Cold email that brought in a software company's best customers.

The challenge

The client's product is built for small companies, so large ones had to be kept out of every list. Many of the right buyers were missing from sales databases or listed with no decision maker attached.

What we built

• A company-level fit check. Every company was screened for industry and size before any contact was searched for, so the campaigns only reached businesses the product was built for.
• Owner and operator contacts. We found the owner or operations lead at each company and verified every email.
• A full-history dedupe. Anyone already contacted, or already in the client's CRM as a customer or open deal, was removed before sending.

Testing the offer

Over several months we tested very different offers against each other, from a direct pitch to a free-access offer, each at meaningful volume.

Approach	Emails sent	Interested rate
Winning approach	30,000+	0.60%
All other approaches combined	7,000+	0.15%

The winner outperformed everything else by four times, at a volume large enough to be conclusive, and became the standard for the account.

Measuring what happened after signup

Matching our campaigns to product usage showed that the customers we brought in became some of the client's strongest users, ahead of every other acquisition channel.

Customers from	Adopted the product	Brought on a team
Our campaigns	22%	28%
All other channels	9%	10%

Results

• Customers from cold email adopted the product at 2.4 times the rate of every other channel.
• They were 2.8 times as likely to bring teammates onto the product.
• One tested approach became the standard, with four times the response of the alternatives.