved onto the company since they originally signed up for the mailing list.
So 40% of our negative replies could’ve been completely avoided if we did a super small test batch (ie: 100) then expanded.
(And the remaining 10-15% could’ve been averted by us delaying sends till after the holiday season. I was just impatient and wanted to get it going.)
In the grand scheme of things, we reached out to only 1% of our audience.
But still, that ended up being a few thousand people for us.
My bet is we would’ve doubled our positive reply rate if we solved this one data integrity issue (by adding a column for “is current company? = yes”).
(5) Your first cold calls are never your perfect cold calls
Overall, if this was the 10th campaign we’d run, I’d be like wth we can do better.
The reality is this is the FIRST campaign I’ve personally run where we used large scale email personalization and filtering.
You can spend a million years designing the perfect campaign but the only thing that really tells you if it works is first contact with market.
You can’t wait 4 weeks to make your first cold call.
You have to make cold calls and the rejection informs your next cold calls.
So this was honestly a lot of fun and taught us a lot about how we could do more fun email campaigns in the future.
Check out the full video and lmk what you think:
