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.

cold emailbounceverification

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

I saw you stopped using Apify to scrape Apollo leads and now suggest LinkedIn with the posted-in-last-90-days filter, but you don't get emails that way. What's a similar cost-effective alternative to scrape high-quality, latest leads like Apollo or Apify scrapers? What is a good new scraping stack?

Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator as your primary data source. Set the filter 'posted in last 90 days' to true, then feed that into either Airscale or Vein or any one of the other intermediary scraping tools. What this will do is take your LinkedIn — which right now is just a list of names and profiles — and convert it into a list of email addresses. You can expect to get somewhere between 30% and 60% of the profiles as email addresses, and they'll have a reasonably low bounce rate assuming you do things right. You can then verify them using something like Million Verifier — there are a variety of different ones and I'm not going to talk too much about that because they change virtually every month. Mails.so is another okay one.

scrapinglinkedin sales navigatorapolloemail verification