A member asked how long to pause his campaigns after a bad bounce run, and what warm up settings to use. The honest answer is that the standard advice is a guess. Pause for four weeks and start again. Based on what? Not every blacklist is the same. Not every bounce or spam complaint is the same. Four weeks is a number somebody made up so they had something to say. Here is what I actually do. First, I take the decision away from myself. If your sending platform has inbox placement rules, set them up. A domain or mailbox lands on a blacklist, sending pauses automatically and warm up starts. It comes off the blacklist, or placement climbs back above 80%, and sending resumes on its own. No thinking. No calendar reminder. It is one of my favorite features anywhere in this space and the thing I miss most when a platform does not have it. Second, when I warm up, I go way past what is recommended. They suggest around a 30% warm up reply rate. I set it to 90%. They suggest 20 to 30 warm up emails a day. I run 50 to 100. Fair warning on that. The platform controls the warm up pool and the interactions, so setting 90% does not mean you get 90%. You are asking, not commanding. I have never seen a downside to asking for a high reply rate when the warm up pool is good. Keep sending volume low while warm up runs high. Take the thinking out of it and turn the dials up. Let me know your process in the comments.

I was in Montenegro at an AI conference when the reports started coming in. On vacation. Which is exactly when this stuff always happens 🤦‍♂️ Clients telling me replies had gone soft. Not off a cliff, nothing dramatic. Just quietly worse. So I sat in a hotel room with my laptop and Claude Code instead of doing any of the things you go to Montenegro to do, and started running tests. Here's the part that made me stop caring about the vacation. We found domains sitting on a blacklist before they had sent a single email. Not before their first cold email. Before they ever entered a warmup pool. Zero sends. Zero complaints. Already burnt. You cannot burn a domain that has never sent anything. So it wasn't the copy. It wasn't the warmup. It wasn't the volume. We tested all of it and none of it moved. Then we found the cause, and I did not enjoy it. It's a setup I've been telling you to use for years. In this community, in my paid programs, everywhere. Every serious infra provider in the space did the same thing, because it was the gold standard. It isn't anymore. It's now one of the easiest ways to get spotted as a cold emailer, and there's a blacklist quietly picking people off because of it. We ran a clean test that proved it in under an hour. Then we built two fixes and deployed them for all new orders before making this public. Both fixes are in the video, along with how to check if you're already on the list and what to do if you are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYoh_2j6VMg Watch it before your next send. If you've bought domains in the last few months, you're the one this happened to.

I wasn't going to post a replay for this one. But.. too many people asked, so here it is. Up for 72 hours and then it's gone. 577 people joined the webinar at some point, and we went an hour over because the questions kept coming. 👉 Watch the replay here Questions in the comments and my team and I get to them.

Just finished reviewing one of our recent cold email campaigns. 870 prospects → 24 opportunities → $120K potential pipeline. What I like about this campaign is that we didn’t rely on sending a crazy amount of emails. We focused on the basics: - Good targeting - Clean lead data - Proper inbox setup - Deliverability - Relevant copy - Follow-ups - Constant optimization The biggest mistake I see is people trying to scale before they know what’s working. If the foundation is weak, adding more volume won’t fix it. Get the setup right. Get the targeting right. Get the messaging right. Then scale. There are no conversions recorded yet, so the $120K is potential pipeline, not revenue. Still, 24 opportunities from 870 prospects gives us a strong base to work with. Now the job is simple: keep optimizing and turn those opportunities into customers.

We kick off the live webinar in 30 minutes, 12pm ET. Here's what I'm covering: How to build an AI powered outbound marketing system How to launch a cold email machine in under an hour How to run your entire lead gen system with Claude Code The secret strategy we used to get 10% reply rates for our clients' cold email campaigns No signup needed, just click the link: https://zoom.us/j/93534158055 See you in there 🤝