Cédric

The cold email I’ve been testing to local businesses doesn’t pitch anything. It offers one free thing: a personalised video for one of their quotes. And it’s been crushing. Here’s why it works. Every local business owner sends estimates that never get signed. A PDF, a price at the bottom, “let us know,” then nothing. So the email doesn’t say “we help businesses like yours get more leads.” "It says: send me a quote you’re waiting on, and I’ll turn it into a short video your customer actually watches." → It’s about money they already priced, not leads they still have to find → They see it work on a real job, this week → It’s free, specific and done for them, so there’s nothing to say no to That’s the whole idea. You don’t sell local businesses marketing. You give them the tools to sign more jobs, and the first one is free. The video shows the quote creator from start to finish. The rest of how I land these clients (the niche, the list, the prompt that finds one true sentence about their site, the funnel built before they reply) is in the playbook. Steal all of it. Link in the first comment 👇

I have opened sourced Instantly, Heyreach and Gojiberry all in one go, now I am sharing the playbook that gets replies. Our cold email playbook: the deliverability, offer and tracking rules we learned by breaking things first We send cold email at volume for our own agency and for clients. Most of what we know came from breaking something first. This is the full playbook, no fluff. Steal all of it. TL;DR: volume comes from breadth, never from pushing one inbox harder. Most "deliverability problems" are really list, offer or tracking problems. INFRASTRUCTURE: PICK YOUR MODEL, THEN RESPECT ITS NUMBERS There are two sending models. Mixing their numbers is how people burn domains. Model A, standard mailboxes (Google Workspace, properly licensed Microsoft 365): - 2 mailboxes per domain - 30 sends per inbox per day - = 60 a day per domain Model B, bulk-provisioned Microsoft 365 tenants: - 50 mailboxes per domain - 5 sends per inbox per day - 1 domain = 1 tenant. Never put a second sending domain in a tenant. - = 250 a day per tenant A bulk mailbox can't carry Workspace volume. Sending 30 a day from each one is the classic way to kill them. Minimum 30 domains for any serious setup. If you need more volume, add domains and inboxes. Never raise the per-inbox numbers 2. WARMUP IS PART OF YOUR CAP, NOT ON TOP OF IT If an inbox can send 5 a day, warmup lives inside those 5. We give warmup 20% of the daily cap (minimum 1), and it stops entirely once real emails have used the allowance. We learned this the expensive way: warmup and real sends were separate budgets, so some inboxes were warming at 167% of what they were allowed to send for real. 3. ROTATE ACROSS DOMAINS, DON'T FILL THEM ONE BY ONE Spread sends round-robin across all your healthy domains. Filling domain 1, then domain 2, then domain 3 concentrates volume, and concentration is what burned our first batch. Also: don't pin a campaign to a fixed list of inboxes. Pinned pools decay as inboxes disconnect or domains get blocked, and one day your campaign silently sends nothing. Pick inboxes at send time from whatever is healthy right now. 4. KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BOUNCE AND A BLOCK This one cost us hundreds of good leads. - Real bounce (address doesn't exist, account disabled, no such user): kill the lead everywhere. That address is dead. - Reputation block (Gmail's "550-5.7.1 ... very low reputation", "envelope blocked", "rejected by security policy"): that's the receiver refusing YOUR domain. The lead is fine. Keep it. We used to log reputation blocks as bounces. Every one permanently suppressed a perfectly good prospect from every future campaign. And bounces describe your list, not your inbox. Don't bench an inbox for its bounce rate. Clean the list instead. 5. TEST YOUR DOMAINS FROM THE OUTSIDE A block is per receiver. Sending a test to another inbox you own proves nothing about Gmail. Keep a few external seed addresses (a real Gmail-hosted mailbox works) and probe each domain weekly. When a domain gets a 550, rest it for about 8 weeks, then probe it again before it goes back into rotation. One Gmail-only block on a domain isn't a crisis. Escalate when blocks spread beyond Gmail or bounces climb. 6. LISTS: VERIFY EVERYTHING, KEEP VALID ROLE ADDRESSES Verify before you send. But don't auto-drop info@ or office@ addresses. Local businesses often publish nothing else. If the verifier says the mailbox exists, send to it. "Role" predicts a lower reply rate, not a bounce. 7. THE OFFER BEATS THE COPY Our best lesson from local-business outreach: - "Free lead lists": about 1 positive reply per 1,000 sends - "offer 2 of what they need more of (AKA appointements but in their own terms)": about 1 per 300 What works for us: - Offer = outcome. Booked jobs, meetings, signed quotes. Not "an audit" or "a landing page." Those go in the PS as proof. - Guarantee in the PS: "If we work together and you don't get more calls than your current setup, you don't pay." - Soft opener: "I think it might be leaking money" beats "it's leaking money." - CTA: "Mind if I send it over?" - Follow-up = value, not guilt. Email 2 is a short tip list, not "just bumping this." - Cut every vague line. "We add ads and follow-up" means nothing. Name the concrete thing. 8. TRACKING: TURN IT OFF BY DEFAULT Open tracking is unreliable, and click tracking is worse than useless. Every wrapped link points at a tracking domain you share across all your sending domains. When one domain gets flagged, that tracking domain gets poisoned, and it drags down placement for every clean domain that uses it. Send the first email as plain text. Measure replies, not opens. 9. UNSUBSCRIBES: MAKE THEM WORK, MAKE THEM SAFE - Put an unsubscribe link in every email, plus the one-click List-Unsubscribe header. - The link should open a confirmation page, not unsubscribe on click. Corporate link scanners open every URL in incoming mail. If a plain click unsubscribes, scanners quietly opt out real prospects and you never find out why. - Keep one suppression list across every campaign. Unsubscribed, do-not-contact and hard-bounced are never mailed again, whichever campaign or list they show up in. 10. LIFECYCLE RULES THAT STOP EMBARRASSING MISTAKES - A real reply stops every sequence for that person, not just the one they replied to. We had a lead reply to campaign A while campaign B kept emailing him. - Out-of-office pauses, it doesn't stop. - One active sequence per lead. Overlapping campaigns double-contact people. 11. MEASURE IT AS A FUNNEL - Reply rate = replies / delivered leads - Positive rate = positive replies / replies - Meeting rate = meetings / positive replies Out-of-office and auto-replies are not replies. Count them separately. And don't crown a winning campaign until it has at least 5 replies and 3 positives. 1 out of 1 is not a 100% positive rate.

I have replaced Instantly, Heyreach, Gojiberry, and Postiz with one single tool and open sourced it.

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Claude Fable 5.2 just shipped, so I gave it one sentence. “Find head of sales in companies between 50 to 200 employees in the US.” That’s the whole prompt. Here’s what happened next, all inside ACA: > It searched ACA’s lead pool and found 18,412 heads of sales that fit. > It built a list of the best 5,000, every email verified. > It wrote a 3-step sequence: an email, a follow-up on day 3, a LinkedIn touch on day 7. > It enrolled all 5,000 and the campaign went live. Then the part that matters. Replies landed in the ACA inbox. The interested ones got tagged on their own. When Sarah said “can you do Tuesday afternoon?”, the reply drafted itself and the invite went out. This is what changes with models like Fable 5.2. It doesn’t just answer. It plans the work, calls the tools, checks the results and keeps going until the job is done. The model is the brain. ACA is the hands: the lead pool, the mailboxes, the sequences, the inbox and the calendar, all connected through one MCP.

2 things: > marketing emails infra is now working better than cold emailing infra (my prediction for 2027) > the funnel farming for local businesses strategy is working well and you got the whole playbook for free in the first comment