Case studyB2B services — named under NDA

A 14.7% reply rate from cold email — by contacting 95 people instead of 5,000

Confidential client

A fully managed outbound engine built on a deliberately small, tightly-qualified list. In its first month of sending it returned a 29.47% open rate and a 14.74% reply rate — roughly one answer for every seven people contacted — and produced a qualified opportunity from 95 contacts.

Reply rate
14.74%
Open rate
29.47%
Emails sent
315
Opportunities
1 qualified

The challenge

Cold outbound usually fails in one of two ways: the list is enormous and generic, so replies come in at one or two percent and the domain burns; or the team never gets past the setup — domains, warmed mailboxes, deliverability — and the channel quietly never launches. This client needed the channel to work as a source of real conversations, not as a volume exercise.

What we did

We built and ran the engine end to end: dedicated sending domains, warmed mailboxes and authentication kept separate from the primary domain, and a verified list built to a tight ICP rather than bought in bulk. Copy was written to earn a reply rather than a click — no tracked links or attachments in the early touches, personalised per account rather than per merge field. Sending opened on 12 August 2026 and replies were triaged and worked into booked calls, with what the replies said feeding back into targeting and copy.

The results

315 emails across a multi-step sequence reached roughly 95 people: 28 opened, 14 replied, and one became a qualified opportunity. A 14.74% reply rate sits well above the 1–5% typical of cold outbound, and it came from precision rather than volume — the next lever is converting replies into booked calls, not adding contacts.

What we delivered
B2B outboundGTM engineCopywritingDeliverability management
Tools & stack
ClearScaler GTM Engine

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