I Tried Cold Email for 18 Days. I Got 6 Clients.

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Cold email was the absolute goat of outreach for us about 1 and 1/2 year ago. I think from cold email alone, we probably made 300 to 400 K dollars. And then everyone started on cold email spamming with shitty AI openers, and it just became a mess. Our emails went to spam, and even if they got through, they didn't get opened because there were so many emails going out. Now, I'm a pretty stubborn person. I wanted to prove that I could make cold email work in 2026 by just thinking about it a little bit differently. So, a month ago, I decided that I would run a cold email campaign, and I ran it for 18 days, and we got six potential clients that all wanted to hop on meetings with us, and they wanted a proposal. And just so you know, I did not cheat. I didn't use any past references, any case studies, anything like that. I just used my knowledge that I had with cold email previously, but I started completely fresh, ran it for 18 days, and I'm going to walk you through the exact setup, the exact emails, and the real numbers that actually came out.

[00:00:54]And make sure you stick around to see the subject lines, because those are the ones that I've always used, and they've had the highest open rates than anything else that I've seen and tried from the internet. And you can just copy them straight from the screen. Now, one of the reasons I did this is because the AI guru that goes in and sells you a 5K course, a $497 course, they haven't actually sent a cold email. They haven't gotten any clients. They didn't get any results, which is why I decided just to try to make a campaign, even if there was a risk that I would waste a bunch of time. And I'm not going to lie, I was sweating the first one to two days where I didn't really get any responses, but then they started just racking in. I spent 6 days setting this up, and it all started with this pyramid. And it's important because everyone messes this up. Now, if we look at the foundation, which is tech, without it, your email just goes to spam. It doesn't matter how good of a list you build, and it doesn't matter how good your email is, because no one will see it. But then if we have the tech in order, but we have the wrong list, you're going to send a really good email to a bunch of people that will just ignore it. And then if you have the tech in order, you have the list in order, but your copy sucks, then it won't convert people. They won't respond to you. So, these are the three things that if you get wrong, you kill your entire campaign. It's done. Now, day one was spent on setting up a pre-warmed domain on Instantly, which means that I basically didn't really have to do anything. I paid my way out of it. This just made sure that I didn't have to wait for the inboxes to warm up before I actually started the campaign. So, what I did is I went onto Instantly and I found a domain with the inbox names that could be Danish names. And then I went into the inbox and I changed the last name to a Danish last names so that I would have more trust with the people that I sent to. Then I made sure to add all the DNS records that I needed. These are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. And then I selected all the emails and then I changed it so that they only send out a maximum of 20 emails per inbox. And this gave me 100 emails a day. This will make sure that you keep volume low and you don't land on a blacklist because if you do, you can just start all over again and it sucks. Day two I spent picking my niche and finding the right people.

[00:02:43]First, I made a crazy prompt that would run a full cold email strategy report on Denmark to see exactly what kind of numbers to expect, how good cold email actually is for the country, what the top niches that I should consider, and it gave me a whole breakdown for each and every one. And I decided to go with dentists. Then I took that entire cold email report and I made another prompt where I just insert the niche and I insert the country. And then I get an entire cold email list building guide on how to get the perfect prospects for private dental clinics in Denmark. And this worked perfectly. It gave me Denmark's local registry, which had all of the businesses that I needed for the cold email campaign, and it told me exactly how to get them. It told me which code private dental clinics were under so that I could filter them out and get all of them, and then how I ran the scrape. Then on day three, I made an entire prompt again that would create perfect offers and perfect lead magnets depending on the Danish market and the pain points that the private dental clinics have. It gave me our one-line hook, which is the pain point that we're solving. And here we have the lost leader version that I will go with any day of the week where you basically lead with what they lose out on. And what that means is the first thing you put in the email is what they're losing out on, which is their pain point. And then it gave me an entire list of different lead magnets that I could choose to use for the cold email, and I ended up going with the missed call cost calculator, which was a one-page PDF with a simple formula that shows a Danish dental clinic owner how much revenue their unanswered calls are costing them each month. So, I just ran this through Claude. I gave Claude the business name of the clinic, and then it would make a calculation based on that they lose two to four calls a day, which is pretty conservative. And then with that calculation, they can see that they're actually losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every year from not picking up the phone, which just makes what you're proposing even more valuable. So, now we had the pain points, we had the people, and we had our core offer. Now, I spent the entire fourth day just writing copy, and I read it out loud, I rewrote it a bunch of times, I put it into Claude, I told him that we would only want to land in the inbox to remove spam words, and we basically ended up with this. "I was thinking about calling your clinic during lunch and after closing hours, but wanted to reach out in writing first." This right here, if you take one thing and apply it to your outreach in the future from this video, take this.

[00:05:04]If you can send a message or an email, and it could be from anyone, it could be from a potential partner, it could be from a potential customer, it could be from anyone. If you can write something compelling down, and the first few lines could be from anyone which gets them to read, you'll have so many more people reading your emails rather than just ignoring them or throwing them in spam immediately. And the way I did this here is the subject line is literally just their company name. And then I said, "I was thinking about calling your clinic during lunch and after closing hours, but wanted to reach out in writing first." This could be someone that wanted to apply for a job. It doesn't really matter, it could be anyone. And that's the point. They start by reading it because they're curious. They want to see what what this actually is. And if your email is purely marketing, they're just going to read the first three words, and they're not going to bother reading further. So, for the body that worked, this is the framework. So, the first line is always going to be some sort of observation or a thought that you had about their business. Now, the second line should always be about a pain point that the dentist has. And then on the third line, I always try to disarm them because at the second line, they realize that this is something that is a bit salesy. So, if we say, "Would this even make a difference?" or "Does this even make sense to you?" it disarms them. And as a bonus, you can also use a subject line where you put in your name and your phone number. That subject line could also be from anyone, and it catches perfect attention. Then my first follow-up was, "Hey, is there anyone else at company name I should send this to?" This is also a perfect second follow-up because again, this could be from anyone, catches attention, and they actually take a look at it. We send this after 3 days. Now, the third follow-up is our lead magnet where we say, "I put together a lost revenue calculator. Do you want me to send it over?" which again catches attention. They want to know how much revenue they're losing and how we know that. Now, this is our fourth follow-up where we say, "I had a few minutes to write to you. Have you had a chance to see my message above?"

[00:06:46]We don't use any words like follow-up, checking in. These are words that everyone else uses, and it's not going to help you. Now, the fifth email is just a Hail Mary. We just try to offer them something else because clearly, what we sent them before didn't really resonate. So, we just say, "The dental clinic in the area with the most Google reviews, if we could get more reviews for you, would that help?" and then can I show you how it works? Very simple, if this resonates, they can respond. Now, at this point, we're basically ready to pull the trigger, but there are some things inside of Instantly that we needed to do. First, we needed to set a schedule. We basically only send from Monday to Friday. We don't send on weekends from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

[00:07:19]local time. We made sure that all the accounts were actually being used so we didn't waste any money. We made sure to send email as text only, and then I set the daily limit to 100. Now, this is the campaign I ran for 18 days. We sent 1,000 emails to 278 prospects, and we got six opportunities back. We can see that our first email had a reply rate of 6.12%, which is absolutely insane, and we got two potential clients from that. Our first follow-up got a 5% response rate and we got three opportunities. And our fourth email got six responses, had 4.58 and got us one opportunity. Apparently, when you're interested in something, that interest drops drastically minute by minute. And I don't know why. We're all just NPCs, our brains are fried. I'm not 100% sure why. However, they actually did a study where people were 21 times more likely to convert if they got a response within 5 minutes. That's just how it works. So, what I did is I downloaded the Instantly app on my phone and I went to the gym, I went to see my family, I went to watch a race, I looked at my stock portfolio while this was on and I just made sure to get back to people immediately when they responded.

[00:08:21]I also tested out Instantly's AI agents and my campaign was in a local language, so I didn't really trust it, so I didn't put it on. But, I checked what the responses it drafted were and they were actually pretty good. So, I would recommend using this and actually putting it on if you know by yourself that you're not going to be able to respond to these people within 5 minutes. You can also set it on so that it only runs in the nights. Whatever you want to do, it's actually pretty good and I would recommend using it because it has some pretty good responses. Now, most of you are going to watch this, maybe you're going to screenshot some of the templates, but you're never going to send a single email. And I'm telling you right now, just please break the YouTube tutorial loop. I think this campaign cost me $50 and it obviously works. We got six people going back to us wanting proposals, wanting meetings. If you are going to send cold email, here's what I would tell you to do on day one.

[00:09:04]Preparation is everything. Genuinely spend 3 days doing this before you start sending. Get a domain, build a good list, build a good offer, and then build a good structure with body and follow-ups inside of Instantly, and then pull the trigger. And two, go to a local market and establish trust locally.

[00:09:21]Every city has 50 to 200 businesses with a budget spending money on ads that are losing calls, losing money, losing messages, losing people, wanting more Google reviews. There is so much potential in every local city. There's no need to go to California or to go to Sydney where you are miles and miles and kilometers and kilometers away from.

[00:09:41]Just go to your local city. There is 50 to 200 businesses that are perfect for cold email and perfect for selling AI too. And number three, please reply in under 5 minutes or use the AI agent to do it for you. This is genuinely one of the biggest things. You've sent the email. Now all you have to do is just reap the benefits. Now as you saw, I created long long prompts that does research for me on every step of the way, all the way from picking a niche to writing our offer, to building the list.

[00:10:10]And you can use them by inserting any country and any niche and it works.

[00:10:14]Obviously, you can do your own research.

[00:10:15]You can go out and do the exact same thing that Claude does. But if you want all of the videos with the step-by-step setups that I did for this exact campaign and all of the prompts that I used, it's in the first link in the description and it's under the cold email masterclass. If you enjoyed this video and it helped just a little bit and you want to see more on how to sell AI and get clients, make sure to subscribe. It means a lot and I'll see you in the next video.