Should I continue sending cold emails to this industry, test other industries, or increase volume to 5‑6K per month before deciding?

#195 · The Future of AI Chatbots After 2025

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.

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Xander says he's using cold email with dental clinics and creative agencies, nine inboxes at 270 emails per day, with a 2% reply rate and little to no positive reply. He's been copywriting for 1.5 years, feels his copy is solid, offers guarantee value and free leads, but isn't seeing results. Should he increase to 50 inboxes and 500 emails per day, or try something else?

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.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

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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youtube ↗Cold Email

I sent 204 cold emails with a 32% open rate and zero replies using a personal Gmail account. What should I do to improve replies?

Start with a custom Loom video and send a limited number, like 25, even though that takes more effort. The fact that you sent 204 emails, got a 32% open rate but no replies, suggests there’s something wrong with your copy that’s turning people off. I’d begin with a templated cold email. Remember that 204 sends with zero replies is a reply rate of less than 0.5%, which isn’t terrible but far below the 2‑3% you should aim for. I recommend the same approach I suggested to Jamal: improve your copy and use a proven template.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

If my cold email deliverability drops and accounts are placed on warm-up, should I wait for them to recover or start sending small volumes from a new email account immediately?

First, don't overreact to a single day of zero replies when sending at a small scale like 100 to 150 net-new leads per day. That is well within normal statistical noise—one day could be 0% and the next could be 6%. However, if your deliverability score has genuinely tanked below 80% on platforms like Instantly or SmartLead, warm-up usually will not fix it. The best move is to replace those accounts with fresh ones. To prevent getting stuck, you should always maintain a buffer of extra mailboxes on continuous warm-up—roughly 20% above your active sending capacity. Treat this extra 1.2x cost as an insurance policy so you never have to pause sending entirely while paying for software, domains, and leads.

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