No case studies.
The work instead.
Most agency portfolios are unverifiable numbers next to logos you cannot call. We would rather show you how we actually build a campaign and let you judge the craft. Everything below is the real structure we use.
Four touches. Each one
a different angle.
Every touch has to earn its own reply. Resending the same ask in a new wrapper is how sequences get marked as spam. The example below targets a VP Engineering on behalf of a development agency — the shape stays the same whatever you sell.
Lead with the observed signal
No compliments, no "hope you're well". Open with the specific thing that made this account worth contacting today, then make one inference from it. If we cannot name a trigger, the account does not belong in the list.
Saw you have two backend engineers open with Rails in the spec, and the new billing flow shipped last month.
Usually when both are true, there's a migration sitting behind headcount that hasn't arrived yet.
We put senior Rails engineers on that gap for 8–12 weeks so it stops waiting on hiring.
Worth a look?
Answer the silent objection
The reason they did not reply is usually a thought they never typed. Touch two names it out loud and removes it, then lowers the ask.
That's the part we take, and we hand it back documented.
Fifteen minutes to see if it maps?
Change the angle, not the volume
New value, new framing, and an explicit permission to say no. Offering a concrete artifact instead of a call converts a percentage of people who were never going to book from a cold email.
If those roles are still open in six weeks, the migration slips a quarter — that's the pattern we keep seeing.
Want the two-page scope we'd start from? Happy to send it with no call attached.
Leave cleanly, leave a door
The last touch reliably outperforms touch two or three, because it costs the reader nothing to answer. It also keeps the relationship intact for the re-touch three months later.
If backend capacity becomes the constraint later, reply "later" and I'll come back in a quarter.
What we will not
send from your name.
Your domain and your reputation are attached to every one of these. The standard is simple: would a competent buyer find this worth 20 seconds?
Gets deleted
- "I hope this email finds you well" — three words in and you have said nothing
- A paragraph about your company before a word about theirs
- {{first_name}} personalisation that any tool could have generated
- Claims with no source: "we help companies 3x their pipeline"
- Four calendar links and a 500-word body
- The same ask repeated across five touches, louder each time
Gets a reply
- A first line that could only have been written to this account
- One inference that shows you understand their situation
- Under 90 words, one idea, one question
- A specific offer with a defined scope and timeframe
- An easy no — permission to decline raises reply rates
- Each touch adds something the last one did not say
Nothing sends until
all of this is true.
This is the checklist that separates a channel which lasts years from one that burns out in six weeks. It is also the part most agencies skip, because the client cannot see it.
Domains isolated
Cold volume goes out on separate registered domains. Your primary domain never carries a campaign, so your team's email stays unaffected whatever happens.
Authentication complete
SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured and verified on every sending domain, with a custom tracking domain so links do not resolve to a shared provider address.
Warm-up finished
Fourteen to twenty-one days of graduated volume per inbox before a single prospect is contacted. No exceptions, no matter how urgent the quarter is.
List verified twice
Two passes of verification with a bounce target under 2%. Catch-all and risky addresses are held back rather than sent to and hoped for.
After launch, placement and reputation are checked daily and sending volume is adjusted before a problem becomes visible in the reply rate.
Four numbers that
actually mean something.
Open rate is not on this list. Since Apple Mail Privacy Protection it has been unreliable enough that optimising against it makes campaigns worse.
Did it reach the inbox
Sent minus bounced, cross-checked against placement testing. If this moves, everything downstream is noise until it is fixed.
Did a human respond
All replies, positive and negative, split by segment and by touch. The negatives tell us more about targeting than the positives do.
Were they a real fit
Replies that meet the criteria you set at kickoff. A high reply rate with a low qualification rate means the list is wrong, not the copy.
Did it reach your calendar
Confirmed meetings, plus the show-up rate. This is the number the engagement is judged on, and it is the one we open the weekly review with.
Want this run against
your market?
Book a call and we will sketch the account profile, the trigger signals worth targeting, and the first sequence angles — on the call, for free, whether or not you hire us.