I started a cold email campaign 10 days ago; initially it was booming, but then replies dropped and I got a warning about excessive bounces. Should I pause the campaign? What could be causing the dips in replies?

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I started a cold email campaign 10 days ago; initially it was booming, but then replies dropped and I got a warning about excessive bounces. Should I pause the campaign? What could be causing the dips in replies?

The reason your campaign started strong then declined is that your deliverability decreased over time. When deliverability drops, fewer emails reach inboxes, more get marked as spam, which further hurts deliverability—a negative feedback loop. This usually happens because either your email copy is poor, causing recipients to mark you as spam, or you're sending to a low‑quality list. To fix it, improve your copy and clean your list. Many people use email validation tools like mails.so to check DNS records and get a deliverability score; you can set a cutoff (e.g., only send if >50% deliverable) to automatically remove bad addresses. This cuts out bounces and boosts deliverability and campaign health, though it adds cost (you pay for the validation service), takes extra time to set up, and reduces your lead pool—often to about 30% of the original list after validation. So you trade some volume for better quality and fewer bounces.

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How do you deal with a cold email campaign that has high bounce rates?

When you see high bounce rates, the first thing to do is verify your email list. Depending on how you generated the list, you can use third‑party verification tools such as MailerCheck, ZeroBounce, or similar services that give you a deliverability score. Set a minimum threshold—if a contact falls below it, don’t send to them. Proper verification can eliminate roughly 50 % of bounces. I have free credits through Maker School and other deals, so you don’t have to pay a lot. My typical process is to send a small test batch of 1‑2 k emails to identify which niches or copy combinations perform poorly, then verify the good ones and scale the campaign. This way you only pay for verified emails that are likely to convert.

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When should I stop a cold email campaign? What volume of sends and which KPIs indicate it's time to cut a campaign?

To decide when to cut a cold email campaign, look at the positive reply rate. It depends on the niche—higher‑ticket niches often have lower reply rates. A rule of thumb: don’t send more than about 1,000 emails per piece of copy before checking results. Aim for around a 1% positive reply rate; if you’re getting ~0.8% after 1,000 sends, that’s decent and can be improved to 1–1.5%. If most of your campaigns are performing poorly (e.g., five out of six at ~0.9% while one is at ~0.8%), drop the weak ones and create variants based on the better performer. There’s no perfect threshold, but this is how I evaluate campaigns.

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My email campaign was getting 1-2 leads and 2-3 rejections daily, then reply rates dropped dramatically overnight. What could cause this sudden decline?

The drop you’re seeing is likely due to something specific in your campaign rather than a general trend. It could be that you imported multiple audiences into the same CSV and one audience performed much better than the others. Once you exhausted the stronger audience, the overall reply rate would fall off a cliff. Another possibility is that the messaging you used became less effective because others started using the same approach. Also, double‑check your deliverability – make sure you’ve verified inbox placement with tools like Glock Apps. These are the first three things I’d check. If this is your first campaign, remember that even a modest 1‑2 leads per day is enough to be profitable and to iterate on your system.

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How many follow‑ups do you recommend in a cold email campaign, and does it change if I'm still testing an offer after finding product‑market fit?

I start with two emails in total: one main email and one follow‑up. The reason is to put yourself in the shoes of someone reading a crappy email. Think about how many times you’ve opened a pitch email, marked it as unread, or ignored it. If the email isn’t good, a follow‑up makes the recipient far more likely to mark it as spam—about 100× more likely after the first follow‑up and a thousand times after a second. The number one thing we’re trying to avoid in cold email is being marked as spam. So, before you know your copy is good, do not add more than one additional follow‑up, spaced about 48 hours apart. Once your copy is acceptable—say a 3 % reply rate or a 0.5–1 % positive reply rate—you can add more follow‑ups. Adding them will raise your total reply rate, though the proportion of positive replies may drop, the absolute number of positive replies will still increase.

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