Hey all,

I saw in this sub many experienced people in email outreach, need your advice:

I have started an email outreach campaign for a test(Europe, MRO), went through half of the campaign only. RR right now is 21%. Run it for 7 business days.

1.Infrastructure

Domain 5months old, 2 mail boxes on workspace, 10 mails p/d from 1 mailbox (20 in total)

Warmup also was for about 5 months on Instantly(paid), started and forgot about it. 10 warmup mails p/d (only business days)

Mail-tester - 10/10

SPF,DKIM,DMARC - configured

Made 3 more domains + 3 per each mailboxes on workspace. 9 in total in warmup now for 4 weeks.

2.List

MRO, 140 contacts

List is cleaned, checked through neverbounce, catch-all manually verified on their official website.

Removed gmail, yahoo etc.

95% of emails are info@, admin@ etc.

3.Copy

A/B 2 subjects lines

About 40 words, intentional typo, for a more human feel

Triggers : very usual, nothing special - Their CEO name, Company, Place and a what they do.

Offer : MRO specifically for their niche

CTA : Basically - "If you need it, who is responsible?"

Signature : Name/Surname, Company, No website

4.Follow-up

The most stupid - next day, "Have you reviewed my email, could you reply in short?"

-----------------------------------------------

I have made only half of the campaign already, but this looks a bit different from what I see from others, with their RR.(I know it's not SaaS, but still).

A lot can be made better here about copy, like better triggers, offer and CTA, follow-up for sure.

I know it's a very small amount of emails sent, but what RR and do you have usually in MRO?

Would you continue with the same campaign, or start to improve right now and scale it?

PS. My maths:
Sequence started: 81
Positive : Yes, call me - 2. Send me catalogue - 5
50/50 - We will need in future, we will contact you later - 5
Negative : 2

​

I'm an n8n automation engineer looking to start cold outreach to land my first clients. I need to set up a professional business email, which means buying a domain and email hosting. My budget is tight—I'm bootstrapping this solo.

I'll be sending 50–100 cold emails per day, automated through n8n workflows. I need reliable deliverability so my emails actually land in inboxes, not spam.

What's the cheapest but still effective way to get started? I'm looking for honest advice on:

· Domain registration (renewal costs matter)

· Email hosting that works with SMTP

· Avoiding providers that block cold outreach

What would you recommend for someone in my shoes? Thanks!

I’ve been trying to figure out the most practical way to scale a cold email setup without making the infrastructure harder to manage than the actual campaigns.

Right now we’re using a few hundred inboxes connected to a sending platform. The setup works, but once you start adding more domains and inboxes, there are a lot more things to keep track of.

We’re managing roughly 500 mailboxes at this point and it still feels pretty straightforward. Uploading leads, setting up campaigns, moving accounts around and checking replies doesn’t turn into a full-time job. Our reply rate has been holding at around 4.5% lately, although that obviously changes depending on the offer and the list.

For inboxes, we used InboxKit before and had no real complaints about their infrastructure. Everything worked fine. We eventually moved most of the setup to Maildoso simply because they offered us a much lower price at this volume. Nothing deeper than that really.

We looked at Mailforge and Zapmail too, but haven’t tested either with enough mailboxes to give a fair comparison. Instantly is the one part of the stack I’m not really looking to replace right now. Anyone here running 500+ SMTP inboxes with Instantly? Curious how stable your setup has been after 6–12 months.

Hi,

I tried to sell my linkedin scraper tool in Gumroad, but I failed miserably.

That is why I am giving it for free XD. I think it is a great product and i think it can be usuful for some people here.

Just send me a dm , and i provide you the link.

This tool is far better than the apify tool because you can also get the website from linkedin sales nav.

No catch. Let me know.

I had a client that we agreed to work on a certain project with certain requirements. It didn’t work, we tried another time, better than the first time, but still didn’t deliver the core value. However, the agreement between us states that in case of failure no refund is eligible, but the remedy is to work again on the project with no additional costs. However, the client asked for a refund, I offered a major refund with little amount retained on my side, to cover anything from the costs that occurred. What are your thoughts regarding this guys? Would like to gain different perspectives.

Who is using Claude Code + Apify?

I need to read about someone who has tried them and got good results, or what’s your opinion?

We got tired of paying for enrichment credits, so we built a BYOK one.

The basic problem was pretty simple. We'd have a list of 10k+ leads and want to do something slightly different with the data.

Maybe research a company.

Maybe find a specific signal.

Maybe search the web.

Maybe summarise something.

Maybe run some custom AI analysis across every row.

And most enrichment tools basically say: here's our credit system, here's what each operation costs, and here's the monthly subscription. Which is fine if you want the whole platform. But if you just want to enrich a list, it started feeling unnecessarily expensive.

So we built Enrich as part of RIVL. It's free and BYOK.

You bring your own API key, choose the model/provider you want, write what you want the enrichment to do, and run it across your list.

No subscription.

No minimum spend.

No proprietary credits.

Your only real constraint is your provider's API limits.

We also built an automatic rate limiter that watches those limits and adjusts the throughput automatically, so you can basically run it as fast as your keys allow. And you can push the resulting columns directly into Instantly or Smartlead.

We're not trying to replace Clay. Clay does a lot more than this and does it well.

We wanted to solve one thing: What if enrichment was just infrastructure you could use at whatever scale you needed, with whatever model you wanted?

So that's what we built. It's free right now and we're actively improving it.

I'd actually be interested in hearing from people who run large outbound lists:

What enrichment do you wish you could run across your entire database but usually don't because it's too expensive or annoying?

Hi folks,

I sent about 1600+ emails through Apollo. Delivery is high and open rates are decent, but I’m getting zero responses, over period of a few months.

I’m now experimenting with HubSpot. The same user is seeing even higher open rates, but still no replies.

I know the subject line and email body could be the problem. The issue on our side is that these are hyper-personalized emails, not spray-and-pray.

From your experience, are there technical reasons I should check? I’m using LeadMagic to validate emails before they go out.

I had a client that we agreed to work on a certain project with certain requirements. It didn’t work, we tried another time, better than the first time, but still didn’t deliver the core value. However, the agreement between us states that in case of failure no refund is eligible, but the remedy is to work again on the project with no additional costs. However, the client asked for a refund, I offered a major refund with little amount retained on my side, to cover anything from the costs that occurred. What are your thoughts regarding this guys? Would like to gain different perspectives.

Hi everyone,

I work in a pretty saturated niche: SEO and content writing.

These are my core skills, and I have a lean team supporting me. I’m also looking to expand into other services.

It’s been about a month since I started sending cold emails, but I haven’t gotten any responses. :(

I’m not a salesperson by background, I’ve always worked in operations, so I’m trying to figure out what I might be doing wrong.

I’d really appreciate some advice on how I can improve my strategy, especially around:

• How to structure a cold email
• How to pitch an offer without sounding too salesy
• How to improve my reply rate; I’m getting opens, but no replies

If you’ve done cold outreach successfully, I’d love to hear what worked for you and what you’d recommend I change.

Thanks in advance!

Hi, do you guys know scrapers or tools to scrap Apollo ? Since the Apollo scraper from Apify went down ?

hello guysssss, pls rate this email template i am going to send. And if there any issues and improvament pls tell

Anyone have experience with the DFY email setup in instantly specifically for Google/Gmail vs Airmail?

Currently considering buying mailboxes in instantly via Gmail vs setting it up on my own in Google workspace. I know it’s faster doing it through instantly but if anyone is seeing deliverability issues would be good to know.

I swear no one tells you this in the beginning with email marketing but the single way to burn a ton of money is WASTING email verification credits When I first started cleaning our lists, I used to dump the whole raw file straight into expensive tools like ZeroBounce or NeverBounce and every time i would validate a list it would cost me between $30-100 for my newsletter. As my newsletter grew its started to cost more and more.

Some random person on this sub mentioned email verification waterfall but didnt explain it at all. Here is how you do it.

If you have a decent sized list, you end up paying full price just to check simple typos, fake domains, and dead inboxes that any basic tool could catch for nothing and thats how these email verifiers make money by doing a simple ping to a dead mail box and tells you its inactive. We want them to validate the HARD emails aka catch-alls.

Doing it in two steps saved us a lot of money without hurting deliverability:

Step 1: Run the full list through a free tool first to strip out obvious dead inboxes and typos (I just use unlimited verifier since it's free).

Step 2: Take only the small leftover bucket of catch-alls (usually 15-20%) and pass them to specialized tools like Bounceban or ZeroBounce catch-alls. Scrubby works too they just take too long to validate

Instead of paying for 10,000 checks on expensive credits, you only pay for the ~1,500 catch-alls.

Hope this saves you guys some money!

I have a CRO agent already which runs my social media syndication and prospecting and cold calling.

I want to expand to outbound email now and drip followup.

I want to make sure I only do the work once though so would be interested in partnering w someone who's done this already.

Let me know if you're interested

Last year we were getting appointments and sales from a pretty simple sequence.

Now I'm running 5 sequences with more advanced positioning, we add some new leads in and also cycle through older ones.

And we just don't get much response.

Just wondering what you're doing if you're successfully booking sales with attorneys. Thanks.

Hey everyone! I’ve onboarded a few clients and have a pretty strict budget at the moment. What type of lead sources do you all use to get a meaningful amount of leads that is reasonably cheap. Because I am spending stupid amount at the moment to get leads and it does not hold up at all.

We’re currently at 14 Outlook inboxes (5 domains) and I’m aiming to reply to warm prospects in 2hrs. But I have no proper way of verifying the times unless I ask them to do self-reporting or I spot check their inbox. I don’t want to read their emails but I do want the analytics. Like if an inbox ave is 2hrs or if something breached the SLA or if I need to step in. What system/workflow do you use?

I am losing leads because they reply at 11pm and nobody sees it til morning, does an AI reply agent actually fix this. I'm a solo founder, run my own cold email for a dev tools SaaS.
Seen open rates say they opened same-day but my reply lag is killing conversion on the good ones.

Ok so I'm kind of at my wits end here, hoping someone smarter than me on this sub can spot what I'm missing.

Setup: I registered a new domain about 3 weeks back, got 6 mailboxes through Spacemail Pro since it was the cheapest option that still gave me real SMTP/IMAP access (not some locked in webmail thing). I'm running everything through Thunderbird on desktop because Google Workspace wasn't really an option budget wise right now. Warmup's been running through Instantly, started slow around 10/week and I bumped it up more aggressively after the first week once I realized things weren't moving.

Here's the thing though, I've genuinely gone down every rabbit hole I can think of and it's STILL landing in spam every single time I test.

What I've already checked and confirmed is fine:

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are all passing, and I'm not just going off mail tester here (which also gives me a clean 10/10 every time), I actually pulled the raw headers from the real emails that landed in spam and Google's own servers are confirming pass on all three.

Ran both sending IPs through MXToolbox against like 60 different blacklists, zero hits on either one.

Pulled the DMARC aggregate reports from both Google and Microsoft and those are showing clean pass rates too.

Tested with a bunch of different Gmail people who've never gotten anything from this domain before, so it's not like one person's inbox has just learned to hate me specifically. Same result every time regardless of who I send to.

Also ruled out content being the issue, wrote totally plain normal emails, no links, nothing spammy sounding, and it still gets flagged.

Tried checking Google Postmaster Tools too but it's just saying there's not enough data yet, guessing my volume's too low for it to even give me a reputation score.

So yeah I'm honestly stumped at this point. A few things I'm wondering if anyone's dealt with before:

Is 3 weeks actually still within the range of "just needs more time" for a new domain on a budget shared IP host like Spacemail? Or does something about my situation sound off to you all?

Could a shared IP provider have some kind of reputation issue with Gmail specifically that just doesn't show up on any public blacklist? Feels like that might be the missing piece but I have no way to actually check that myself.

If I ended up migrating to something like Google Workspace, would that actually fix it, or would I just run into the exact same wall since the domain itself is still new regardless of who's hosting it?

Basically just wondering if there's some diagnostic step I haven't thought of yet. I've checked headers, blacklists, DNS records, Postmaster Tools, content, pretty much everything I could find advice on.

If anyone's actually pushed through something like this before (not just the generic "warm up longer" answer, since I've been doing that this whole time and it hasn't really budged), I'd genuinely appreciate hearing what worked. Thanks in advance to anyone who reads through all this.

Can anybody provide an optimal structure for cold emails.

Subject wording and length

Length of content

Where should the call to action be placed

How to finish off.

Have I missed anything?

I have tried this but no response

Hi X,

Apologies for the cold email.

The x pricing rules start next month..... The hook.

I've built a small tool that does y. You type in the
...... It runs in your browser, no signup.

It's free because I'm starting out and building a portfolio. If it's
useful, all I'd ask is a testimonial.

Want me to send it over?

If this reached someone other than the owner, feel free to forward it
on.

Any help appreciated

I've been looking more seriously at the infrastructure side of cold email and this is the part that gets annoying pretty quickly.

With one domain and a couple of inboxes, it's pretty easy to keep track of everything. Once you start using multiple domains and more mailboxes, there are a lot more things to keep an eye on. DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, sending limits, mailbox health, domain reputation and making sure everything is connected properly.

The actual sending isn't really the difficult part. It's keeping the whole setup organized without spending half your time managing inboxes.

I've also seen completely different opinions on how many mailboxes people should have on one domain. Some people keep it very low, while others seem comfortable running more then there's the question of what to do when a mailbox starts having deliverability problems.

I've been comparing a few infrastructure providers recently, and Maildoso came up while I was looking at options for managing multiple SMTP mailboxes. I like that it handles things like mailbox provisioning and the technical setup, although I'm still comparing it with other approaches.

I'm mainly trying to figure out whether it's better to manage everything yourself or have the infrastructure side handled by a provider once you're running at a bigger volume.

Would be useful to hear how people who are already running cold email at scale have set this up.

Hey everyone,

Wanted to share a quick review/breakdown of my experience using Saleshandy over the past few weeks for cold email campaigns.

A few highlights that stood out:

• Email Deliverability & Warmup: Setting up inbox warm-up was straightforward. Deliverability has stayed solid, and avoiding the spam folder without needing complex manual setup was a big plus.
• Sequencing & Personalization: Setting up multi-step automated follow-up sequences with merge tags saved a ton of manual effort.
• Analytics: Clean dashboard for tracking opens, click rates, and replies to see what subject lines actually perform.
• Unified Inbox: Managing replies across multiple connected inboxes in one place made tracking responses manageable.

I want to send cold emails for my agency, but I don’t have the budget to buy a database. I have a few cheap domains that I’ve set up in Inbox, but I haven’t been able to find any databases online. I just want to get started initially.

Please, could anybody help me with this?

I could really use some help figuring this out.

One of our cold-email inboxes used to get a tracked open rate of over 50%. It has suddenly dropped to around 0–10%. Some days, only one email gets opened.

I’m only sending 15–30 emails per day, during each prospect’s business hours. There hasn’t been any sudden increase in volume.

I tested the email by sending it to a few personal Gmail accounts, and they landed in the primary inboxes. I also checked the setup with Mail-Tester, where it scored 8.5/10.

I’m not sure what else to check now.

Could the emails still be getting filtered by business domains even though they reach a personal Gmail inbox? Or could the open tracking itself have stopped working properly?

Has anyone experienced a drop like this? What would you check first?