Was reading a report where they analysed 1.41M cold emails and it has some mindblwoing revelations that i wanted to share. so their dashboard showed a 1.38% reply rate. But when they actually went through the replies, 65% were out of offices and auto-replies. Real people replying was just 0.48%. The other thing was list size. Campaigns sent to 500-2,000 people got almost 3x the reply rate of campaigns sent to 25k+. Always assumed more volume meant more replies, but apparently not. Also, the typical campaign only got 0.42% real replies, so if your numbers look low, you're probably not as far behind as you think. Sharing it here in case anyone wants to go through it. https://www.revenueflow.com/benchmarks/cold-email-benchmark-report-2026

Most domains are not burned they are just landing in spam for a reason you can fix. 1. SPF, DKIM and DMARC. All three should pass. Check in MXToolbox. 2. Blacklists. A Spamhaus listing expires once the problem stops, and removal is free. Gmail stopped using SURBL in Sept 2025, and SURBL listings usually come from linking your main website in your emails. Stop linking it. 3. Volume. One inbox provider saw Google suspensions jump from 2% to 11% when inboxes went from 12 to 20 new emails a day. Stay at 10–15. 4. Bounces. Above 2% means a bad list, not bad infra. Verify before you send. 5. Tracking. Turn off open and click tracking, and keep links out of email 1. 6. Cheap "Workspace" inboxes from a reseller. Ask for Admin Console access. If they won't give it, they're probably EDU inboxes, and Google suspends those. If one of these was the problem: pause campaigns, fix it, give it 2–4 weeks, then test again. Only drop the domain if it doesn't come back, wasting money on new domains withouth fixing the core issues will result in more burned domains and stacked expenses.

For my youtube leads scrapping, claude works better to streamline and collect the info I want the lead sheet to include. And Apify is scrapping it. Have some issues though. Gonna sit and figure out the missing links here. If anyone has any idea other than claude please share