Are Apollo leads being overused/milked by everyone, causing poor results despite sending 3,000 emails?

#199 · How to Sell AI Systems In Lower Cost-Of-Living Countries

Are Apollo leads being overused/milked by everyone, causing poor results despite sending 3,000 emails?

It depends on where you're selling to; right now it's August, and many people in the EU are on vacation, so out-of-office replies are common. More broadly, Apollo leads are definitely being milked—many creators have promoted cold email, so more people are using the same leads, increasing message frequency and raising the bar for good copy. As a result, your results suffer. This is typical competitiveness. To insulate yourself, find leads from other sources instead of just Apollo, which is an old database that caches Sales Navigator leads. Go directly to Sales Navigator, or combine it with other lead-scraping avenues like vain.io, or scrape the web yourself using tools like an appy scraper for Google search results, then use a mailfinder to get emails and decision makers. There are many paths to a profitable email campaign; Apollo and Amplify are just the lowest-hanging fruit, but if they're insufficient, you need to go above and beyond.

apollo leadscold emaillead scraping

Related answers

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

How can I get more leads for the same niche (coaches) from Apollo after scraping 4,000 leads?

Well, you're likely being unnecessarily restrictive. You're talking about total addressable market—the total number of people you can access in a market. For example, if you search for real estate agents with filters like job title and location, you might get 16,080 results. Scraping the whole list gives you that many leads. To get more leads, you can adjust your filters: change the location (e.g., add Canada), or remove filters like employee count, which could increase the pool to 182,000 or more. If you've exhausted the niche using Apollo, you'll need to find other lead acquisition methods. A big tactic I used in successful campaigns was obtaining lists from conferences your target audience attends. You can ask conference organizers for attendee lists; often they'll share them if you imply you're part of the event. These lists are highly valuable because attendees are already credible, have the budget to travel and speak, and are there to network. Emailing them with a reference to the conference yields high open and reply rates. So, if you hit a TAM limit, you need to source leads another way—changing filters or using conference lists are quick and easy options.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

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

youtube ↗Lead Generation

How do I gather leads on Apollo for real estate, hiring, and digital marketing agencies?

To gather leads on Apollo for your target niches, start by building a list in Apollo (e.g., real estate agencies, hiring agencies, digital marketing agencies). Export that list’s URL and paste it into a scraper like Apify (or Ampify) to pull the data and extract email addresses—this is cheaper than scraping LinkedIn directly. If your initial list is too small (e.g., only 50 leads), broaden the filters (remove overly specific sectors) to increase volume. Export the results to CSV, then run them through a workflow that combines the emails with profile fields (such as headline, title) and uses AI to generate personalized one‑line icebreakers. Finally, feed those icebreakers and emails into a platform like Instantly to automate your outreach.

apollolead generationapifyinstantly