I’ve sent **592,318 cold emails** across different campaigns.

Here’s what the numbers look like:

* 592,318 emails sent
* 13,696 replies
* **2.3% overall reply rate**
* 2,590 leads marked as high intent
* **881 meetings booked**

The biggest thing I learned after sending this much volume:

**Sending more emails is rarely the solution.**

A bad list at 10,000 emails is still a bad list at 100,000 emails.

Most of the improvements came from what happened **before** the email was sent:

Better ICP filtering.  
Better data.  
Keeping domains/mailboxes healthy.  
Filtering out people who had no reason to buy.  
Changing the message based on the company/person instead of blasting the same copy to everyone.

We actually started getting better results when we became more aggressive about **not sending emails**.

If someone was a weak ICP fit, had bad data, or there wasn’t a strong enough angle, we skipped them.

Another thing I underestimated early on was deliverability. You can have the best copy in the world, but if Gmail decides you belong in spam, none of it matters.

After doing this manually for a long time, I ended up building most of this logic into the product I’m working on.

The idea is basically:

**website → ICP → leads → research → decide who is worth contacting → personalize → send**

Instead of starting with a giant list and trying to email everyone.

Still experimenting with it, but I put the current version here if anyone wants to see how the workflow works:

[https://getle.ad/ai-gtm](https://getle.ad/ai-gtm)

Happy to also share the mailbox setup / sending limits / campaign structure behind the 592K if that’s useful.

I sent 592,318 cold emails. Here are the actual results.