I fed Claude a bunch of your YouTube transcripts and docs to build a knowledge base guiding my cold email agency. I've sent about 3K emails across 3-4 niches in 3 weeks, no sales calls yet. My sequence opens with 'Hi [first name], quick question.' Do you have a consistent way to get in front of new leads each month, or is this mostly referrals? Why isn't this working?
First: 'quick question' as an opener is a pet peeve — if it were really quick, you wouldn't need to say so; saying it just slows down the reader. The bigger issue is you haven't given the reader any reason to answer yet — you're a total stranger extracting information and time from them with no value offered up front. If instead you lead with something like '10 years in enterprise sales, built outbound systems that put qualified calls in your account every month,' that's at least somewhat valuable and establishes you're not just a random stranger — though it's still not especially compelling on its own, and the ordering of these elements matters. Bottom line: when a campaign isn't working, it's a copy problem roughly 50-60% of the time.
I paused the campaign after getting a huge influx of positive replies – people were eager to hop on calls, which wasn’t realistic for me to handle. I had to pump the brakes in certain regions to keep growth sustainable. Here are the final stats: I ended up with 26 replies. When I launched the campaign I was opening at about 2‑2.5 % and have now scaled that up to roughly 4‑4.2 % after some split‑testing. I even recorded a video showing the iterations and published it, which helped a lot of people make money with cold email, confirming I was on the right track. I plan to follow up with deeper dives into the rest of the sales process, but it’s tough to justify the time right now because each sales call takes a lot of effort – I need participants who are comfortable having their calls published, and there’s a liability factor now. Producing one of those deep‑dive videos costs me about 10‑15 hours versus the 30‑45 minute videos I make now. I still think doing cornerstone content like this about once every 10‑15 videos is strategic, so I’ll keep it in the pipeline when the timing feels right.
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.
I recommend watching my video 'Watch Me Start and Sell a Service in 10 Hours'—it shows exactly how to do a cold‑email campaign for an automation agency. By the end I had eight to eleven interested leads, and it took about an hour and a half to put together. That’s the highest‑value advice I can give right now. (I note that my daily‑video titles often don’t match the content, but I’ll still give you a heart for pointing that out.) I don’t have much time, so I tend to use click‑baity titles based on the questions I’ve answered. This particular video was also a test of a title format we’re considering for another video. Thanks for the feedback.
You should start testing now instead of waiting for 1500 emails. Don't put a Loom video in your first outreach when going mass market—it hurts deliverability and offers little value unless the recipient already opted in. There are two main approaches. Hyper‑custom: spend 3‑5 minutes researching each prospect, craft a highly personal email, and record a short opportunity‑style Loom video that gives value first (e.g.,