Cold Email Reply Rate: From 1.2% to 4.8%

The situation

An outbound-led Series B company was seeing a 1.2% reply rate on cold email — a symptom that usually points to two separate problems stacked on top of each other: deliverability and message relevance.

What we built

Deliverability rebuilt from the domain up — SPF, DKIM, DMARC alignment, sending domain hygiene, and warm-up sequencing — combined with AI personalization that drew on real account research (tech stack, recent hiring, funding signals) instead of a templated {{first_name}} merge field.

The result

Reply rate moved from 1.2% to 4.8% — a 4x improvement, with no increase in send volume or headcount.