Last week I was digging around in the Instantly Facebook Group (of 49,000 members) and saw a suspicious post of someone claiming to get 19-26%+ reply rates… 👀

Was this legit? I had to find out for myself…

After contacting the cold emailer who made the post, I scheduled an interview to dive into his cold email strategy.

Here’s what I asked him:

1. What are you using cold email for? 💼

These campaigns are for a client who runs an e-commerce marketing agency.
We’re targeting e-commerce brands, specifically smaller ones with annual revenues between $500k and $10 million.

2. What do you do to ensure deliverability? 📩

We don’t use unsub links. Instead, we include a simple line asking them to let us know if they want to opt out.
Open rate tracking hurts deliverability, so we focus on reply rates instead.
We do 3 weeks of warming up mailboxes with weekday activity.
For volume, we start with 3 contacts per day in the first week of Outreach & slowly go up to 10/day or 30 emails/day per address.

3. How do you use Clay with your leads? 🛠️

For Qualification: We put LinkedIn profile and website data into Clay and use ChatGPT to filter out unqualified leads.
This ensures prospects meet the client’s ICP.
For Personalization: We put in recent data, like a LinkedIn post or website, for a custom first-line.
We fit the offer to the prospect, like for an agency in roofing including roofing use cases.

4. How do you structure your email content? ✉️

We keep the email short, 50 to 80 words max.

1st line: Explain why we’re reaching out, with relevancy to the offer.

2nd line: Identify a problem or solution with a question.

3rd line: Clearly state the offer, showing the benefit of working with us.

4th line: Include a soft CTA, ideally offering free value.

5. How do you structure your email sequences? 🔄

We initially send just one or two emails to test offers and avoid burning prospects.
Email 1 and Email 2 often present different angles of the same offer.
We target different pain points in each.
Email 3 could be a bump or a meme.

We avoid long sequences (4-6 emails), as low reply rates hurt deliverability.

6. What subject lines and CTAs work best for you? 🖊️

We make our subject lines short and show we’ve done our research.
We often use case studies from their website or recent news about their company, as that works well.
With CTAs, we like to offer free value, like qualified leads, email scripts, or case study docs.
We avoid aggressive CTAs early on.