Claude Code for Cold Email
I've done cold email for my business for three years now.
Here are some tips for things I've been able to do with Claude Code in the last months that make a giant difference.
When building lists, I start off with a broad company list in Apollo.
Export it for free.
Run it in my AI segmentation tool.
This tool scrapes each website and labels each company yes or no if it matches my ICP or not.
Remove all companies that are "no".
Import the "Yes" companies back into Apollo.
Filter on them and download emails for leads at those companies.
This is a way to get very segmented, specific lists at bulk scale, without doing any segmentation yourself.
I built a similar tool for MX Lookup.
Instead of using email provider matching features in smartlead or Instantly let's say you start off with a list of 10,000 leads, you can build a tool that checks the email provider for all of them. Then if all your sender addresses are Google, you just email all the leads with Google as a provider, giving you a much higher reply rate.
3
Obviously, you need to verify lists before emailing them.
Before I used to just remove all addresses that are returned as failed.
Meaning I would include two kinds of emails in my campaigns.
- Passed all verification tests.
- Unknown. Probably Catch-All.
This meant an average bounce rate of anywhere from 1% to 10%.
In the past months, I stopped including unknown catch-all emails in my campaigns, and now the bounce rate is at like 0,05%.
Obviously, this only works if you have a big TAM and you miss out on a lot of good leads returning from the Verifier as "Unknown".
But in terms of keeping deliverability and reputation clean, this is a great strategy.
I use MailSpot to auto-categorize and write draft replies for all incoming leads showing interest (that's like an email AI service tool).
I don't only do this because I'm too lazy to write the emails myself, but on a typical day I have about 30 follow-up emails to send to various leads that showed interest in the past but then went cold.
The conversion rate of the follow-up for these kinds of leads drastically goes up if you do some account research, researching their company and how your offer relates to them.
This is not something I want to do for 30 leads every day, because even throwing them into ChatGPT, it takes a few minutes per lead on average.
This kind of tool does the account research for you and has a knowledge base of your company, so it's able to automate that process and you can then just proofread the email and send it.