Should I continue sending cold emails to this industry, test other industries, or increase volume to 5‑6K per month before deciding?
With a positive reply rate below 0.1% after 1,000 emails, your copy likely isn’t resonating. Instead of just raising volume, rewrite the email with completely new angles and test again. If the next batch yields over 0.1% positive replies, you’re on the right track and can keep iterating; otherwise, continue refining the messaging.
You're probably doing something wrong — if that's 200 new leads a day (1,000 total over 5 days) with literally zero replies, positive or negative, something's broken, and it's overwhelmingly likely to be the copy. Start by adding yourself to the sequence and sending it to yourself to catch anything obviously wrong (broken HTML, stripped line breaks, ugly formatting). Then dig into what's putting people off in the subject line, teaser, and body — I have a full copywriting walkthrough in my 'watch me start and sell an AI service' video, including a 4-step email framework (essentially: not spam, who are you, why should they care, and what happens next). Work through that, make changes, send the next thousand, and see if the reply rate moves before assuming patience alone will fix it.
The main issue is your copy, not the leads or audience. A 2% reply rate can be acceptable for high‑ticket, enterprise‑focused campaigns, but you need to look at the positive reply rate. If your positive reply rate is low (e.g., 5%), then at 10,000 emails a day you’d get only about 10 positive replies, which translates to just a few sales calls. Instead of simply increasing volume, you should fix your copy: test and refine it, ensure it matches the industry and audience, and run at least 1,500 emails before judging performance. Remember that copy is never as solid as it can be; iterate, bend the rules, and see what sticks.
Your cold email is performing if your positive reply rate is around 0.5–1%; if it’s in that range, just scale it up—you’re sitting on a gold mine. If it’s lower, the issue is likely copy‑to‑audience mismatch or poor copy quality. Improve by avoiding answering the question in the subject line or first 10 words (bury the lead so recipients must click), steer clear of generic, sweeping claims, and instead personalize the message by showing you’ve researched the recipient’s specific problem. Also check your lead source—outdated or recycled lead lists will hurt performance and need refreshing.
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.