stopped using purchased lists and my reply rate jumped
we were running cold email for a few months. Decent copy, solid sending infrastructure, good deliverability setup. Replies were trash. kept blaming the copy. Rewrote sequences 3 or 4 times... still nothing.
Eventually figured out the problem wasn't the copy. It was the list. We were just emailing people who had zero reason to care right now.
so we switched. instead of pulling static lists, we started building lists based on signals
same copy. same infrastructure. reply rate went up 4x in the first 2-3 weeks weeks
The difference is timing. Emailing someone who just posted a job for an SDR is a completely different conversation than emailing someone from a list that got scraped 6 months ago. most people optimize copy first. timing and relevance matter way more