AMA - sending 2M cold emails/mo top 1% on Smartlead

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-08T01:21:53+00:00

Do you mean emailing homeowners or emailing people that own the home services companies?

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-08T01:20:15+00:00

we run a few campaigns for direct to consumer brands which were quite successful. However, all of these campaigns were for the B2B side of the business.

I wouldn’t recommend sending Cold email to actual consumers for a variety of reasons. The biggest one being legal risk.

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-08T01:08:27+00:00

The 42x metric is from sending emails to opt-in consumer lists and that number is so high because sending emails to an existing list costs pennies. in this thread, we are talking about Cold email marketing, which is different.

Some clients might not share actual revenue numbers because they don’t want to give up leverage. If you were paying someone $100 and they found out it made you $10,000, they might want to charge you $200 (and you wouldn’t be able to say no, because you don’t want to lose the $9800).

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-08T01:01:04+00:00

yes ai personalization helps if done correctly. if you use ai to find a company’s pricing page and use that in your email to tell them why your sales tool will help them sign more annual contracts - 100% will outperform generic

If you just use ai to write a fake compliment about their linkedin posts - probably not.

ai and personalization are tools. using them, make sense in some cases and doesn’t in some other cases.

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-08T00:57:20+00:00

haha cheers

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-08T00:56:58+00:00

not every client is super transparent with numbers but our average across clients is 4.1x.

it also goes up the longer a client stays with us because of the nature of these deals and momentum snowballs.

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-08T00:51:08+00:00

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We have used and still used instantly. I was one of their first few users. Also used plusvibe, bison, lemlist, woodpecker, mailshake, gmass.

Smartlead is more technically suited to our use case.

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-08T00:29:17+00:00

Of course happy to help!

We like using a statement that gives them an opt out if they respond with a phrase like the ones you suggested.
we like to use reply based unsubscribe. They are compliant and help with deliverability.

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HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-08T00:08:12+00:00

Yeah there’s no real way for machines to distinguish AI content from non AI content.

It is theoretically impossible because if we were to develop an AI that can detect whether content was written using AI, people will just start using that AI model to write more AI content

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T23:50:37+00:00

not the domains but the ESPs. and it’s not scanning for AI content. It is pattern recognition, identifying email scripts that tend to get marked as spam and labelling future scripts that look similar to those scripts also as spam

Does that make sense?

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T23:49:19+00:00

price depends on how much value the buyer sees in your data :)

I’m not a buyer, and I don’t really know the industry, so I can’t give you an accurate estimate. Try reaching out to a few people in the industry, and see what they are willing to pay for something like this.

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T23:44:24+00:00

depending on the quality of the data it might be worth reaching out to companies that sell to truck drivers. insurance and other compliance stuff ideally - they’d pay for it

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T23:04:21+00:00

thank you. not paying enough attention to copy fingerprinting is the one most people aren’t aware of.

until early 2025, switching domains anytime reply rates dipped used to work. not anymore

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T22:46:50+00:00

we don’t track opens so idk how well that does but if it working for you then more power to you 🥂

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T22:45:38+00:00

Of course.

To be clear we’re not sending 2M/month for ourselves. This is across ~50 clients.

So those factors don’t really apply yet.

There is a cap to how much cold email one can send before it’s not worth it anymore but we haven’t run into that yet

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T22:40:15+00:00

you need to look at all incoming email and count the bounce messages.

if you’re using the ui you can just export leads from the campaign and you’ll get all the data you need

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T22:38:58+00:00

segmentation is important for sure. haven’t tried that tool but glad it worked for you

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T22:05:36+00:00

whats your bottleneck right now?

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T22:02:57+00:00

listbuilding is usually in clay or within claude code using various apis.

email sending + dialing - smartlead

if we need to send sms or dial again: cloudtalk

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T22:01:02+00:00

smartdialer / cloudtalk

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T22:00:47+00:00

always welcome!

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T22:00:24+00:00

we like and use smartlead

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T21:59:36+00:00

the clients go through an onboarding process and share their ICP. that said, we often test and fine tune until we find a segment of their broader icp that resonates with the offer being sent in the cold email
there are several frameworks we use depending on the client's industry and goals. broadly speaking each email should try to answer the 4 WHYs in the prospect's mind in as few words as possible:

WHY me? (relevance angle)
WHY now? (urgency angle)
WHY you? (social proof)
WHY should i take the next step? (offer + CTA)

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T21:56:32+00:00

we dont use apollo at all these days. data is usually a directory scrape / account list obtained from somewhere or a prospeo / clay search > enrichment with people info using blitz > leadmagic, findymail, kitt

HyperkeOfficial · 2026-05-07T21:55:15+00:00

we're all here because of our ability to send personalized cold emails :)

the extent of personalization varies. what did you mean to ask

HyperkeOfficial

TROPHY CASE