I recently started sending cold emails using leads from an Apify/Apollo scraper, and my Instantly campaigns keep stopping because bounce rates are too high. Is this an issue you run into, and how can I keep my lead list legit — preferably for free?

There are a couple of free email-validation alternatives, but they're not great — Lumbrid is one, though it's overly aggressive and flags a lot of good emails as bad. Depending on which Apollo/Apify scraper you're using, I'd recommend two things: pull personal emails alongside business ones (I weave both in and actually get a higher reply rate from personal addresses, and it lifts overall deliverability too), and either run an email verifier or just turn off the feature that auto-pauses your campaign at a bounce-rate threshold — Instantly will warn you it hurts deliverability, but on the campaign from my “watch me start and sell an AI service in 10 hours” video, I raw-dogged the Apify/Apollo export with zero validation and I'm still sitting at a 4% reply rate with healthy mailboxes. So you can just raw-dog it like I did.

bounce rateemail validationapollo scraperdeliverability

Related answers

youtube ↗Cold Email

Do you recommend using an email verification tool like Million Verifier in cold email?

Using raw Apollo scraped emails hurts deliverability, so it’s risky. I still do it sometimes to get campaigns up quickly, but I mitigate risk by using a cheap done‑for‑you mailbox provider (~$3.50 per mailbox). I launch campaigns fast, verify they work on the first send, turn off bounce‑rate pausing, and only start verifying email lists after I’ve confirmed initial interest. My first approach is always run‑and‑gun.

email verificationapollodeliverabilitymailbox provider

youtube ↗Cold Email

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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youtube ↗Cold Email

Do you ever run out of cold leads on Apollo when there's nobody left to cold email, especially if you're tightly positioned, like lead generation in recruitment?

I have. Honestly, most people never get to that point, and beginners often hit perceived roadblocks that stop them from starting. I don’t worry about that; I just send them to all of the audience members. Note that Apollo’s data is a few years old, so the leads aren’t refreshed frequently. When I run out of an audience on Apollo, I recreate the same audience in LinkedIn Sales Navigator and use tools like Phantom Buster or Appify Scraper, which can give me three to four times more leads. You’ll need to deduplicate, but this works especially well for niches with high turnover or rapid growth, such as recruitment lead generation. I also use non‑traditional scraping methods—directories, databases, conference lists, etc.—to gather low‑hanging fruit, then move on to higher‑ROI sources. The key is to start scraping now rather than waiting for the perfect list.

apollolead generationrecruitmentscraping

youtube ↗Lead Generation

What do you recommend for selling cold email as a service with a $200 budget when leads from Apollo are saturated?

See cold email as a gradient, not a zero‑to‑one game. Saturation pushes performance down, but high LTV pulls it back up. With a $200 budget, start anyway—your early campaigns will be the worst they’ll ever be, giving you a baseline to iterate on. Get something live, talk to real people, and treat it as an editing problem. For SAS companies, have the client cover domains, mailboxes, and scrapers because the ROI is so high it’s irrational for them not to.

cold emailservice$200 budget