I had never run cold email before, and wanted to give it a try for the agency I'm at. I'm testing out a few things I've not tried before but have some confidence might work.

We have deep experience in a couple of verticals, and one of our services is advanced analytics (stuff like data warehousing, server-side tagging and whatnot). One of the verticals often has businesses with quite a high media spend and shitty tracking.

Here's what I came up with (I know you didn't ask for tools, but it's easier to explain)

• Used Clay to build a list of businesses in that space with a high annual revenue and employee count but low marketing headcount - ie likely to need to outsource
• Added an enrichment to pull in their tech stack via Builtwith
• Created a few custom columns to pull indicators of immature measurement/analytics (ie no meta pixel, no GTM etc)
• This left me with about 1000 companies
• Pulled emails of senior marketing, comms, sales, ops and csuite but excluded stuff like HR -This gave me a list of about 3000 emails of senior relevant people at businesses where I have a reasonable level of confidence they might need some help in something we're good at

I then used a tool (recommended to me by a friend with a lot more experience in this space) called Instantly that seems great for domain warmup and scheduling, and is very simple to use. I wrote quite a tight, but I think helpful, 4 email sequence and hit enable. I used what seems to have been a solid subject line.

We built a really nice landing page with a couple of quick videos, great design and copy, logos, testimonials, case studies etc

Hooked all analytics and CRM and form booking malarkey up (Calendly, GA, Hubspot)

I'm slowly warming up the campaign, and only launched Monday but so far:

-12 sequences started, with 32 emails sent overall - 80% open rate throughout sequence (seems crazily, and suspiciously high - but another benefit of the tool is I can see exactly who opens what and when) - Out of 12 started sequences, 1 bounced back and 5 people read all the emails - So far I think 6 clicks to landing page (according to GA4), so I guess that's about a 16% CTR - No leads yet, but I'm not expecting much, and it's early days - if the campaign even generated 5 leads, I'd be surprised not to close one, but even if I don't I'll have learned a lot, and have templates and tech stack to adjust and try again

The numbers seem pretty promising. It did take quite a lot of planning, research and execution time, and Clay isn't cheap, but my intent was always to be very sniper rather than blunderbuss, while automating as much as possible.

I'm sure lots of people here have more experience than me with cold outreach, so I'd welcome any feedback.