I Generated 154 Cold Email Positive Replies in One Month (Full Breakdown)
Over the last month, I generated 154 positive replies for my own business through cold email outreach. This doesn’t include all the campaigns we’re running for clients—this is just what I’m doing for myself. And I’m going to break down the exact targeting, messaging, and offer that I used to get these results.
What I’m going to focus on here are the five top campaigns that drove these results. This is basically one massive campaign with five different iterations as we expanded the list, and I’m going to walk you through each one.
Targeting by Growth Stage, Not Industry
Here’s the key insight: Instead of saying “Let’s target people in this specific industry,” we’re looking at people in terms of the growth stage they’re at right now and the implied pain points they’re suffering from as a result of being at that growth stage.
These people are in all kinds of industries—mostly consulting companies, marketing agencies, or SaaS companies. But the growth stage is the most important thing.
Campaign #1: First-Time Founders with Sales Backgrounds
If we look at the first campaign, it targeted first-time founders with sales backgrounds in the US, at companies with 1 to 25 people, founded in 2022 or later.
Why this specific targeting? Well, if you’re a first-time founder, it’s all new to you. You’re struggling, you’re swamped, you’re time-poor. Everything is on the line, and you just need to make this damn thing work. If you have a sales background, you’re much more likely to be responsive to cold outreach.
How was I able to build this list? Thanks to AI Arc, which is the lead database I use right now. In the job role section of the people search, you can enter current job titles like CEO, founder, managing director, managing partner, business owner, etc.
But to find first-time founders, we need people who’ve never had titles like CEO or founder before. So we go to previous job, select exclude, and exclude CEO, founder, and all those titles. Now we have people where it’s their first time being a founder.
To take it one step further and reach people with a sales background, in the previous job section under include, I put sales, business development, account manager, account executive, territory—you get the idea. Within 10 seconds, I built a list of first-time founders with a sales background. Incredibly easy.
You can dial this in further by looking at things like founded year. I put 2022 as the minimum, and you might also want to say maximum 2025, because if they founded their business this year, they’re at such an early stage that they probably don’t even have a website or customers yet.
Results: This campaign had a 3.5% total reply rate, and 23% of those were positive.
Campaign #2: Same Targeting, But in the UK
After exhausting the US list, I thought, how could I expand this? We did the same thing but for the UK. I’m from the UK, and I found this really interesting.
In the US, we had a 3.5% total reply rate. That almost doubled to a 6.4% total reply rate in the UK. But the positive replies went from 23% down to 13.4%.
In other words, Brits compared to Americans like telling you no thank you. Less Brits are likely to say “Yes please, I’m interested, send me the thing.”
My theory is that people in the US are receiving way more cold email than people outside the US, but the UK is probably a close second. I think Brits are just way more conservative and just say “go away, I’m not interested in your outreach.” Still got some positive replies from it though.
Campaign #3: First-Time Founders with Any Background (US)
I needed to build the list further, so I thought: what about first-time founders who don’t come from a sales background, but just have any background?
This time we got a 1.92% reply rate with 19% positive. What’s interesting here is that compared to the sales background US people, we went from 3.5% total reply rate to 1.92%—that almost halved.
This list isn’t from a sales or BD background, and they are therefore about half as responsive to outreach compared to the sales background people. But the overall positive reply rate is similar—it went from 23% to 19%.
Campaign #4: First-Time Founders with Any Background (UK)
I expanded that to the UK. The UK got more than double the total replies and about less than half of the positive replies. Again, more evidence that Brits do not respond well to outreach.
Campaign #5: Repeat Founders with Sales Backgrounds (US)
The fifth iteration targeted founders with sales backgrounds who are not first-time founders. They’re in the US, at companies with 1 to 25 people, founded 2022 or later.
In AI Arc, this time we have current job: CEO, founder, and those titles. Previous job: sales, business development, and so on. But this time, we exclude those CEO/founder keywords for previous job titles, and instead include them.
So now we know they are a CEO or founder, they were a CEO or founder in a previous job, and at some point in the past, they had the word sales or BD in their title.
That’s how you can quickly and easily create lists of people at companies with implied pain points.
The Email Copy That Generated 154 Positive Replies
Now let me show you the copywriting, messaging, and offer that I used to get all of these positive replies.
The First Email (Sales Background Founders)
Here’s what the email looked like:
“Hi Alex, as a first-time founder with a sales background, you know how to sell, but you might not have time to build the system that feeds you leads.
I built a workflow that builds entire campaigns for you.
You tell it who to target, it finds and qualifies leads, checks for signals, personalizes the copy, and loads everything into your sending tool.
I put together a video walking through how it works. Want me to send it over?”
Let me break down what’s happening here. First, there is zero AI-generated personalization in this entire email. But the opener says “As a first-time founder with a sales background, you know how to sell.”
Even though I’m sending this from one person to thousands of people, all of them are founders with a sales background. So the messaging looks very much like a one-to-one message. It looks like I’ve literally researched his profile on LinkedIn, even though I didn’t.
I’m complimenting him and acknowledging that he knows how to sell, because that’s a nice thing to say about somebody, rather than coming in as a complete stranger and pointing out “Hey, I noticed that you’re doing it all wrong.”
We’re leading with acknowledgement, observation, and compliment. But then we quickly transition in the same paragraph to the pain point: “But you might not have time to build the system that feeds you leads.”
We’re not saying “You might not know how to build it.” We’re saying “You might not have time.” We’re focusing on that empathetic approach of understanding that they’re a first-time founder, extremely busy, and probably don’t have time to build a fancy lead gen system.
Then we transition to the offer: “I built a workflow that builds entire campaigns for you.”
This is written in layman’s terms and paints a picture in their mind of all this stuff happening autonomously, without saying “I built this AI-driven automation engine,” because I found that using words like AI and automation can get your email flagged and hurt your deliverability.
The call-to-action is very soft and low-friction: “I put together a video walking through how it works. Want me to send it over?”
I’m not asking for time on a phone call or Google Meet. I’m not asking for a credit card number. I’m literally just offering a low-friction thing—a video they can digest in a couple of minutes.
Being able to dial in the targeting to such a finite degree with AI Arc allows you to create messaging without using AI personalization that really comes across as a one-to-one message, not a one-to-many message.
Adapting the Message for Different Audiences
By iterating and having a separate campaign for each list exported from AI Arc, I was able to tweak the messaging. For first-time founders without a sales background, the opener changed to:
“Hey Kayley, when you’re building a new company, one of the hardest things is keeping a steady pipeline of leads coming in.”
This time we’re not mentioning first-time founder or sales background. We’re saying “when you’re building a new company”—acknowledging her current situation—then getting straight to the pain point. The rest of the message is exactly the same.
The Follow-Up Strategy
I typically do a two-step sequence, because by the time people are getting a third or fourth email from you and they haven’t responded, the chance they’re going to mark you as spam goes up.
The biggest mistake I see people doing with follow-up emails is saying “Hey, just wondered if you saw my message the other day” or “Just wondered if this is of interest to you.”
If they didn’t reply to your first email, the chance they’re going to reply to your second email that just says “Did you see that first one?” is very, very low. You’re wasting an opportunity.
Here’s what I do instead. I pique their curiosity by opening with:
“Greg, wanted to share another workflow.
It monitors LinkedIn posts from your competitors and finds people who engage with them.
It checks if they fit your ICP, validates their email address, personalizes the messaging, and loads them into your sequencer.
It’s truly evergreen—once it’s live, it keeps going.
Is this worth a look?”
I’m saying “I have something else for you. If that last thing didn’t interest you, what about this?” I’m painting a picture of an automation that feeds them leads without them having to do anything, but avoiding words like automation and AI. Instead, I’m describing the process and saying this runs indefinitely.
The CTA is very soft: “Is this worth a look?” I’m just asking if they’re interested.
Managing Multiple Offers with Sub-Sequences
Since email one has one offer (one video) and email two has a different video, I have two separate sub-sequences in SmartLead.
Every time I get a notification saying someone is interested, I go into SmartLead and retag them—either “email one subsequence” or “email two subsequence.” Based on the tag, they get added to the relevant campaign.
Each subsequence delivers a different video, then has a couple of follow-up emails that pitch times and give them a link to my calendar (I use Tella for the videos) so they can book a time on their own if the suggested times didn’t work.
Final Thoughts
That’s basically it in a nutshell. This is how I was able to generate 154 positive replies over the last month using highly targeted campaigns based on growth stage, empathetic messaging that speaks to implied pain points, and low-friction offers.
The key takeaways are:
- Target by growth stage and implied pain points, not just industry
- Use precise targeting tools like AI Arc to build hyper-relevant lists
- Write emails that feel one-to-one, even when sending to thousands
- Lead with acknowledgement and empathy, not criticism
- Avoid words like “AI” and “automation” that can hurt deliverability
- Use low-friction CTAs like offering a video instead of asking for a call
- Make your follow-ups add new value, don’t just bump the thread
- Test different segments (US vs UK, sales background vs any background) and track what works
If you want to replicate these results for your own business, the tools I recommend are AI Arc for building targeted lists, and SmartLead for managing your campaigns and deliverability.
Want help automating your lead generation? Book a call