15 Meetings From 1,021 Cold Emails in 14 Days [Exact System]
I’m going to walk you through every single step of a campaign that we recently ran for a client that generated 15 booked meetings from just 1,021 contacts. Now, if you think about that, the number of people needed to be contacted in order to book an actual meeting is crazy. I know meetings is not the end game—revenue is the end game—but meetings is a big part of it. So, let’s dive in.
The Results That Caught Everyone’s Attention
So you can see here in SmartLead, this campaign sent 1,892 emails. It’s a two-step sequence that contacted around 950 people. It got 72 total replies, which is a 7.05% reply rate—which is great. But what’s fascinating is the positive reply rate: 55.56% of all replies were positive.
The Strategy: Mining Your Database for Gold
So, what is this campaign? How did we do it? What is the targeting? I said to my client: “I bet you have a ton of leads sitting in your database going stale, doing nothing, who have engaged with your business at some point.” Maybe they had a meeting with you. Maybe they just filled out a lead form on a Facebook ad or something like that. But you have all these leads doing nothing. They know who you are. They’ve shown some sign of intent in the past, some varying levels.
The challenges with this campaign were that everybody is in all kinds of different niches or industries. So we can’t really just use the same or similar spin text copywriting to every single lead. We need to use AI to personalize every single message to make the messaging as relevant as possible for each lead based on what they do, what their company does, and what kinds of leads or customers they might want.
The Exact Copy That Generated 55% Positive Replies
This is for a PPC agency, and I’m going to show you the exact copywriting that we used. The subject line is personalized to every single lead based on that lead’s ideal clients. That’s what we’re mentioning in the subject line because it’s as appealing and relevant as possible.
Here’s the first email:
“Hey [First Name], It’s been a minute since we were last in touch. A while ago you reached out to us about bringing in more [ideal inquiry type plural] with [ICP].”
What is ideal inquiry type plural? Well, if you were reaching out to a law firm, this word might be “consultations” or “case evaluations.” If you were reaching out to some kind of software company, it might be “signups” or “demos.” And then ICP is obvious—ideal customer profile.
“As you may recall, we run Google Ads campaigns and Facebook ads campaigns for [company type plural]. As one of the top 3% of Google Premier Partner agencies, we’re confident you’ll see at least 30 [ideal inquiry type plural] per month and we’ll continue working at no charge until you do.”
This is the offer. This is the risk reversal. This is the reason why anyone would want to do business with this company.
And then the call to action in this first email—you could argue that it’s not even a call to action. It’s just checking current status. It’s very soft, deliberately. We already have some degree of a relationship with these leads, so we do not want to burn bridges right from this first email.
“Are you still looking to generate more [ideal inquiries plural] from [bio-flavored audience] this year or at the moment?”
What’s a bio-flavored audience? Well, we have ICP, which would be very generic like “affluent homeowners” or “people dealing with injury cases.” But bio-flavored audience is like a more descriptive form of your ICP that focuses on your ideal types of your ICP—the segment most likely to want to buy from you right now.
The Follow-Up That Closed the Deal
The follow-up email is basically a different angle. It starts with: “I’m not sure if you’re the right person for this. Is there someone else I should reach out to?”
Then we say: “Since [Company Name] does [USP], I thought you might be looking for more [ideal inquiry type] with [bio-flavored audience].” So it’s explaining why I’m reaching out to you right now and the reasoning behind it.
The third paragraph says: “If you’re still looking to bring in more [ideal inquiry type plural] from [ICP] this year, would you like me to put together a tailored customer acquisition plan or a custom marketing strategy for your business? On the house, of course. Yours to keep either way. No strings. Use it however you like.”
The offer this time is different. We’re not just checking in—we’re offering something of value, which in this case is a custom marketing plan. It’s a small amount of free work that can help to provide value, build trust and authority, and take them to the next step towards converting them into a paying customer.
The Clay Table Magic That Made It All Work
Now I’m going to show you the Clay table. The challenge with this was that we received a list of 3,079 leads and a lot of those leads had Gmail or Hotmail email addresses. You cannot just send cold emails at large scale to personal email addresses. So already right off the bat, the number of actual valid available email addresses was way less.
When we sent these people into the enrichments table, we ended up with only 1,021 email addresses out of the 3,079 that we received. Very small list size, and also they’re all over the place in terms of industries and company sizes. That’s why we needed heavy personalization to really boost the relevance.
Here’s the enrichment flow:
- Find missing domains
- Get domain merged
- Get company description merged
- Run them through an email waterfall to validate and find missing ones
- End up with our total final valid emails list
What we do is look at another person in the same table to see if we have multiple people at the same company. So let’s imagine there’s James Bond and Mary Poppins. If we’re sending an email to James Bond, we might say something like: “Hey, I’m not sure if this falls under you or Mary Poppins, but…” And then if we’re sending to Mary Poppins, it’d say: “I’m not sure if this falls under you or James Bond, but…”
The personalization is so extreme that people would hesitate and think, “Okay, this is a real person emailing me. This is not just some mass blasted email that’s going out to thousands of people.”
The AI Prompts That Generated Hyper-Relevant Copy
Next, we have “get company type plural”—so things like wealth management firms, stone suppliers, health service providers, legal consulting firms, and so on. Then we generate ICP: financial advisers, families and business owners, etc.
Then we generate what they do: “Plan finances and protect assets for long-term security.” This is just step one because what we want to do is firstly generate an output of what they do. Then we want to polish that.
We use a second step and turn it into something that’s going to be usable in an email, but also that’s going to be spam safe. You don’t want to use financial terms when you’re sending cold emails because they just get flagged by email service providers. So we try to minimize the use of financial language in any of these words.
As you can see, the output of what they do says “plan finances and protect assets for long-term security”—a lot of spam trigger words in there. This prompt then converted that into “manage internal planning and safeguard resources.” It’s a bit unclear, but it does a good job of bypassing ESP spam flags.
Next, we have USP of what they do: “Select and install stone materials, help designers create stunning spaces with custom stonework.” So this one is looking at what they do in terms of their USP—what do you do differently to all of your competitors that is better for your ideal customers?
Bio-flavored audience examples: “tech-savvy travelers seeking hassle-free journeys,” “designers seeking unique material options.” This is your audience, your ICP, but the segment of that ICP that is ready to buy right now. Because if you’re a recipient of this email and you see that, it’s going to be a lot more appealing if I’m saying, “Are you interested in having more meetings with these kinds of your ICP right now?”
Subject Lines That Get Opens
Subject lines are just relevance: stone selection, tax planning, freight coordination, project management. These are relevant subject lines that are going to get the attention of the reader and make them open the email.
Then we have the ideal inquiry type plural—for example, consultations, projects—and then we have company name normalized and first name normalized.
The Bottom Line
And that is how we were able to get 40 out of 72 positive replies so far from a list of just 1,021 contacts. The key takeaways here are:
- Mine your existing database for leads that have gone cold
- Use AI-powered personalization at scale with tools like Clay
- Avoid spam triggers by rewriting AI outputs to be ESP-safe
- Soft CTAs work better for re-engagement campaigns
- Offer real value in your follow-ups (like a free custom plan)
If you’re sitting on a database of cold leads right now, you’re sitting on a goldmine. You just need the right system to extract the value. And with tools like Clay and SmartLead, you can automate the entire process while maintaining that crucial personal touch that gets replies.
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